[9913] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: bill text draft 2: Telecommunications Competition Act (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Scott W Brim)
Wed Jan 26 17:46:19 1994
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 1994 17:30:04 -0500
To: <com-priv@psi.com>
From: Scott W Brim <swb1@cornell.edu>
Gordon seems to think there is something wrong with MUDs...
At 21:51 1/26/94 +0000, Gordon Cook wrote:
>Well now, latest statement I have heard from Al Weis is 10 terabytes
>a month. So that is one terabyte a month of MUDs financed by the US
>taxpayer at a cost of roughly $100,005.00 a month ( one tenth of your
>current monthly payment from NSF.)
To start with not all MUDs/MUSEs/MOOs/M*s are used for gaming by any
means. Some are even used for system administration. Second, MUDs are
not an evil wart that one hopes will go away with time (you know, like
what the dinosaurs thought about mammals). Rather the foundation of a
lot of markets that are emerging. Shared environments are a
best-seller on Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL etc., and you should expect to
see extensive participation, increasing in proportion to how fast homes
are hooked up to The Net. Right now there are shared environments for
a lot of topics which those connected to the Internet are interested
in. Also there are tens of thousands of dial-up-based BBSs in this
country which can be connected to The Net in the near future. You
should expect that as more people are connected to the NII that the
number of these environments will explode. In fact MUDs may be the
biggest influence on our perception of ourselves since television.
This is *not necessarily* bad.
...Scott
