History of Public Access Unix and GNU/Linux (Pubnix) Systems

By cmccabe@rawtext.club

NOTE: This paper is under revision, so you will notice some 
discrepancies in the text.

This article explores the history of public access Unix and GNU/Linux 
[1] systems (hereafter referred to as "pubnixes"), combining first-hand 
experience of contributors, historical accounts from related 
documentaries, and materials gathered from online archives.  In 
exploring this history, one goal of this article is to provide overdue 
recognition to pubnix systems by clearly defining them as a category 
distinct from bulletin board systems (BBSes), web forums, IRC channels, 
and other computer-based social venues.  And through this history and 
definition, this article will make a broader argument, that Unix itself 
is a communications and social medium, distinct from printed text, 
television and the World Wide Web (WWW) -- and that it can provide a 
unique and powerful role in society because of the special way in which 
it shapes social interactions.  Finally, this article aims to encourage 
participation in and support for pubnix systems, partly by brainstorming 
on what the next generation of systems might look like.

A central thesis of what follows is that pubnixe systems have played and 
continue to play an important role in fostering non-commercial online 
communities.  And because of the way that Unix shapes social 
interactions among users, it is particularly relevant today.  As 
concerns rise about the exploitative, addictive and shallow world of the 
commercial WWW, pubnix systems offer a meaningful alternative in which 
people can be valued for their interactions with others rather than for 
the resale value of the information a site collects on them.

With this thesis in mind, this article is written for the following 
audiences:

* People who are already users of pubnix systems, both experienced and 
those just getting interested in them,

* Potential users in the form of technically-inclined people who are 
concerned about issues of privacy, user exploitation, and low quality, 
sensationalistic content of mainstream media and social media outlets.

________________

Definition of Pubnix Systems

Pubnix Systems are defined as computers running a Unix or Unix-like 
operating system that provide shell access for free or low cost to 
members of the general public by remote connection for recreational, 
educational or other use.  This is distinguished from public access 
Internet providers which, although occasionally Unix, primarily serve as 
a pass-through for Internet access.  This is also distinguished from 
BBSes which are often not based on Unix, and which provide access to a 
BBS software interface rather than a Unix shell.

Similar to pubnix systems are those that provide shell access restricted 
to members of a particular institution, such as a university or research 
organization.  In fact, Unix as a social computing platform arose from 
this context in Bell Labs and several academic institutions in the 
1970's.  The distinguishing factor is that pubnix systems are open to 
the general public, in much the same way as public libraries are 
distinguished from university libraries.  Not surprisingly, public 
access Unix systems also tend to have a larger and more diverse set of 
leisure uses than institutional systems.

Another important dimension of this definition is the use of these 
systems for conferencing.  Conferencing facilities (essentially 
threaded, persistent conversation forums) are not limited to public 
access Unix systems and in fact cross-cut many types of multi-user 
systems.  On some systems, conferencing has become the dominant 
attraction, overshadowing the other uses of the system.  The popularity 
of conferencing on some pubnix systems is an example of their value of 
providing a venue for online social communities.

Origins

"What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to 
do programming, but a system around which fellowship could form. We knew 
from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by 
remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a 
terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication."

-- Dennis Ritchie [2]

Although time-sharing operating systems were initially designed in the 
early 1960s to solve the problem of efficiently sharing computer 
resources by multiple users, they were very quickly adapted to include 
tools for communication among system users. CTSS [3], the very first 
time-sharing system, had by 1965 introduced the commands 'WHO' to list 
other users currently connected to the system, and 'MAIL' to allow users 
to exchange electronic messages. Public user profiles originated with 
the 'FINGER' command, developed originally on a DEC-10 system in 1971 
[4] before coming to Unix in 1980. And the first bulletin board program 
was developed for the PLATO system in 1973 [5].

Unix's well-documented history began in 1969, as a descendent of the 
early time-sharing systems.  One goal in designing Unix, as stated in 
the Dennis Ritchie quote above, was to facilitate collaborative work 
between the system users.  To support this goal, even the early Unix 
systems had many social utilities-- including 'who', 'mail', and 'write' 
--allowing users to interact with each other, and many others were added 
by the early 1980's (Appendix A). And even the earliest Unix systems had 
a file system permissions scheme that allowed files to be kept private 
to the user, shared with a group, or made available to all users on the 
system.

