09.58, Thursday 6 Mar 2003

On a multiplayer online game from 1986, The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat: "Habitat is built on top of an ordinary commercial online service and uses an inexpensive - some would say 'toy' - home computer to support user interaction. In spite of these somewhat plebeian underpinnings, Habitat is ambitious in its scope. The system we developed can support a population of thousands of users in a single shared cyberspace. Habitat presents its users with a real-time animated view into an online simulated world in which users can communicate, play games, go on adventures, fall in love, get married, get divorced, start businesses,found religions, wage wars, protest against them, and experiment with self-government" [via Phil Gyford's Creating a 1980s virtual world].