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The talker is a kind of chat system that was originally based on MUDs.

Talkers start with a virtual world in which people log in remotely (usually via telnet), that has a basic text interface with which to communicate with each other, in a similar way to how MUDs work, but without the games. Some talkers have added simple games, some even almost as detailed as the games that exist in MUDs.

History of talkers

Intranet talkers

The first talker in history appeared in 1984. Talkers at this period of time were hosted on an intranet within a school or office or local bulletin board systems that people used to connect to the internet. An early example of an intranet talker was UNaXcess, which was created in 1984.

Early internet talkers

See also: #Early talkers

Early internet talkers were primarily hosted on a University server without the permission of the University, and hence when the University found out about them they were shut down. Most of the first users of these talkers were from the same University or else from a nearby University. From 1994, a lot of talkers were hosted on privately owned servers, and were owned or hosted often by the system administrator, manager or sometimes owner of the school or company.

The first talker that was hosted on the internet was created in 1990 by Chris Cat Thompson, and was called Cat Chat, which was based on LPMud, a type of MUD code. In 1992, he created the code for Cheesehouse, which was the first ever popular talker, and hence 1992 is regarded as the "true" beginning of the history of talkers.

A friend of Chris Thompson, Simon Burble Marsh, developed a code-base for a new talker called "Elsewhere", which later changed its name to Foothills, one of the most popular talkers of all time.

Once Foothills was created, the number of talkers increased dramatically.

Foothills staff then created the 3rd major talker Resort which was the first talker to use "Elsewhere Too", or ew-too code.

In 1994, Marble Madness appeared, using the same ew-too code that was used in Resort, and many Foothills & Resort users and administrators accused Marble Madness staff of stealing the code. In response, Simon Marsh, the creator of Foothills, in collaboration with Michael Wheaton, after whom Foothills was named, released the code for public download, and have since stated that Marble Madness, or Surfers, as it was later known, had done nothing wrong, as the code should be freely available.

NUTS talkers

See also: #Multiple worlds talkers

In 1992, a major alternative to ew-too code was being developed by Neil Robertson as part of a school project on the history of talkers, and he based the code on UNaXcess, an early talker from 1984. His project was called "TalkServ", but later released it publicly as NUTS, or Neil's Unix Talk Server. He created the code in 1993, and made his code able to be freely downloaded immediately, thus making a proliferation of NUTS talkers, which eventually became the preferred code base for talkers.

The first major NUTS talker was Crossroads that was opened in 1993, with Ncohafmuta, another major NUTS talker, released in 1994. Soon afterwards, in 1994, the first major adult-orientated talker, Lintilla was created using NUTS 2.1.

Lintilla was also the first talker to have more than 1 talker on the same network, which they called "multiple worlds". With the split off of Sleepy's multiple worlds in 1995, and subsequent creation of Fantasia's multiple worlds in 1995 and Planes of Existence in 1996, multiple worlds talkers became increasingly popular. Seeing this, NUTS 3 was developed in 1996 allowing for users to link several talkers together.

Talker hosting

In 1996, one talker owner, Yacko, and his girlfriend Alisa formed talker.com, the first ever server to sell space for talkers, later giving it the name Dragonroost. The server had up to 90+ talkers on it at one time, during the mid-nineties boom of talkers.

A number of other hosts started up as alternative hosting companies to talker.com. This actually impacted on the MUD community, and a company called MudServices.com started their own MUD hosting community, their keynote mud being Aardwolf.

With the proliferation of these hosting places, everyone could have their own private talker. As such, the number of talkers grew exponentially, whilst the number of users did not. This was no more obvious than with Fantasia's multiple worlds which grew to 30 worlds by 1998, with at times less than 5 users combined on the 30 worlds.

Controversies

Note: These controversies have only been documented by one side of the story. The other side of the story is needed in order to conform to the neutral point of view. There is dispute by some sections that the material below may be inaccurate. More sources are needed to create a more balanced view of these incidents.