While these utilities proved very popular, and user communities 
developed within these systems, access to Unix systems was largely 
restricted to the research institutions where they were operated because 
computing in general was expensive and very few people had computers and 
modems at home.  But in the late 1970's and especially 1980's, the 
commercial availability of home computers and modems changed all of 
that, and changed the culture of computing forever.

Computer based social networking outside of research institutions first 
became available to home users during the early 1980's, largely in the 
form of bulletin board systems (BBSes).  Early BBSes were simple 
computers (often not Unix) to which users could remotely connect via 
modem.  These systems rarely had Internet access and users primarily 
drew from local calling areas because long-distance charges were 
exceedingly expensive at that time.  The dial-in connection gave users 
terminal access to the machine and a limited ability to interact with 
others through the functions of the BBS software interface.  Processor 
and modem constraints meant that early interaction among users was 
mostly limited to simple exchanges of text notes -- literally analogous 
to a physical bulletin board.

As an example of modem constraints, the early 1980's Hayes Smartmodem 
supported 300 bits/sec of data transfer.  The article you are reading 
now, in plaintext format, is about 30K in file size.  It would have 
taken more than 13 minutes to download this article.

But despite these limiting factors, being able to interact with others 
through one's home computer was an incredible novelty and computer-based 
social networking took off.

The conditions that precipitated BBSes in the early 1980's also yielded 
the first pubnix systems.  Like BBSes, these systems were open to home 
users through a modem connection. And like BBSes, the early users were 
primarily electronics and computer hobbyists who wanted to socialize 
with like-minded people around their hobby interests.  It is true that 
some early pubnix systems offered BBS services and therefore acted as 
hybrid systems -- the dividing line between these two types of system 
was sometimes blurry.

Early Pubnix Systems

There is some question about which was the first pubnix system [6], but 
most sources point to one set up in 1982 by Mike Myers in Ann Arbor, 
Michigan.  M-Net, as it was called, ran System III Unix on an Altos 
68000 and primarily supported conferencing through two programs called 
PicoSpan and Party [7].

Also in 1982, Randy Seuss started up a separate pubnix system in Chicago 
[8].  Originally called wlcrjs, it changed its name to Chinet around 
1984.  Chinet ran Unix on a Compaq "portable" with a 4 MHz 8088 
processor, 640k of memory, and a 10 MB hard drive.  It supported 
conferencing on variants of PicoSpan, and also offered Internet access 
including e-mail and newsgroup postings over UUCP [9].

Throughout the 1980's, many other pubnix systems were set up.  Some rose 
to notoriety, such as Sausalito, CA's The WELL (1985) and New York 
City's Big Electric Cat (1987).  So many systems had sprung up by around 
1985 that an enthusiast named Wayne Ross began sharing a compiled list 
of "Public/Open Access Unix (*NIX) Sites" that he called "nixpub" sites.  
In 1989 maintenance of the list passed to Phil Eschallier (now of 10 
Types Inc. and RCH Solutions) who regularly distributed it on USENET 
[10].  The list consisted of 35 systems in 1987, and rose to 156 systems 
by 1995.  The Pubnix History Project's gopher site [10b] will maintain a 
continually updated list of known pubnix systems, largely consisting of 
what was recorded in these nixpub lists for the historical systems.

Like M-Net and Chinet, many of these early systems offered shell access 
but appear to have been primarily used for their conferencing forums or, 
later, USENET, email, and file transfer (over UUCP [9]).  Users were 
typically people who had day jobs in academia, the government, or 
corporate research, and conferencing topics tended to be of a higher 
technical or intellectual level for that reason.

Computer hobbyists were the most common user of these early public 
access Unix systems, and their interests included not just 
computer-based social networking, but also the architecture and 
operation of the computers themselves.  These more technically minded 
people tended to be frustrated with what they saw as the toyish power of 
the single-tasking home computers of the day (e.g. the TRS-80), and saw 
modem-accessible pubnix systems as an opportunity to use a "real" 
operating system.  The Unix OS was prohibitively expensive for home 
users during that time [11], so pubnix systems provided these 
enthusiasts a welcome opportunity to use it.

