--- /dev/null
+The Muddle programming languge is a member of the Lisp family. It
+started at MIT's Project MAC.
+
+It's hard to pin down exactly when development began. The first
+documented reference to it seems to be in the Project MAC Progress
+Report VIII at <http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/AD0735148> which
+covered the period of July 1970 to July 1971 although some have
+claimed as early as 1969 but provide no sources.
+
+The original MIT-DMS (along with other historically important systems
+like AI, MC, anmd ML) were KA- and KL-10 based PDP-10 systems running
+the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS.) When they were retired in
+1982, four KS-10 systems ("DECSYSTEM-2020") were put in their place in
+order to keep ITS running. These were retired from service around 1995.
+
+This mudman.git repository is named after the MUDMAN directory on
+MIT-DMS, which contained documentation about Muddle.
+
+Many people have worked on Muddle in one aspect or other over the
+years. These include (in alphabetical order by first name): Brian
+Berkowitz, Bruce Daniels, Carl Hewitt, Chris Reeve, Dave Lebling,
+David Cressey, Gerald Sussman, Greg Pfister, Jim Michener, Joel Berez,
+Marc Blank, Michael Broos, Neal Ryan, Roger Banks, Stu Galley, Sue
+Pitkin, Tak To, Tim Anderson and others that will probably never be
+known.
+
+This represents an effort to preseve information about the Muddle
+programming language by migrating the documentation from aging books
+into modern formats. Despite efforts to preserve the documentation as
+much as possible one change is made: Changing MDL references back to
+Muddle.
+
+In talking to people that originally worked on the language it was
+always called Muddle.
+
+The Muddle name was in the MIT AI Lab's tradition of naming Lisp
+dialects with somewhat sarcastic names. Reference other names from
+there like Planner, Scheme (which was actually named Schemer but ITS
+limited file names to a maximum of 6 characters), Conniver, etc. and
+it shows a pattern. Chris Reeve says that the Muddle name came from
+the nickname of the Project MAC Dynamic Modeling Group from either
+Gerald Sussman and/or Carl Hewitt, which was "Dynamic Muddlers."
+
+The MDL name was actually invented by an administrator at the project
+that feared losing DARPA funding over a funny name. No one actually
+called it "MDL" except in documents DARPA might see and even then they
+wrote "MDL" but said "Muddle." The name "MIT Design Language" is,
+consequently, a backronym.
+
+The Muddle name itself eventually got a backronym of "MAC's User
+Defined Data and Language Evaluator", with "MAC" representing "Project
+MAC".
+
+Changing the MDL references back to Muddle is believed to be in
+support of the original naming decision of those that made the
+language, especially since there are no longer any DARPA funding
+concerns.
+
+The documents in this repository, including this one, are made
+following the CommonMark specification: <http://commonmark.org/>.
+
+Converting them to other formats requires that cmark, which is the
+reference implementation of Commonmark in C from
+<https://github.com/jgm/cmark> or Pandoc from <http://pandoc.org/> or
+some other program that can understand CommonMark be installed on your
+system.
+
+---
+
+This document by Jason Self is licensed under the Creative Commons
+Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License and all future
+versions: <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>.