There have been 5 major controversies in the history of talkers. These are as follows:

In 1991, Cat Chat was closed amidst fears that it would face legal challenges from the network that the school where it was hosted, Warwick University, used to connect to other universities. This resulted in the opening of Cheesehouse, which in turn faced real legal challenges with regards to not only stealing computer space, but also allegations that the talker was being used by a number of hackers. Demands were made for logs of all user conversations, but this was refused. From 1993-1994, Elsewhere (later called Foothills) was closed by many different universities, with varying legal repercussions, the end result being that universities from all over United Kingdom and United States were alerted to watch out for talkers being illegally hosted on their sites. This prosecution spread worldwide, and was at the time seen by many as the death of talkers.
In 1994, Superusers from Elsewhere stole the code to form their own talker Marble Madness (later known as Surfers), which led to ew-too being made publicly able to be downloaded and a boom of both talkers and talker users, as well as in the release of code for public download.
In 1995, Sleepy, with the help of Graeme, stole the Lintilla talker, including its code, wiping it off its original host's service. This was the first of several such hacking efforts by various talker owners/administrators. This individual incident created great hostility amongst talker users everywhere.
In 1998, the wizard of one talker was accused of using NUTS 3 bugs** to spy on users, and the wizard in question then responded by saying that in fact the talker owner/coder had spied on users, and blamed her to hide the evidence. This was the first of many such allegations of spying (at least in the NUTS world), and led to an increasing feeling of insecurity in talkers, especially since so many talkers had this "spy code" in it, as it was the default code. A similar controversy had occurred earlier in 1995 involving the ew-too talker Forest, which at the time was the #4 ew-too based talker in the world, and the only major one located in Australia; the controversy in that case, however, proved false eventually.
In 2000, Planes of Existence was embroiled in controversy as a number of users, who were arrested by German police, made the accusation that the reason that they were found was because of the talker being used to get their personal information (possibly using security holes in telnet) and that the users were blackmailed to pay up or else be arrested. This highlighted the security holes that are inherent in all talkers, in that the telnet protocol that they must use to connect to talkers does not encrypt any data and hence can be used to hack in to the talkers.

Different sources speculate as to whether these 5 major controversies are the main cause of talker downfall, or if it is the series of allegations that exist on every talker in history, and the on-going internal politics, or even if it was simply the fact that ICQ and instant messengers came out. Whilst talkers were relatively popular from 1992-1998, and had some popularity until 2000, they are now quite small and there are very few of them remaining.

- It should be said that the "bug" being referred to is probably simply the ".invis" command which allowed admins to be invisible to normal users. The intention of this command was to allow admins to monitor NUTS talkers for anything they regarded as immoral/illegal and deal with it , without being bothered by users asking for help/favours etc as soon as they saw the admin was logged on. Some (possibly rather right-on civil rights type) people saw this invisible ability as "spying". It all depends on your point of view.

Programs used to connect to talkers

Traditionally, the only way to connect to a talker is by using telnet. Some talkers allow connections via SSL, but this is quite rare.

Originally, the most common way users connected to talkers was by using raw telnet clients (see below) or by using various MUD clients, which were developed to be used on MUDs.

However, as talkers developed, a number of clients were developed that were specifically tailored for use with talkers. While MUD clients primarily focused on triggers, scripts, speedwalks, macros and other tools involved in enhancing the gaming environment, talker clients were focused more on making talkers simpler to use, such as easily being able to use several talkers simultaneously, and focussed on things like colour and layout.

With the advent of the World Wide Web, Java programs were released which embedded the telnet clients directly within web pages.

Most personal computers come with a form of telnet client included, which is sometimes referred to as raw telnet. This client does the bare basics - it allows a user to connect to the talker, and they can talk - however it often does not allow a user to see what they are typing, does not allow line-editting, and is very difficult to use. Most regular users of talkers, sometimes referred to as spods, therefore prefer to use an individually-tailored client.

Regardless of which telnet client is used, including Java and other web-based clients, nearly all people connecting to a talker are still using telnet, and hence anything that they type in the talker can be spied on by network sniffing, including their passwords and every word that they type. Nonetheless, the average user feels that this security problem is acceptable, as they believe that hackers are unlikely to want to spy on them.

Levels of users

Most talkers had 3 basic levels - USER, WIZ and GOD (or SU). On some talkers, they required for you to register before promoting you to user, and also had lower levels for punishment purposes. Some also had higher levels of users for long-term users or users who had been voted on to a user council (such as Crystal Palace). A handful of places had several different levels of wizard as well.

