Mu* and history and time
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Adjusted for inflation those prices are… ridiculous. Gemstone III during peak hours would be ~$46USD/hr and British Legends(MUD1) would be ~$33USD/hr. I love you, Faraday, but I’m not paying you over five hundred bucks a month for a casual twenty hours of pretendy funtimes.
Thanks for the sources! And yeah, those prices seem crazy, but keep in mind that with AOL at the time you were also paying $3-4/hour just to check your email and access early internet forums, on top of whatever you were paying your phone company. People just weren’t online as much. I remember having to meter usage carefully until I got basically unlimited access through the university computer labs.
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And yeah, those prices seem crazy, but keep in mind that with AOL at the time you were also paying $3-4/hour just to check your email and access early internet forums, on top of whatever you were paying your phone company.
Looking through my archive of old CDROMs, I can also confirm from a few AOL CDs I kept for my collection that AOL had an unlimited plan as well that was $20 a month.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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People just weren’t online as much. I remember having to meter usage carefully until I got basically unlimited access through the university computer labs.
fun story: I was 14 when I had to get my first job…because I had moved across the country with my family and we didn’t have internet in our new place, so I just innocently used the dial-up number I had memorized. not understanding that this, y’know, actually costs money.
so my mom gets hit with a phone bill of almost a thousand dollars.
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an actual WORA Wiki
Thenomain’s still around, but I think he’s the last person of admin-level around from that era. Lord knows if he’s kept anything.
I can ask but 100% doubt. He’s fairly done with the hobby in general.
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I can also confirm from a few AOL CDs I kept for my collection that AOL had an unlimited plan as well that was $20 a month.
Yeah, that came later though as competition heated up between the dial-up providers. The original AOL was a monthly fee with a few “free” hours and then an hourly rate on top of that. Reference
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@Faraday Oh yeah, totally not unusual prices for the time. The main difference between now and then? I’d be the one paying this time.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
@Faraday said:
Pavel is probably right
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@Pavel I am amused beyond words that you made that your signature.
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It’s not a history of individual games or experiences, but Sherry Turkle, who works at MIT, has written books on online communities, including MUSHs. I know they’re covered in her book “Life on the Screen” but may crop up in other ones.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_in_Cyberspace
I was there, and was quite chummy with both Mr_Bungle and his victim.
This may be my brush with history. That and how I used to buy pot from a guy who also sold pot to Hunter S. Thompson.
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Oh man, what I would give to log onto PernMUSH once more, just to look around. So many happy and bittersweet memories of the place, and how it changed over the years I played there. Up till about a year before COVID, the last ‘owner’ of the database kept it online; then it dropped connection, and I haven’t seen it since.
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