There was wide diversity among these early pubnix systems, from 
small-scale hobby projects that attracted a scattering of local users, 
to heavily used conferencing forums.  M-Net, for example, was quite 
popular, with around 25,000 users at one point.

By the late 1980's some cities had access to a Telenet service called PC 
Pursuit [12] that allowed users to dial into a local number and get 
access to systems in more than 20 other end-point cities across the 
United States.  This allowed some systems to cultivate user bases from a 
much broader area.

Pubnix systems were similar to BBSes in their use for text-based 
conferencing and file sharing, but Unix offered one big difference; at 
its core, Unix was not built for socializing alone, but rather for 
programming.  As John Biggs put it in a 2011 TechCrunch article [13], 
"Dennis Ritchie and [Ken] Thompson worked together to build Unix as a 
hacker's paradise, a place to test small programs and share the 
results".  While BBSes have sometimes been referred to as "the original 
computer-based social network" [14], one way of describing pubnix 
systems is that they were the original online "hackerspaces".  Hobbyists 
could work on coding projects in an environment that revolved around 
teaching and learning from each other and enjoying conversation with 
interesting people.  As will be discussed below, this communal coding 
focus is seeing a resurgence in popularity more recently.

Change Over Time

In the late 1980's and early 1990's a number of new pubnix systems came 
online, sometimes evolved out of old BBSes and sometimes as de novo 
services.  These systems combined the social spirit of the BBS era, the 
thrill of accessing the Internet's exploding amount of information, and 
the innovative spark of a new and better equipped DIY programmer 
generation.

Some of the main influences on these systems were formative changes to 
the Internet, increases in modem speeds, and growth and diversification 
of user numbers and interests.  One big change was that many systems 
began providing Internet connections, allowing their dial-up users to 
reach a broad variety of other networked resources.  Another big change 
was that many new social utilities and other programs were added to the 
Unix environment --IRC, USENET, Gopher, and others.  And of course, in 
the early 1990's the Linux operating system was developed, and the 
corresponding explosion of hobbyist programmers and sysadmins drew even 
more people into running and using Unix-like systems [15].

One of the key technological changes impacting pubnix systems was an 
increase in modem speeds.  From the period of the early 1980's through 
the mid 1990's, dial-up speeds continued to rise, going from a now hard 
to imagine 300 bits/sec speed of early Hayes Smartmodems to 28,800 
bits/sec by 1994.  And with these speed increases came changes in usage 
patterns.  Early access was so rare, and modem speeds so slow, that 
connected time was precious.  Every word typed, every post made was 
thoroughly thought out before sending.  Content was terse and 
purposeful.

But in the mid-1990's, dial-up Internet access from services like AOL or 
CompuServe had become a strong force in the landscape.  Along with the 
rapid growth of information and resources on the Internet, dial-up 
Internet service brought online a wave of new users from the general 
public.  In addition, the WWW and the Mosiac web browser gave people a 
new medium for using it.  Local systems such as BBSes and pubnix systems 
were no longer the only attraction in town.  The era of the BBSes 
precipitously declined [16], and pubnix systems felt the 
effect as well.  This change was reflected in both declining user 
numbers and shifting patterns of system usage.  As 1980's veteran Phil 
Eschallier put it, "we went from brilliant physicists, compsci, EE, etc. 
to pictures of cats" [17].

This was also a period in which malicious user behavior became a 
problem.  Spam mailers, script kiddies, and people hosting and sharing 
illicit files became a problem.  But despite this, the value of 
community still shone through.  As Ross Turk (now director of Red Hat 
portfolio evangelization) put it in describing his first experiences on 
Nyx.net, "You could tell it had already been the subject of much 
compromise - there were a bunch of disabled services and cumbersome 
processes (like a sign-up form requiring notarization) already in place. 
But it wasn't the system that made Nyx special, it was the community 
that it allowed to be created" [18].  For example, NyxMud's support for 
user scripted game elements was replaced with the "Wand of Creation", a 
limited options menu of sorts; but still, "it was a busy place with a 
vibrant community of players and wizards."