USER level

Typically, the user level was used to represent everybody. Whilst some talkers used different labels to represent the theme of the talker (the Planes of Existence had different labels for users on each of the 10 planes, and for males and females), and some like Crystal Palace had different names to represent different likes (they had Alpha, Beta and Ceta to represent dominative, switch and submissive, as well as Vanilla), they typically all could do the same things. User level meant that you could do everything that the talker allowed you to do. This generally meant that you could say hello, privately tell someone hello, shout to the room, move to another room, make a room private, invite people to the room, edit your profile and send mail to someone who was not logged on. Different talkers had other additional commands, some including games to play, some of which more resembled a MUSH or a MOO.

WIZ level

The wizard level was used to represent an administrator. They could ban a user, ban an IP, send someone to jail, and on some talkers demote a user, with the main role of the wizard to welcome new users and create general peace and harmony. They were variously called Sorcerors, Sorceresses, Wizards, Wizzes, and a variety of theme-based names. Talkers generally liked to have at least 1 wizard on at all times, but were also conscious not to have too many of them. Many talkers were abandoned because there were more wizards than regular level users. A typical ratio would be to have 1 wizard for every 10 to 20 online users.

GOD or SU level

The God or SU (superuser) level was usually used to represent the owner of the talker. They had access to all commands, and were usually the person who promoted wizards as well. On some talkers, wizards were not permitted to ban - and some even forbade them from doing anything beyond normal user levels. Some places had more than 1 God, but this was typically only the case with multiple worlds talkers, where each world would have their own God. Some places used the label god to refer to WIZ level users (and some even to refer to normal level users!). On multiple worlds talkers, as well as the God or SU level, they then had a higher level for Owner. This level typically had the same commands and abilities as God/SU level, with the exception that they could promote someone to God level or demote them from God level. This was organised differently in each place, with planes of existence having users who were God only having God level on one world, being WIZ level on the remainder.

ew-too user levels

ew-too based code user levels were similar, but had several name differences and variations from the NUTS model.

A basic user who had logged in for the first time was a newbie, and had only a limited set of commands to choose from; essentially, they could talk, and move about and explore, but nothing they did could be saved, nor were they allowed access to some commands which were prone to easy abuse.

A Resident was the next level up, equivalent to a USER in the NUTS model; Residents were permitted to have their own private rooms, which they could personalize, and their own lists of other users, which they could use to denote who their friends were, and who they wished to ignore. (Later ew-too talkers such as the PG96 and Summink based codes allowed newbies some limited similar functionality, particularly to ignore annoying users.) Most importantly, a resident could password-protect their name, ensuring no one else could use that name in their absence.

On some talkers, particularly Forest, an advanced Resident level existed called Citizen. The Citizen level is non-standard to the base, but exists on a de facto level in many places; a citizen would be granted greater privileges such as a longer list, or more rooms, but no (or very few) additional actual commands.

A Pseudo SU is a special case lying in between Resident and Superuser. On most talkers, a Pseudo was originally a user level granted to a person who was in temporary training to become a full Superuser. Such persons had an extremely limited set of administrative commands, often restricted to only the power to bestow residency and to communicate on the SU Channel. This is known by various other names in different bases, such as Channel or Trainee. Some talkers would also grant the Pseudo rank to visiting administrators from other talkers, or just to friends of the admins (on a temporary or permanent basis) as a courtesy, although standards varied from place to place.

A Superuser is the basic level of talker administration, essentially equivalent to a WIZ, and responsible for granting residency and enforcing the talker rules. Superusers usually had access to more user information, such as the user's IP connecting address, and had the power to punish rules violators by sending them to "jail", "warning" them, or in extreme cases, evicting them from the program entirely, and deleting (nuking) their accounts. Many normal users aspired to become a superuser, but on established talkers becoming a superuser was relatively difficult and rare, particularly in the beginning when there were far fewer talkers and far less opportunity to gain experience and become well known.

On most talkers, there was at least one intermediate rank between Superuser and Administrator. Many had two, some had as many as three or four. Usually the subdivisions looked something like this:

An Advanced SU (or Upper SU) was just a superuser with more powers. They had more tools at their disposal to do things, or could set more permanent consequences to troublemakers than a regular SU could. Where talkers made such a distinction between SU levels, the regular Superusers were usually called Basic SU or Lower SU. Sometimes Advanced SUs were called Senior (not to be confused with the use of the same term to describe a Lower Admin at other places).

