Welcome to the web site of Cold Winter Knights BBS and the MOOCitadel Telnet-based BBS software system.

Cold Winter Knights ("CWK") BBS was originally an old Sacramento, California-based Atari ST Citadel-style modem-dialup BBS running on an "STadel" variant called Inner Sanctum. In its heyday of the summer of 1990, it had on the order of 60-70 logins per day and over 100 active users -- quite a heady thing, considering the locality that is inherent of a dial-up BBS.

CWK first went on-line in May of 1988, running primarily as a Role-playing game BBS: at its most-popular point in that morph, it was running 11 different RPGs with six distinct game-masters.

After evolving through very distinct phases (and associated user bases), by its end, it had waned to about 50 calls a week and a core of about 20-25 users. Ultimately, once the Internet became a household name, Dial-up BBsing in general lost its appeal and in February of 1996, the original Dial-up version of Cold Winter Knights was closed down.

Fast-forward five years... In 2001, the person who has the distinct credit of naming Cold Winter Knights (one Dylan Carlson, aka "Axis of the North") e-mailed me and told me of his telnet-able citadel bbs, "Retrovertigo" (Now since defunct.) I was intreagued, and of course logged in. Sure enough, the old heady days of (G)oto (N)ew (E)nter came roaring back to me.. And I found that I wasn't the only citadel-er that was still around. Half of my final old base was still into the Citadel scene, in the new Internet version of the Citadel boards.

Naturally, I soon dreamed of being able to put Cold Winter Knights back up. But there was a problem: all the citadel proggies currently in-use were Linux based -- the distinct realm of pentium and Mac PCs. I wouldn't want to do it at *all* if I couldn't use the Atari ST - it just wouldn't seem natural!

So I did that for a few years (2005-2007). Got it working a little bit using the Atari ST "STinG" TCP/IP protocol. I eventually ran out of patience with it, and stopped. It was fun, and I may go back to it again at some point, but then I realized I was more of a MOOer nowadays than I was ever a BBSer. (MOO = MUD, Object-Oriented... MUD = Multi-User Dungeon. Google it.) I also realized I was a pretty decent MOO programmer; why not just write a Citadel using the LambdaMOO code? And to have my own MOO.. So, here in 2024, I present to you, CWK - The World's First MOOCitadel.

Oh, and I imported all the old rooms and non-private messages into the new incarnation from the time that CWK was taken down, in 1996. You can read all those old ancient history messages. Rather amusing!


Contact


I can be e-mailed


Alternatively, I am also on Lambdamoo as YD