About MCiOS
This site is a place to play Mornington Crescent and other games which may or may not be based on those played on the BBC Radio 4 program I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue.
The style of play emulates Rob Bunting's original Mornington Crescent server at York. In fact the only reason this site exists at all is because one day in 1998 Rob announced he'd be graduating, and the York server would presumably fall down from neglect sometime thereafter, so I hastily hacked this thing together as a replacement. With characteristic treachery, Rob then proceeded to stay on for another year. It's also worth noting, with complete irrelevance, that Rob is entirely unable to keep both feet on the ground at the same time. There is copious photographic evidence to support this.
Why "Outer Space", anyway? Absolutely no reason, except it was the first thing that occurred to me to type after <title> and before </title>. For better or worse we're stuck with it now.
And the clock? What gives there? It started as an original logo meant to evoke the style of London Transport poster art of the 1930s; in particular it's vaguely inspired by the work of E. McKnight Kauffer, with other influences from the era as a whole. The actual clock mechanism is something I banged in later, cribbing my own work from a stint with a web development shop. It keeps MCST, or Mornington Crescent Station Time, and its purpose is to provide a common reference for the times in the time stamps of each move and game update. I'm occasionally asked why it doesn't show the user's local time -- the reason is it wouldn't correlate to game posting times and besides, you already have a clock on your desktop.
But, getting back to the site...Formatting moves
Players normally use a small amount of HTML markup for emphasis and for distinguishing moves from the surrounding conversation. The most useful tag to know is bold, which is used like this:
<b>This text will appear in bold.</b>
In particular, a winning move must appear in some kind of markup if it is to be recognized by the server.
In addition to the standard HTML markup, the site supports a nonstandard hide tag. This is typically used in conversation to avoid spoilers. The text <hide>This text is hidden</hide> is replaced by a graphic: 
. Move the mouse pointer over it to see the text.
Links may be posted using standard HTML, but in order to discourage linkspamming the site prevents you from submitting a move which contains a link unless you also enter a certain well-known value in the small, grey text field next to the posting buttons. What you need to type may change from time to time; to see a hint as to what's required here, either preview the move or attempt to post it. The hint assumes that you have some slight familiarity with the game and its origins. If you don't know the answer, it's reasonable to wonder why you need to post a link to a Mornington Crescent server. There's little point in asking in the chat game: if you get any answer at all it's sure to be a good deal more cryptic than the hint.
Winning
It is well beyond the scope of this document to describe the conditions in which it is possible to win a game; however, assuming you're in a position to do so, you can win the game by entering the winning move in HTML markup -- again, bold is usually used. If the winning move is not given by the game's creator in its introduction, it is probably the standard move for the game of Mornington Crescent. If you're not sure, you can view the source of the page, where the winning move will be shown in comments near the game's title. Note that some games cannot be won.
Game limits
The server limits the number of games which can be active at any given time. It is also possible to enter additional moves and comments to games which have ended. Games which have recently ended or recently had moves or comments added to them continue to be displayed in the finished games section on the front page for about four days after the last move or comment is entered. It is not unknown for finished games to carry on "below the line", sometimes for a very long time.
When a win is challenged the game may be reinstated; when this occurs and a new game was created during the interval, this can result in the limit being exceeded. This isn't considered a problem, though it does mean that more than one game will have to end before any new game can be created.
Real-time chat
In addition to the "permanent" chat game, there is a live chat system which operates in real time. It can be used by any browser that supports the Macromedia Flash plug-in.
Channels
When you connect to the chat server, by default you're talking on an unlabeled channel called 'default'. You can create a custom channel by providing a channel name argument in the URL, thus: http://parslow.com/chatserver/?channel=toast. If the channel already exists, you'll join that conversation in progress; if it doesn't it will be created. Channels are created on demand and destroyed when the last participant leaves.
Server information
MCiOS consists of three rather crude Perl programs, and apart from minor tweaks is essentially unchanged since 1998. The server-side code for the live chat was written in Python in 2001.
The site is served by a 1.83 GHz Mac mini running Linux located at the Pittock Internet Exchange in Portland, Oregon.
The Lure of the Underground poster by Alfred Leete, 1927. It is my belief that this image entered the public domain at the end of 2003. Will be removed if information to the contrary is presented.