A Lower Admin was the highest of these intermediates, and was usually (as per the name) considered more Admin than SU in nature. Lower Admins had some ability to overrule SU decisions such as site bans (and often, even setting such a ban required an LA at minimum to do it), to view the system logs, and to grant residents greater rights such as more rooms or a longer list. On some talkers, this position was called Senior SU, rather than Lower Admin, which denotes the LA's role as more of a high-ranking staff member rather than as a site owner (which the term Admin implies). Usually where the term Senior SU was used to mean Lower Admin, the regular SUs were just Superusers (or Normal/Regular SUs)

An Administrator is the equivalent of a GOD, although even here there was a hierarchy. Administrators had the unique power to bestow Superuser status on other users, or to take it away, and thus effectively were responsible for ensuring the talkers policies were enforced evenhandedly and regularly. Coders were those responsible for maintaining the code base (and therefore always had shell access to the live version of the code), and sometimes were or were not also responsible for what the Admins did - in some places the functions were merged, but in larger talkers, often the coders left the personnel issues to the non-coding Admins. On some bases, a HCAdmin (for Hard-Coded Administrator) was defined as even higher; this was so noted because any person logging in with the HCAdmin's name automatically became an admin - therefore there was a need to secure that name carefully.

Main differences between ew-too type talkers and NUTS type talkers

Whilst talker bases had a variety of names for their codes, there were essentially only 2 base codes from which all other codes were based, this being NUTS (also known as "dotty" because of its use of a . before each command) and ew-too.

The main difference between ew-too and NUTS is that ew-too required for you to type in "say hello there" while with NUTS you could type in "hello there" without a command. NUTS also required a . before each command, while ew-too did not. For example, in ew-too code you would type "tell jack what's up?" while in NUTS code you would type ".tell jack what's up?". In both codes, there were command shortcut keys that could be used, for example > was often used for tell, and in ew-too talkers, ' was used for say. So you could type in ">jack what's up?", and this could further be shortened to ">j what's up?", so long as jack was the only person online with a name starting with "j". However, later versions of NUTS incorporated the ew-too style as an alternative. In some modified NUTS 3 talkers, a user could type in ".ewtoo" and all of their commands would change to ew-too style. In other unmodified talkers, the .mode command can accomplish the same thing. Thus NUTS talkers could be accessed by people who were more familiar with ew-too style code.

Some big ew-too talkers required a user to register before entering the talker, often sending an e-mail to a system administrator before logging in for the first time - thus having a delay of 1-2 days before entering [1]. However, most ew-too talkers did not operate in this way, and some NUTS talkers also asked you to register in a similar vein.

Whilst there are a variety of other code bases in existence, some of which were created independently to either of these, talkers can be generally categorised as having similarities to one of the two code bases. Ew-too is often regarded as "a MUD without the game" and is attractive to MUD users as well as MUSH, MOO and MUCK users.

Both code bases are equally powerful in their different ways though only NUTS allowed you to roam to a different talker without having to log onto it, a theme continued in NUTS-4 which allowed many-hop roaming effectively creating a traversable talker network.

However , as the web took off and interactive web and GUI based chat clients arose , "telnet" command line based talkers slowly died off.

Since 1998, NUTS and Ew-too coders have worked in collaboration with each other, and they share a history. [2]

Commands and abilities

Each talker had different commands available, but a typical list is as follows:

say - talks to the room
shout - talks to the entire talker
tell - privately talks to another user - similar to IRC/instant messenger "private message"/pm
emote - makes an action (for example, assuming your username was 'Jack', "emote smiles at you" would appear as "Jack smiles at you")
move/go/translocate - moves to another room - on some talkers this could go from any room to any other room, while on others you were required to follow a map
private/lock - makes the room private
public/unlock - makes the room public again
invite - invites a user to a private or locked room
join - joins a private or locked room
send mail (smail) - sends mail to a user, whether they are logged on or not
read mail (rmail) = reads your mail
delete mail (dmail) - deletes mail
look - looks at who is in the room, and the description of the room
who - sees who is on the talker (on multiple worlds talkers, as well as on talkers connected using NUTS 3.3 connection code, you could type in a port number of name of the world to see who was on that talker as well)
description - enters a short description for a user
profile or edit profile - creates or edits your profile (this works differently in each code base, but was typically 10 lines long)
examine or look (user) - looks at a user's profile
review - sees what has recently been said
review tells (revtell) - reviews the tells that you have recently been sent
private emote (pemote) - privately sends an action
shout emote (semote) - sends an action to the entire talker
quit - logs out of the talker
delete/suicide - deletes your own account
ignore user (ignuser/iguser) - ignores a user, preventing them from being able to send you tells (on some talkers, it also means that you cannot see their messages to the room, and it is as if they vanish)

Most talkers had a variety of other commands, with 50-60 commands total being a typical number. A lot of talkers used the command "set" and then had secondary commands associated with that, allowing you to set your time zones, see if you can see tells, and so forth. Most also had a few which were restricted to the WIZ/SU or GOD/ADMIN levels, for rules-enforcement and program stability purposes.

