Way back in the day, there was a short story that ran in the D&D magazine Dragon. I remebered it distinctly, as it painted fantastic image of a world where people played computer games in an online persistent world. At the time I had never heard of a MUD, (this was back in 1985) so the story blew my computer ignorant mind about what a game was, and what networks could do. Plus it is a pretty darn good story that still holds up and did a pretty good job of predicting the world 20 years off. (although apparently we should still be using command prompts for everything still...)

Anyway, with some downtime at work, and a little digging, I found that the author Henry Melton has posted the story online, so if you are interested reading this little bit of retro geek fiction, check out Catacomb.