The Elder wizards are former Arch wizards, after they have retired to an existence of leisure and play rather than hard and cruel work. At an old age, they enjoy their otium, hang around talking about "the good old days" and observe the young. Here has been collected some personal comments by those of them that could be bothered to put something down.

Profezzorn
From his hammock, Profezzorn muses: I remember the good old days, when Nanny ran on Nanny, you were glad if you actually had your autoloaders when you logged on, and lag was caused by people running emacs on Nanny. Back when 'take all from corpse' would reply: There is no all in corpse and Chino was a new and active wizard. Qqqq was still a highwiz, and Mats ruled the mud with a gentle but firm hand. Those were the days to become a wizard.

And who can forget when Angmar hung the mud because he wanted to connect GnuChess to the game. The next day Mats, Angmar, Oros, Gwen and me were in the church when Angmar suddenly exlaims: I didn't do it!!! Mats raised an eyebrow, (or at least I assume he did, because the soul didn't have that command back then) and asked Angmar what it was he hadn't done.....

Angmar, who provided the ultimate way of removing a call_out: Someone asked over the wizline how to remove a call_out and Angmar replied without delay: shutdown("function")

This, is the Nanny in my heart.

Qqqq
It all started when my friend Oros gave me the keys to the gate and I entered what is now known as Nannymud. Back in those days we were lucky if the game could stay up for an hour. Life was a struggle for money, since when you bought something you always wondered if the game would be stable enough so you could regain the money you had just spent. We also had free playerkilling, no stupid rules stopping us from slaying others, and it worked! You walked up to someone who had just stolen something from you and asked politely for it, while pointing at your two bulky friends. But then we got Greeks and Americans, and playerkilling had to be confined with an angel.

Even back then it was possible to become a wizard, if you survived the crashes. So after a long and hard journey solving a handful of quests, I became a wizard. Oros became wizard shortly after me and we worried what would happen if we died? Would we become players again? Or worse? So we did the only safe thing to do, we created another "test" wizard (using patch in the great Fizban's staff). Then we bravely tried to kill him and found out that we could not die, at least not by normal means. Pell "caught" us though and we learned that there were ways to become mortals again, but we were lucky and all he did was to talk some sense into us.

Oros, Anvil and I later became part of the administration. In the beginning it was easy, since the mud would get full after 11 (!) players had logged on. Those were the days when you had time to look at wizards' code as it was being created, when you were able to help everyone and assist them when needed. Then Nannymud moved to another machine, and we got more players and more wizards, but not more people in the administration. I no longer knew every player by name, or what every wizard was doing or planning. There was no time to get to know the people playing the characters anymore. After a while we got tired of hearing, "I did not know it was illegal," when wizards interfered with mortals or created wc 40 weapons, so then we created "RULES" to "enlighten" the un-informed wizards. I think the Nannymud I learned to love and treasure partly vanished in this process.

Recently, after I became an elder, the rules were expanded to include rules for mortals; how they should behave, what they should call themselves, etc. I can not help but wonder if Qqqq is an acceptable name, or if I ever would have been allowed to become a wizard. After all, Qqqq is really my help character; he tried to help Belgarion to become a wizard. Belgarion of course had the bad taste of dying on low levels, so Qqqq became more fun to play. Hence the name.

Lpd
Ah.. NannyMUD. The one and only MUD. It was very fun to play, for a while. Then when I reached level 13 or 14 or so I talked Mats into making me a wizard so I could help writing some code for new areas (funny to think of it now - then we had too little areas so it was actually some very _hard_ and boring work to reach wizards level. No quests, just monster-slaying... (It get's _boring_ after a while to kill Harry, Harry dies. Wait for a reset, race to find Harry before some other player finds him. Kill Harry. Harry dies. Repeat forever... This was long before mud clients - real players used "telnet" :-). That was when I starting writing stuff (that as far as I know still exists in the MUD somewhere (ever visited my printer factory and talked to the secretary?).

A my nice birds... The birds that go "Chirp, Chirp!". They are much calmer these days (not like when they ran amok and filled every room in the mud with multiple birds, including white ones that left white goey stuff on people sometimes :-) I still wonder why Padrone created that monster who shot all birds he found...

Or the "wet-code" which introduced the "feature" that players, monsters and other things could get wet (torches who wouldn't burn if wet) if they came into contact with water. Spawned funny things like water-guns and towels, and Profezzorns "cold" virus (which would spread between players)

I remember the early wiz-tool-wars between Angmar, Prof? and other wizards, where everybody tried their best to snoop at others and eject them from the MUD against their will. Actions and counteractions...

Later on I spent more of my time inside the internals of the MUD driver fixing many bugs and creating things like the ACL access control stuff used to restrict access for wizards. The ACL is that last big contribution I did before finding myself with much too little time for NannyMUD (sadly).