What I remember:
The Order and Chaos system were the pre-cursor to the current day factions. However, they were not available right from the beginning either. It was added maybe a year later by Lord British and Lord Blackthorn to promote PvP between blues. Hence they made it available only to chars that has reached Great Lord fame.
Lose the Great Lord status and kablooom. Were pretty nice as they had higher AR (chaos shield had a higher AR) than heater shields and they were the only shields you could cast in. Also, AR from shields at that time was determined by your parrying skill.
Incognito at that time hid your fame level instead of changing your name, and can be cast on other players. So some folks would cast on unsuspecting people wearing the shields, causing the wearer to die when the shield exploded...
Pre coloured ore, max AR from NPC plate armour was 30. Player smiths would get a message when they crafted higher quality items than normal, but no "Exceptional" tag on the armour. A suit of crafted exceptional armour would give 32 AR. Also the AR depended on the durability, when it wore down, the AR afforded by the armour would reduce as well.
I stuck to free bone armour looted from skeletons, 28 AR
Sold them at the bank too!
Plate armour had a dex penalty, but bone armour didn't.
However, dex didn't determine your swing speed. It only lets you walk further when you were overweight. So everyone wears platemail. Only later on were there archer suits.
Heavy armour did not give a penalty to mana regen. Then again, the meditation skill did not exist either.
Pets have a fetch command that you can abuse to make it carry a crate full of ore.
No weight or item limit in containers.
Skill gains were only shown when you reached a full point. You still gained in 0.1 increments, but you just won't know if you'd gained any skill until it reached the next round number. Coupled with the low gain rate and fast decay, it was really hard to reach GM and keep it there!
Other things I did for gold included scribing spells outside the mage shop, tailoring, making bows, buying ingots at the Brit smithy and making wooden shields using 1 ingot each (no wood needed).
You could place as many houses as you wanted and almost anywhere too. Roads, fields, town, the roof in LB castle, all were fair game.
There was no spell casting delay either.
Scribing scrolls required mana, but using them did not.
Player vendors were added later on. Though you had to place them outside your house.
