TinyTIM

TinyTIM's exact date of creation is unknown, but is observed by the staff and official history as March 18, 1990 (it is unlikely to be more than a week away from this date). Based on the TinyMUD program, TinyTIM was created as a parody of other MUDs that were currently running, including TinyHELL and Islandia. While the original intent of the name was simply to parody the "Tiny-" prefix of the currently running TinyMUD games, it was later declared that this was both a combination of the singer "Tiny Tim" and "Tim the Enchanter" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The TinyMUD software required that object #1 be a "God" character, and this character was fashioned into a form of Tim the Enchanter, sealing the association. It was installed on a machine owned by the GNU foundation (gnu.ai.mit.edu), using an account owned by Richard Stallman. At the time, Stallman's account had the same password as its username: "rms". TinyTIM's initial period of existence was one of constant deletions, as other users on the gnu.ai.mit.edu system would kill the process and remove the database of the MUD. In July, 1990, TinyTIM was moved from the gnu.ai.mit.edu machine to a system hosted at the Supercollider in Texas. In August, TinyTIM switched to the TinyMUSH 1.0 codebase, and was one of the first MUSHes. TinyTIM has diverged from nearly every other MUSH due to heavy modifications made around that time. As of 2024, TinyTIM is still in operation.

From the time that TinyTIM switched to MUSH-based code, the maintaining of the codebase was taken over by the Wizard/Administrator R'nice, who kept the program closed-source and made incremental and large-scale improvements to it for the next decade and beyond. Along the way, with suggestions from users of TinyTIM and his own research, R'nice created the first "@doing" command on a game, as well as indirect locks, regular expressions as locks, and a host of new flags and features. TinyTIM rewrote its Help system from scratch, portions of which were used (with permission) in documentation for other code branches. TinyTIM's co-founding wizard, Trout.Complex, has been a wizard on the same game for over 30 years without a break or sabbatical.

On June 2, 1994, the NCSA "What's New" page, the main news site for the announcement of new websites, mentioned the TinyTIM homepage at www.tim.org. This drove tens of thousands of users both to the website and ultimately to the TinyTIM game, which was overwhelmed for over a month. The blurb read: TinyTIM was also mentioned in Wired in their Net Surf section. Sketch was interviewed by Barry Shell for Adbusters magazine in an article called "Cyber-Encounters of the First Kind", which appeared in 1993. The article was subsequently reprinted in December 1996 online.