Fair enough! That's some good experience and should address some of what I've heard from him, but perhaps he has forgotten.

That said, and this is coming from someone who (sadly) missed the era of computing you're describing, I think there's still a difference between dealing with a 64-256 player multiplayer system, and scaling a server application across dozens? thousands? of machines, across the world.

My limited research suggests that MUDs run almost exclusively on a single machine (?), or even just having a small number in one location drastically simplifies the problem space.