Original author of the article here. Sigh. I wrote the damn article in one sitting over about 5 hours on Friday. Yesterday. Because I was sick of seeing everyone and their pet hamster tweeting and facebooking and otherwise mentioning the other piece on Medium, the #1 story on Medium still, about the 19-year-old "actual teenager" and his view of social media in 2015. There was plenty of social media in 1980, and I experienced it, and I was 19 then. So I did a brain dump, in the style of the other Medium article. - @brianstorms (who would sign in here on Slashdot but I don't remember the damn password)

Bartle has made a career out of claiming he created the first MUD. He didn't. His claim is similar to the guy claiming he invented email. Both created programs that happened to have those names, MUD and in the other case, EMAIL. Somehow this makes them the inventors of it simply because of the filenames they chose. The fact is, MUDs were alive and well and thriving already on the PLATO system years before Bartle got involved. I am disappointed that Slashdot doesn't call Bartle on this.