Planning for Aliens

Every night I would open up the laptop, dial in, launch some ancient, long-since defunct shell and log in to the MOO. It was exciting every time. Using the MOO was pretty straightforward. Once you logged in you were in a room. A room was just a screen of descriptive text followed by a list of commands you could type in like ‘North’ or’South’. You were also usually given a list of people in the room you could chat with.

My memory of the MOO is almost 20 years-old and fading, but I’ll never forget the first time I programmed. One night I was chatting in a room with someone when he spoke a command I’d never heard. In an instant my character was whipped up into a tornado of wind and thrown across the world into a secret room. HOLY SHIT COOL! Of course I asked him:

“How did you do that?”

“It was a spell.”

“How do I use spells?”

“You need a quota. I can get you 10k”

Of course a quota was disk space and the spell was a bit of code in the MOO’s programming language. But to me it was spell book and a magic spell. He set me up with a quota and told me how to copy paste what he had done. The whole process was arcane — and I loved every step. I think I had to use Gopher and maybe even Emacs. It was all so new and mysterious. Eventually I adjusted my new spell. Now a giant  earth elemental appeared out of nowhere, grappled them in massive hands of stone and ran straight to my secret room. Everyone else had lame tornados.

I was on the path to becoming a wizard. Actually, at this point the number of possible paths my life could take that intersected with ‘cool kid’ or ‘not a nerd’ began to asymptotically approach zero.