The 1990's was a time of reckoning for pubnix systems.  Some systems 
lost their user bases and closed as the meowing of cat memes replaced 
interesting discussions.  Some others saw that providing Internet access 
was the bigger draw for new users, and they became early Internet 
service providers (ISPs), many of which were either outcompeted or 
consolidated into some of the big ISPs today.  And yet others carried on 
similar to before, but with a more refined sense of purpose.  The ones 
that persisted can be thought of as a second generation.

The first generation pubnix systems had been largely focused on the 
novelty and fun of newly accessible computer-based socializing.  These 
second generation systems continued that, but also began to develop a 
sense of larger purpose.  Grex.org (1991), SDF.org (1987), and Nyx.net 
(1988), all of which still exist today, were among this second 
generation.  A quick scan through their mission, principles, and 
philosophy statements highlights a common theme: community education, 
public education, spiritual and intellectual enrichment, promoting a 
better-informed citizenry, collaboration, non-commercialism, choice, 
privacy, cultural enrichment, scientific research.

Some of these systems were consciously focused on having a positive 
impact on society through the social medium of the Unix system.  They 
saw change on the horizon from the now commercial Internet and knew they 
had something important to protect from it.

Still, the overall trend of usage was one of decline and some began to 
see pubnix systems as just a quaint, nostalgic reminder of a 
time gone by [19].

Current State

In 2014, the downward trend changed.  As Facebook soared past 1.5 
billion users, and snatched up Whatsapp for $19 billion; as the world 
reeled in Edward Snowden's revelations about the U.S. surveillance 
apparatus; and as remaining pubnix systems continued to see 
flat or declining usage; a person by the name of Paul Ford [20] (then of 
ftrain.com blog notoriety) registered the http://tilde.club domain name 
and pointed it at a Fedora Linux server with open registration for 
anyone to use.  He sent out a casual tweet to his Twitter followers and, 
to his surprise, within a few days tilde.club had hundreds of new 
account registrations.

Users logged on to tilde.club and started putting the system to work.  
They created and shared ascii art or simple retro-cool pages; they wrote 
clever command line programs to impress other users; they blogged about 
their interests; they emailed, chatted and wall'ed each other.  After a 
while, the number of new users grew so high that Ford had to restrict 
sign-ups.  By no means were these usage numbers notable compared to even 
moderately sized commercial websites, but the creative energy pulsing 
through the tilde.club community was something different and special.

Although tilde.club had to close its doors to new sign-ups, the interest 
of many members of the current generation had been piqued and others 
excitedly opened similar sites [21].  One example of this was 
tilde.town, created by admin vilmibm who took inspiration and general 
system design from tilde.club.  Similar to tilde.club, registration was 
open to anyone, and users were allowed (encouraged!) to express 
themselves freely with the utilities a standard Linux box makes 
available.

To this day, tilde.town is still active, very active, consisting of 
users with all levels of experience, from non-developers who just want 
to socialize, to both novice and highly experienced programmers.  
Someone is always working on and testing out new projects, often 
resulting in hilarious digital whirligigs or rube goldberg machines of 
code that other users can play with.  For example, one user created a 
tilde-coin that is awarded for answering distorted captcha questions 
from an IRC tilde-bot.  Another user created a multi-user virtual world 
of prose that continuously expands as users log in and describe more 
interconnected spaces.  And another user created a retro BBS called 
BB&J. There is a curses-based "botany" app that lets you test your 
digital horticulture skills.  Or you can homestead in the virtual world 
of cadastre.  Eventually you will be able to grow fields of crops 
through a (currently in-development) project called asciifarm.  (The 
developers of these programs are listed in Appendix C)

There are so many other little projects on tilde.town that a new user 
can take weeks just to get an idea of what is available.  Not all 
projects are perfect, of course; some are buggy, others are confusing to 
use.  But, they were made to share with others, and the developers 
learned a lot while building them (somewhat analogous to the paper 
you're now reading).

Another interesting and active system is called Devio.us. This system 
hosts a community dedicated to open source software and the Unix 
operating system, particularly OpenBSD.  In addition to an expertly 
managed shell service, it has an active forum and IRC channel through 
which geeks, developers, IT professionals, and enthusiasts chat, 
interact, and network around shared interests.

