I could say a lot about this topic, but I'll try to keep it brief.
There were a number of similar "post-LambdaMOO" systems built in the mid to late 90s, and early 2000s. I wrote something of my own during a year long bout of .com crash unemployment 2001ish time frame. But before that there was "coolmud" [written by Stephen White who wrote the original MOO before Pavel Curtis adopted it and created LambdaMOO] and then Greg Hudson's "coldmud", which spawned "Genesis", a few other projects, and the thing I was working on but never finished.
Basically they were attempts to generalize the "extensible object oriented network service" side of MOO beyond the 'game' or 'chat' oriented of LambdaMOO and to fix some technical weaknesses that LambdaMOO had.
IMHO these types of architectures/systems were sort of an alternative path for how the internet could have developed if the web and HTTP based architectures hadn't taken over and defined how we think about what the Internet is. (For people who didn't use the Internet prior to the existence of the web it's hard to imagine that, I know.)
I think the combination of prototype oriented object systems plus multi-users plus networking plus group-authoring plus socializing is something that still hasn't been realized to the depth that these systems had, even if they were hobbled by their lack of multimedia capability.
I believe there were similar efforts on the LPC/LPmud side of things, but there were some differences in philosophy there.
LambdaMOO itself lives on and gets some ongoing development here and there.
Can you expand (or point to a resource that expands) on the "internet as extensible object oriented network service" concept? I'm having difficulty grasping what the key differences between that and the HTTP approach look like.
My understanding of HTTP is essentially "send request with resource locator to server, receive response usually with document" which seems at face value similar to "send message to object, receive message back".
Well, before the development of fat Javascript heavy AJAXy type apps, with websockets, webrtc, etc. the difference was more marked.
A huge difference in granularity, at least. But also a conceptual one. In MOO type worlds the 'physical' objects one 'sees' in the [textual] 'world' are directly associated with programmatic objects (w/ prototypical inheritance but nicer IMHO than Javascript's).
And the environment was such that any MOO user could author -- by creating objects [cloning prototypes] and -- if they had programmer permissions -- by adding "verbs" (methods) to those objects.
And code written in the language was well sandboxed with decent permissions systems and a runtime that enforced good behaviour on programs. Tho in the early days of LambdaMOO it was somewhat easy to DOS the system, that got fixed.
Authoring was easy, barrier to entry low, but there was a consistent metaphor: users in adventure-game-like rooms, with objects that could be manipulated through English-like commands, and a descriptive narrative applied throughout.
I can't help but think this would all be much cooler in this day and age with the arrival of robust natural language parsing, 'augmented reality', and so on.
There were a number of similar "post-LambdaMOO" systems built in the mid to late 90s, and early 2000s. I wrote something of my own during a year long bout of .com crash unemployment 2001ish time frame. But before that there was "coolmud" [written by Stephen White who wrote the original MOO before Pavel Curtis adopted it and created LambdaMOO] and then Greg Hudson's "coldmud", which spawned "Genesis", a few other projects, and the thing I was working on but never finished.
Basically they were attempts to generalize the "extensible object oriented network service" side of MOO beyond the 'game' or 'chat' oriented of LambdaMOO and to fix some technical weaknesses that LambdaMOO had.
IMHO these types of architectures/systems were sort of an alternative path for how the internet could have developed if the web and HTTP based architectures hadn't taken over and defined how we think about what the Internet is. (For people who didn't use the Internet prior to the existence of the web it's hard to imagine that, I know.)
I think the combination of prototype oriented object systems plus multi-users plus networking plus group-authoring plus socializing is something that still hasn't been realized to the depth that these systems had, even if they were hobbled by their lack of multimedia capability.
I believe there were similar efforts on the LPC/LPmud side of things, but there were some differences in philosophy there.
LambdaMOO itself lives on and gets some ongoing development here and there.