The use of these commands made for an appearance which is similar to how instant messenger programs like MSN Messenger work today. However, they also allowed actions and for you to change your descriptions and such very easily. They were a lot more anonymous than instant messenger programs, as there was no possibility that someone could accidentally find out who you were. IP addresses were only ever visible to the WIZ level users (unlike IRC). They were considered to be a safe way to chat to people.

The culture of talkers

Divisions between talkers

Talkers can be divided quite succinctly between two groups - ew-too-style talkers and NUTS-style talkers. Spods, as ew-too-style users were called, would almost never go to a NUTS talker, and vice versa. Beyond this simple division, there was a second division. All-ages users would never go to an adults only talker, and vice versa. However, adults-only talkers were almost exclusively NUTS-style, which meant that there were only 3 major divisions. Multiple worlds talkers however added an extra dimension. Because multiple worlds talkers effectively act as "one stop shopping" for users, many multiple worlds loyalists would never go to single talker systems. Whilst they might be convinced to go to another multiple worlds talker, it would be a great leap for them to consider going to an individual talker. In a similar vein, single talker loyalists would rarely go to a multiple worlds talker - or if they did, they would only go to 1 of the worlds and ignore the remainder. And beyond this simple division, there were also sub-divisions. BDSM users would often only go to talkers with a BDSM or similar theme. Similarly, zoophile users would often only go to other zoo or "furry" talkers. The same existed with lesbian talkers and gay men talkers, and other sub divisions. Indeed, users of general (vanilla) single talker adult chats would often totally ignore all of the other specific interests, never ever going to lesbian, furry, gay or BDSM talkers, or any other subdivisions.

This division is notable within the description of talkers. Whilst a number of articles were written in various magazines about talkers, they were almost exclusively about ew-too talkers, specifically the "big 3", Surfers, Resort and Foothills, and a reader of these magazines could easily conclude that NUTS did not exist. So big was this division that a recent BBC article about talkers [3] failed to mention the existence of NUTS talkers - and referred to the big 3 plus a relatively unheard of talker called Snowplains, and insisted that the ew-too style is the only style in existence. http://www.ewtoo.org/ has only referenced NUTS talkers since 1998, when Neil Robertson, the creator of NUTS petitioned heavily for their inclusion. But even then, Ew-too charts only mention Ew-too talkers. [4] And beyond that, Neil Robertson's history of talkers, which now recognises ew-too talkers, does not list a single adult-orientated talker. [5] In a similar vein, many NUTS loyalists will insist that Surfers and Resort are irrelevant, and instead refer to NUTS talkers. Thus any article about talkers is by its very nature subjective. [6]

Feuds and alliances

A number of talkers developed great feuds between each other. Two well known feuds are the one between Surfers and Resort and the one between Sleepy's and Lintilla. Many feuds remained throughout a talker's entire history, and may develop so far as to encourage hacking of rival talkers, with loyalists proudly wiping the talker or taking it over for a period of time, perhaps even wiping all user accounts. Coordinated attacks, where 30-40 users might be asked to go to a rival talker and hurl out abuse, writing nasty messages on boards, sending nasty messages to other users and so forth were common. In retaliation, many petty bans were enforced. Some rival talkers would ban all admins from a rival talker. Others may even go so far as to ban users who talked about a rival talker in a positive light.

In a similar vein, many talkers had alliances. Whilst these were often determined by the code base and style of talker, they often existed between individual talkers who shared a common desire. Great relationships existed through these alliances, and they may share users, share admins, or recommend users from one talker to be admin on another. Much mutual advertising existed through an alliance. In some cases, 2 or more talkers may even act as one, and may even end up merging, either to create what is effectively a multiple worlds service (such as Ancient Realms) or to be hosted all on the same site. The strong alliance between Foothills and Resort, or between Lintilla and Fantasia's led to at various times both talkers acting as one.