Meanwhile, over at SDF.org there continue to be thousands of logins a 
day.  SDF has developed into a fully articulated social community, with 
free and paid membership tiers that provide varying levels of system 
access.  It supports numerous ways for users to interact, including IRC, 
an old school bulletin board program called 'bboard', and a multi-room 
chat program called 'commode'; among great but lesser known utilities 
like 'oneliner' and an anonymous blogging tool called 'happening'. It 
also hosts several special interest groups including a ham radio users 
group (SDFARC), a python study group, a group of gopher protocol 
enthusiasts, a crowd of Minecraft players, and a user-driven Internet 
radio service ("anonradio") on which any user can sign up to broadcast 
their own shows.  Among the system's users are digital artists, computer 
historians, web developers, gamers, and of course many, many 
programmers.  All experience levels are represented, from young learners 
to veterans and computer science professors.

One aspect that is fairly unique to SDF.org is its large number of users 
with a passion for retro computing and telecommunications.  While retro 
computing is only one of the many user interests on SDF, it is one that 
has arisen partly because of the system's long and continuous history 
(more than three decades now).  Users frequently converse about how to 
bring various pieces of ancient hardware back to life, or how to use old 
networking protocols.  Users also occasionally post pictures, 
documentation or comments about old telephone technology.  In addition, 
through a connection with Seattle's Living Computers Museum, sysadmin 
smj has facilitated online access to old systems like a CDC 6500 
supercomputer and a simulated PDP-10 running the TOPS-20 operating 
system, both of which SDF users can log into.  And of course, you'll 
also see a lot of appreciation for the timeless value of classic 
text-based games [22].

Through the various retro computing activities on SDF, you sense a deep 
respect for facets of computing and the Internet that are currently 
being paved over by corporate saturation.  If you get into discussions 
with SDF users, you'll find that concern with the broader direction of 
the Internet runs deep.

--

There are not an overwhelming number of places like tilde.town or SDF 
online these days, but there are still quite a few, and the communities 
are welcoming.  In them, you'll find an online social space for people 
who are not amused by the mainstream social media; for people who are 
driven by the spark of curiosity and the interest to work on hobby 
computing projects in a collaborative, sharing environment with others.

--

A forthcoming revision to this paper will expand on a growing resurgence 
of pubnix systems.  The affordability and ease of cloud computing has so 
lowered the barrier to entry that many people have started setting up 
pubnixes.  One huge area of growth is in a movement called the 
Tildeverse, initiated by Ben Harris of tilde.team.  The Tildeverse is a 
loose association of tilde-branded servers that share some federated 
services like IRC.

Pubnix systems got their start in the early 1980's and nearly 40 years 
later, they continue to evolve and attract new participants.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
References

[1] This paper originally used the name "Public Access Unix Systems" 
because this is the name that has come into common usage.  Early systems 
were indeed Unix based, but over time the number of true "Unix" systems 
has been eclipsed by BSDs or, even more commonly, GNU+Linux systems.  
One of the core themes of this paper is the importance of individual 
freedom, a theme that I see at the core of the Free Software 
Foundation's mission.  Freedom and liberty did not arise by chance, and 
they will not be maintained without awareness and considerable effort.  
For this reason, this paper makes careful effort to portray the role of 
the FSF and GNU in the history (and certainly future) of the systems 
described here.

[2] The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System | Dennis Ritchie | 
Presented to the "Language Design and Programming Methodology" 
conference | Sydney, Australia | Sep, 1979 |

http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/hist.html

[3] Compatible Time-Sharing System | Wikpedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatible_Time-Sharing_System

[4] History of the Finger Protocol | Rajiv Shah | Jun 2, 2000 | 
Draft Paper

http://www.rajivshah.com/Case_Studies/Finger/Finger.htm 

[5] PLATO | Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_(computer_system)

[6] "Notes On The World's First PA Unix System" | Slashdot 
post/discussion | Mar 19, 2000 |

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/00/03/17/0450236/notes-on-the-worlds-first-pa-unix-system 

[7] On the origins of MNET...

