I see you've written a book on PLATO -- I'd love to know some of the examples of these early MUDs. I believe the deal with the noted jurist who claims to have

I see you've written a book on PLATO -- I'd love to know some of the examples of these early MUDs. I believe the deal with the noted jurist who claims to have invented email is that he may have had an earlier version of a text delivering system called email, except that there is very strong disagreement that his version of email has any living descendants. If we assume that he's wrong, then the right inventor of MUDs is the one whose creation has many (more popular) descendants. I played on the original Essex MUD in the early 80s, and it had a lot of distinctive qualities that directly inspired many of the other MUDs, including I believe LambdaMOO. And, unless you have any competing evidence, I think it might be fair to say that Bartle and colleagues predecessors at least coined the term "MUD".