Net relationships

The concept of the net wedding was explored in detail in a talker. Whilst a MUD may have a net wedding as part of the roleplay (and may even include two men marrying each other, with one pretending to be a girl), a net wedding in a talker had much greater significance. Net weddings were often done by people who were really married in real life, or else living together, as a further sign of commitment. Net weddings often led to real weddings at a later stage. The commitment involved in a net wedding was significant. It was not uncommon for 500 users to go to a talker to see a wedding, and for the wedding to be advertised all over the talker world a month in advance, and for users to be smailed asking for them to come, including a priest, vows, and official sanctioning of the wedding by the owner of the talker and several of the admins. Most multiple worlds talkers had an entire talker devoted purely for net weddings. Some talkers were created purely for net weddings and would only be open so as to facilitate a wedding. A net wedding could last for 4 or 5 hours, and then include a honeymoon to a specific honeymoon talker, with after parties and all of the regalia of a real wedding. Whilst some net weddings were small, and indeed some talkers simply had code to allow users to marry themselves, it was in many cases a significant event.

In a similar vein, it was not uncommon for a variety of other net relationships to develop. Someone might have a net father, net mother, net brother, net sister, and net children, and this could be done regardless of age. A net father could in fact really be younger than you, and children could be older. On BDSM talkers, this also included the ability to permanently own a slave, as well as many other complexities.

The rumour mill

A tactic that was often used between warring talkers was the spread of a rumour about one that they did not like. Because many of the rumours were totally invented or else greatly exaggerated, many users became very thick skinned about them. Indeed, a number of talkers would fiercely support their talker if there was even a suggestion of improprietry, and it could actually increase a talker's popularity. In some cases a talker may even spread a rumour about itself, just to add popularity. "All publicity is good publicity", as they say.

On some occasions rumours were in fact true. Whilst there is ongoing dispute about the technicalities of what happened, events such as Surfers suddenly having Foothills' code, or Sleepy's suddenly opening up with the exact same code as Lintilla were not disputed. The specifics of why or how, however, were. What made a rumour really hurt was not whether it was actually true, but rather if it was possible. For example, the rumour about Cat from PoE being anti-zoo was based on his promotion of Cowlover to sorcerer, someone who was hated. Whilst Cat insists that he was just doing what he was told, the reality is that that rumour stuck. Many other rumours have stuck for similar reasons, regardless of them being true.

Rumours could destroy a talker completely, or turn its user level in to rubble. Publishing of rumours on web pages and posting of them on other unassociated talker's message boards was a good way to hurt the talker. As a result, many talkers refused to even have a web page other than to simply state how to connect. www.surfers.org, for example, did not even mention that Surfers even has a talker on the service, let alone a description of it. www.surfers.org has been removed, but The Wayback Machine provides an archived copy of the page.

But rumours often had the opposite effect as well. A talker which is subjected to particularly nasty constant criticism and rumours, such as Crystal Palace was, may actually gain in popularity, due to people going to the talker to try to find out if it was true, and then concluding that the talker had been scapegoated or treated unfairly.

Talkers which were regularly the subject of rumours often had especially loyal and antagonistic users, who would retaliate particularly nastily. If anyone repeated a rumour to a loyal user of a talker who was subjected to constant rumours, the users of that talker may go to great extremes to seek revenge on that user, often going to the lengths of severe harassment, cyberbullying and cyberstalking, sending a virus to their computer, and sometimes even worse.

Talkers being real

The atmosphere of a talker is that it creates a virtual environment. Room descriptions, a theme, including colour and specially tailored code means that to many it felt like they were home. Many users would look around at a room description, look at profiles of users, and feel like they were really there. It was common for people to describe the talker, or indeed even a favourite room in the talker, as their "home". Some talkers even allowed a user to have their own private personal room as well, either for admins, special long-term users, or in talkers that had credits or money of some kind (such as BOBNet, Forest, Crypt, PoE, Iron Rose or Crystal Palace).

A lot of users described talkers as their real home, and their actual real home, where they lived and their family as being fake. It was common for people to use such terms as "family" to describe their fellow users. "hugs" was a common expression used to welcome people who they knew and loved.

The description of talkers, and the way that commands worked went well beyond simple roleplaying. Whilst in a MUD or the like, a user might pretend to battle, they would really know that it was not real. In a talker, most long term users were very serious with what they were saying or actioning, and, if they were able to do it for real, they really would.

