What blows my mind is that all of this existed almost 30 years ago and nothing quite like it exists today (maybe second life... maybe).
I remember snow crash but I don’t remember much about it. I spent virtually my entire dialup childhood on lambdamoo. Lambda was a giant mansion and you would start in a closet. One of the bottom floors of the mansion had a mirror which replayed things that recently happened in the room. The mansion was huge but I would constantly leave and explore the street. That’s how you ended up in crazy places like a helicopter or random ass island. Still don’t remember how I ended up in someone’s self built house. All I remember is they were having a party and it was freaking awesome reading through everything at 4am hoping my parents wouldn’t barge in and yell at me lol. Good memories :)
If anyone with the handle “dags” sees this, hello from your helicopter buddy
EDIT: AHA. Sensemedia apparently had a virtual community consisting of MANY themed MOOs, termed "The Sprawl," of which Snow was one; ChibaMOO was I guess the famous one, and was based on Neuromancer. This is more progress than I have made on this in years, so thanks!