"The Once and Future M-Net " | James Howard | Mar 14, 2000 | Great Green 
Room | http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=170

"A Partial History of Computer Conferencing in Ann Arbor" | Jan Wolter | 
~1997 |

https://web.archive.org/web/20160805221621/greatgreenroom.org/cgi-bin/bt/backtalk/wasabi/begin?item=19

Arbornet and M-Net Records: 1985-2002 - History | University of 
Michigan, Bentley Historical Library

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/b/bhlead/umich-bhl-2012017?byte=70603759;focusrgn=bioghist;subview=standard;view=reslist

[8] "Chinet -- Public Access since 1982" | 
https://www.chinet.com

[9] UUCP (Unix-to-Unix-Copy-Protocol) was, to quote Wikipedia, "a suite 
of computer programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands 
and transfer of files, email and netnews between computers"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP

[10] Many of the original 'nixpub' lists can still he found 
here:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/comp.misc/nixpub%7Csort:date

[10b] Pubnix History Project
      gopher://rawtext.club/1/cmccabe/pubnixhist

[11] Unix and Personal Computers: Reinterpreting the Origins of Linux | 
Christopher Tozzi | Channel Futures | Apr 27, 2015 | 
http://www.channelfutures.com/open-source/unix-and-personal-computers-reinterpreting-origins-linux

[12] PC Pursuit | 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet#PC_Pursuit 

[13] "What Can We Learn from Dennis Ritchie" | John Biggs | Tech 
Crunch | Oct 15, 2011

https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/15/what-can-we-learn-from-dennis-ritchie/ 

[14] "The Lost Civilization of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems" | 
Benj Edwards | The Atlantic |  Nov 4, 2016

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/11/the-lost-civilization-of-dial-up-bulletin-board-systems/506465/ 

[15] (Linux and) the Enduring Magic of Unix | Ross Turk | Jan 
1st, 2018 | Red Hat Enterprise Blog | 
https://rhelblog.redhat.com/2018/01/12/linux-and-the-enduring-magic-of-unix/

[16] BBSes declined but never went entirely extinct, and there are a 
number of people still passionately dedicated to maintaining the lineage 
and historical documentation.  In fact, both the history and current 
state of BBSes are another fascinating topic.  Like pubnix systems, 
BBSes provide an online social medium that is an alternative to the 
commercial WWW.  Nowadays, many people use BBSes for that alternative 
purpose, but many users are driven by the nostalgia and retro-computing 
aspect.  So big is the retro computing interest that new hardware has 
been released to mimic old modem connections (see the WiFi232 link 
below).  There are many great historical summaries of BBSes online, so 
this article steers clear of replicating any of that content.  Instead, 
here are some pointers, if you're interested.

Bulletin Board Systems, History | Wikipedia | 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system#History

"The BBS Documentary" | Jason Scott | May 2005 | 
http://www.bbsdocumentary.com 

A must see!

The Wonderful WiFi232: BBSing Has (Literally) Never Been Easier 
| Blake Patterson | May 30, 2017 | Byte Cellar | 
https://www.bytecellar.com/2017/05/30/the-wonderful-wifi232-bbsing-has-literally-never-been-easier/ 

BBS Corner

http://www.bbscorner.com/ 

 "...Helping BBS Sysops & Users since 1996"

BBSing... All About Bulletin Board Systems

http://www.bbsing.com/ 

Telnet BBS Guide: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com 

"the largest active listing of Dial-Up and Telnet accessible Bulletin 
Board Systems on the Internet"

[17] Phil Eschallier | Personal communication, Jun 5, 2018.

[18] Ross Turk | Personal communication, Jun 4 2018.

[19] In Noisy Digital Era, 'Elegant' Internet Still Thrives | 
Todd Bookman | Apr 17, 2012 | NPR - All Things Considered |  
https://www.npr.org/2012/04/17/150817325/in-noisy-digital-era-elegant-internet-still-thrives

[20] "I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds" | The story of 
Tilde.Club

Paul Ford, Oct 9, 2014 |
https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf 

[21] Other Tildes | http://tilde.club/%7Epfhawkins/othertildes.html 

[22] On ASCII Games...

SDF's ASCII Game Page | http://asciigames.com 

Text-based Games | Wikipedia | 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_game