Amongst this, however, were a number of casual users who would "play" on the talker, and not take it seriously. Some would pretend to be someone that they were not, the worst case of this being if they pretended to be a woman when in fact they were a man. Whilst that is tolerated on a MUD, on a talker it is perhaps the worst offense imaginable. Some players would say things to the screen as part of cybersex but in reality be quite bored. Some people would tell terrible lies.

The general feeling amongst most long-term talker users is that players were not generally appreciated. Thus, whilst police officers would occasionally use a talker to try to catch a suspected paedophile or even zoophile, the falsity of their methods meant that most talker users were able to notice them quickly. Many talkers indeed had a policy to ban "players", and hence many police officers found themselves banned by talker owners, and unable to complete their "stake out".

The general feeling within a talker community was to protect its users, even if they were breaking the law in real life. So long as they did the right thing on the talker, that was all that mattered to them. Even when a talker owner had been required by law to assist police to capture a known criminal, their doing so was often seen as a reason for abandonment of the talker.

How a talker is advertised

Historically, talkers pre-date the World Wide Web and hence the main form of advertisement was word of mouth, although newsgroups were sometimes used to advertise. From 1994 onwards, however, and with the prevalence of free web page hosting companies such as Geocities, an increasing number of Talker Lists were created by individual users. The talker lists would usually aim to be a comprehensive list of all talkers, and thus any person who was interested in talkers would be directed there. Some official sites such as http://www.ewtoo.org/ also advertised talker lists, but these were usually only listing talkers that they approved of in some way. Talker lists acted in a similar way to modern-day search engines such as Google or Yahoo!. Search engines were next to useless for finding a comprehensive list of talkers.

Talker lists typically had a short 1 line summary and/or a link to a homepage, and hence from 1995 onwards, an increasing number of talkers had their own web site to offer a brief explanation of the talker. Thus, someone interested in talkers could first go to the homepage and have a quick look, or else they could go straight to the talker.

A small number of talkers had extensive web sites, which encouraged participation in their web sites. Lintilla had some photos of users, as well as links to resources, while others had historical reports listed on their web sites, such as Foothills, which then formed ewtoo.org, which listed their relevance to the history of talkers. A small number since 1999 have also included message forums as part of their service.

Once new users were convinced to go to a talker, if the talker had nobody on it, unless it was a theme community with a particularly strong theme, a new user would typically leave. Thus most talkers, prior to advertising, would first hire a group of administrators, or WIZards, whose main role would be to greet new users, and a talker, especially in early creation, would make sure that there was 1 WIZ on at most times of the day.

As a talker grew, it became established either because of consistently high user numbers or because of having a popular theme and unique code. Thus talker creators were always making new code, and the number of code bases available became infinite.

Once the population of a talker started to dwindle, it would be pronounced as "dead" once it got below a certain user level (for example, less than 10 users on at a time), and, while this was acceptable for new talkers, if an established popular talker lost users to drop down to this level, it soon lost even more until there were few left.

However, from 1998, with the popularity of ICQ and other instant messenging software, combined with the perceived increased security issues with talkers, an allowance was made for dwindling user numbers, and the pronouncement of "death" is not as severe as it once was.

Given a choice of several talkers on the same or similar theme, users would typically go to the one which had the highest user level, and avoid the others (although some, may go to all of the talkers, regardless of popularity). Thus it was important to be unique, or alternatively to be the most popular.

The advent of talker.com in 1996 and subsequent hosting services meant that from 1996-1998 there was a boom of number of talkers (but not of users), which was no more obvious than with Fantasia's multiple worlds, that had 30 worlds at one point in time. This led to a growing belief that there were too many talkers, and hence non-unique talkers that were not the most popular of their kind were often petitioned to be shut down. From 2000, a lot of them did, for that very reason.

Code bases

The first internet talker, Cat Chat, created in 1990, was based on LPMud code, used for MUDs. This code eventually developed in to Elsewhere code, which then developed in to Elsewhere Too or ew-too code. One of the early intranet talkers, UNaXcess, which was created in 1984, had a code base that was eventually used as a basis for Neil Robertson's own version, NUTS in 1993, which was immediately available for public download.

One of the major forks of NUTS 1 was Iforms, which in turn was used to create Ncohafmuta, which formed part of the inspiration for the major NUTS fork Amnuts. NUTS 3 led to the creation of Amnuts as well as rNUTS and Talker OS in 1998.

