Freedom.

Parties!

New experiences.

New friends.

Late night study sessions.

Intense school spirit!

Preparing ourselves for the future.

Along the way, we encounter the things we never thought we'd see:

Cheap, cheap pizza.

The value of a dollar. Or even 50 cents!

The joy of sleeping in on a day with no classes, and still technically calling it 'being at school'.

Ditching a lecture.

The beauty and simplicity of ramen!

How strong friendships from high school really are.

And then there are the things we never knew existed:

The Internet

The Outside World

My freshman year in college was a tumultuous one. I was away from home, in a school that I really didn't choose, and I was away from all of my friends who were still at home for the most part. I had to start over. The classes were overwhelming, it seemed, trying to make it to everywhere on time and get everything done on time was a monumental task in itself, let alone absorb the material. I did start to make some new friends on the floor in the dorms, and we bonded pretty well. Well enough that two of them eventually became my roommates for a time over the course of my university experience.

But the stress of everything weighed in much heavier, and faster, than I could ever have anticipated. My grades started to suffer. My pride and joy up to this point was disintegrating in front of me. And for a time, I honestly didn't care. I still felt alone.

One of the guys that I am still friends with, introduced me to a new thing on the blossoming Internet back then - before web pages were tossed around and created like confetti, before Flash animation and 4 different browsers, before spam and viruses via attachments, before newbies were called nOObs, before AOL or Google or MSN, before even 56k dialup speeds, the Internet was a very quiet place - except for these hot spots of gaming and interaction called MUDs and MUSHes. And some were called MOOs. Not kidding.

MUD meant Multi-User Dungeon (or Dimension, depending on who you talked to) and was a text-only game based on the popular Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. There were others out there that based their creations in different genres - some of their names sound so foreign nowadays. SneezyMUD. ApocalypseMUD. JediMUD (for Star Wars fans). But the premise was the same. People (college students, mostly) from around the country, and even in some cases, from areas of the world where access was available, would jump online and interact with their environment in a game. People would group together, take down creatures, gather gold and experience, and move onto more challenging areas. If your character died, you hoped that someone could guard your body from looters or that someone could grab it and bring it back to the (now called) respawn point. And of course, you chat. You get to know people. You become friends.

MUSH meant Multi-User Shared Habitat (or Hallucination, depending on who you talked to) and was also a text-only game, but in this case, it was more of the peaceful, create-your-own world section of the Internet. Some were based off of a general concept, others had specific themes. Again, some of these places sound foreign now. TinyTIM. GlobalMUSH. PernMUSH. After5. You would get a limited amount of credits to create rooms and objects, and since it was all text-based, with the exception of some people's creative ASCII graphics, you had to really use your imagination. The nice thing about the credit system was, if you created a lot, you got more credits. They were free. FREE! Because college students are poor, and there was no way that any of these places could even conceive charging a nickel for this type of interaction. The infrastructure just wasn't there. Also, almost all of these places were hosted on university servers. Sometimes someone would sneak it into a corporate mainframe, but still, each and every one of these places was free. Just needed to know the IP address to TELNET into.

People flocked to these places as well, those that didn't like the whole gaming and competition aspect of it, or those who preferred to socialize instead. Some did both MUDs and MUSHes, in many cases multiple ones, and those people were Internet Addicts. I became one of those. I had a character on Apocalypse, and Global. I found out about Global as it was just getting started from a friend on Apocalypse who was 'hanging up her sword and shield' and settling down to become a wizard (admin) on Global, to help them start up.

Global became a home away, from the home away from home. I spent hours on there, coding, creating, polishing, experimenting, perfecting. One had to learn the coding system of the MUSH in order to operate, and once I started to get the hang of it through the help of my wizard friend, I asked how I could repay her kindness. She said:

"Help others. Teach them what I've taught you." And I did.

I created my perfect area, my sanctuary, complete with some interactive items to make it more 'real'. I would meet people from all over the country. Flirt a lot. Fall in love. Fall out of love. And the time slipped away, as did my grades. I went from being an A-B student to being a C-D student in the matter of one semester. I didn't care about my finals. I just wanted to be online, basking in the warm glow of the white-on-black background 15" CRT  and my friends from far-flung places.

Global is still around, (telnet mildew.org 4201) for those who have a good TELNET emulator (the one with Windows is kinda hokey) and an account on there. I don't know how easy it is to create an account, but it's still free, even after 15+ years of being online.

After that disastrous semester, I came back, on probation, but with a renewed sense of what I needed to do. Time spent on Global was limited to when I could do it. A treat instead of the main course.  I pulled up my grades, graduated and here I am today, reliving the memories of the days spent in the early Digital World. But what is very interesting to me is to see how far things have come since those days:

ICQ

Yahoo! IM

AIM

IMVU

Second Life

D&D Online

WoW