DeMUSE is a branch from TinyMUSE 97, which was a branch of TinyMUSE 1.8a4, which was a branch from the mainline code at MicroMUSE which ran TinyMUSE 1.7b?. TinyMUSE was a branch from TinyMUSH, which was a branch from TinyMUD.

DeMUSE incorporated various aspects of other branches, including the color coding from TinyMUSE 1.9f3 (another variant branch of TinyMUSE 1.8a4) and memory management from TinyMAZE.

When coding ceased in 2000, there was an effort to be able to house multiple games with multiple parsers within the same code. Today's processing power would make easy work of this, but back then it was a tough task; not to mention that the various variants all had their nuances.  If this were written today, it would likely have a mySQL backend.

There also was a modified version of a world-connecting "robot" named Ultralink, but that code was lost in a hard drive failure back in 2000.

DeMUSE still compiles today, with a little help.  You can download it here.