The original Habitat, which had an interface and graphics similar to the adventure game Labyrinth, was released in beta form by Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts) for the Quantum Link online service for Commodore 64 from 1986 until it was shut down in 1988. A sized down version was released as Club Caribe on Quantum link in January 1988. Fujitsu later licensed the code and released Fujitsu Habitat in Japan in 1990. Habitat and Club Caribe was highly influential, and it's code still lives on through WorldsAway, which premiered on CompuServe in 1995, and moved to the public internet in 1997. WorldsAway had multiple worlds, two of which survive today and are now known as Dreamscape and NewHorizone. Dreamscape was Fujitsu's first virtual world, and appeared when WorldsAway premiered in 1995. NewHorizone was originally Club Connect when it was launched by Fujitsu in 1998 and New Radio World when the WorldsAway worlds were sold and became part of an online world known as VZones in December 1998. New Radio World was renamed VZConnections in December 1999, and then newHorizone in September 2001. These two worlds are still a part of vZones, and the WorldsAway software has also recently been licensed for use in MetroWorlds.
The preservation project was spearheaded by Alex Handy, founder and director of the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. The project has official permission from Fujitsu, the company that purchased Habitat from Lucasfilm, to get the Habitat software working again. In order to get the project off the ground, Handy enlisted the help of the creators of Habitat, Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, and Stratus, the company who made the Nimbus servers that Habitat ran on. They were given a Stratus computer, manufactured in 1989, and upgraded to use a 1999 era TCP/IP protocol.
On September 25, 2014, Morningstar and Farmer, and over a dozen hackathon attendees at the MADE video game museum, as well as people working remotely through IRC, set out to get Habitat running again. The hardest part was the Quantum Link code, so they utilized the Quantum Link Reloaded open source project.
There is still a ways to go, as they don't have access to all the support libraries that are needed for the Quantum Link server, so those need to be emulated in order to work properly. But, they have come a long way, and still intend to finish. Once the project is complete, anyone will be able to log in using a C64 emulator.
You can read more about the effort, and donate to the cause if you so desire, over at the Habitat Preservation Project page at the MADE website.