An online Avatar based world produced by Fujitsu. It acts as a predecessor to Everquest. Essentially, people sign on, obtain "tokens" by spending time online, and then buy things in an actual market place that fluctuates according to supply and demand. A huge world with great graphical interfaces and lots of friendly people.

The actual Fujitsu employees that manage the world appear inside in the form of "Oracles". Essentially, they have "Root" access and can do anything in the world when they want to. It creates for quite a show!

WorldsAway was created 1995 under the guidance of F. Randall Farmer, one of the authors of the Habitat Papers, by Fujitsu Cultural Technologies.

It started as a service on CompuServe and used to be on the list of the top ten services offered.

After a number of reorganizations, there finally was a management buyout and WorldsAway now belongs to Avaterra. Avaterra almost went broke twice, at the time this WU is written, the future of WA is doubtful.

During the creation of the software, a number of principles laid down by F. Randall Farmer were violated, such as Don't trust the client. The WorldsAway client, written in Tcl/Tk is one of the most hackable -non-open-source things found on the Internet.

Another known problen within WorldsAway is the economical model, which is severely flawed. The amount of in-world currency, the Token, is ever-increasing, which leads to inflation.

This writeup will most likely be expanded if anybody requests more information on a particular subject regarding WA.

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