In the Ew-too family, Summink was the code-base of choice at first, after its release in early 1994. The original Ew-too may have been "cleaner" code, but Summink had slightly more features, and was compilable on a Linux-based machine with less difficulty than Ew-too. In late 1995, the first of the Sensi-summink releases was made public, and new talkers were more likely to base on this code, due to improved stability, although existing ones rarely scrapped their original-Summink codebases. Playground 96, released in mid-1996, changed the ew-too world forever, as it was the first significant increase in the out-of-the-box amount of features since Summink. Unfortunately, PG96 was also the buggiest of the bases, and there was tension between the two forks until they were partially remerged by Sensi-PG (early 1998, mainly a SensiSummink base with PG features patched in) and then Playground-Plus (mid to late 1998, a bugfixed and stable direct-descendant of PG96). Somewhat ironically, however, the big-three are all old enough that they're based on early code, and the featureset of a PG+ talker is almost a stigma because it means the talker is relatively new.

Every new talker created their own unique code that would work on their own talker, and they would typically say that their talker was "based" on a particular code, rather than being an exact copy. As talkers evolved, so did their code, and at some point they would declare a new name for their code. The family tree of talker code development is far from complete, as a true family tree would include almost every talker every created.

Today there are a number of code bases available for public download. These include:

Amnuts [7] by Andrew Collington
Bolts by Nathan Richards (Sunspot) (no longer in development)
Cheesehouse [8] by Daniel Stevens (Cheeseplant)
Crypt [9] by Bryan McPhail, Scott McKenzie & Marty Greenwell
Ew-too [10] by Simon Marsh (Burble)
Iforms [11] by Vince Rohr (Deep)
Jeamland [12] by Andy Fiddaman
JOOT [13] by Dave Jarvis
Mamnuts [14] by Marcos Marado (Mind Booster Noori)
Moenuts [15] by Michael Irving (Moe)
Ncohafmuta [16] by Anthony Biacco (Cygnus)
NUTS [17] by Neil Robertson
OOT [18] by Dave Jarvis
PG96 [19] by traP, astyanax, Nogard and vallie
PG-Plus [20] by Richard Lawrence (Silver), J. Bradley Christian (phypor) & Geoffrey Swift (blimey)
PyTalker [21] by Marcos Marado (Mind Booster Noori), Daniel Cruz (FX) and José Martins (Hellraiser)
RamTITS [22] by Rob and Mike
rNUTS [23] by Slugger & Engi
Sensi-PG [24] by J. Bradley Christian (Phypor)
sensi-summink [25] by James Greenhalgh (Slaine)
South West [26] by Scott Lloyd (Duck)
summink [27] by Neil Charley (Athanasius), Michael Simms (Grim)
Talker OS [28] by William Price
UNaXcess [29] by Brandon Allbery

BBS talkers

UNaXcess

UNaXcess is a bulletin board system originally started at Bradford University by Brandon S Allbery in 1984. During the early 90's it moved to the University of Manchester and was used for several years, mostly by members of the Computer Science department.

Around about 1998, work started on a re-write of the code base overhaul the current system whilst keeping the quirky aspects that many users had grown to know and love (such as pressing 'G' to quit). By September 1999, the new system was ready to be rolled out.

Today the system is known as UA2 to most people and is mainly haunted by current and ex students from the University of Manchester Computer Science department and members of its computer society, CompSoc. As well as the familiar telnet interface, there is also a web-based version of the client (uaHTTP) that is more friendly to beginners.

The code for UNaXcess (client and server) is available for free download at ua2.org.

This talker base was eventually used by Neil Robertson in 1992 as a school project investigating the history of talkers, called "TalkServ", in which he created his own code, calling it "Neil's Unix Talk Server" or NUTS for short. This code base eventually eclipsed ew-too as the most popular talker base in the history of talkers.

NUTS-style all ages talkers

NUTS-style talkers generally had completely different users to ew-too style talkers. People who used ew-too loved them and refused to use anything else, and similarly those who were used to the simpler commands of NUTS, and the "dotty" elements, loved NUTS. Whilst ew-too users were known as spods, NUTS users were not. In spite of the vast majority of adult (18+) talkers being NUTS-style or "dotty" talkers, the vast majority of NUTS talkers were all ages. Neil Robertson, the creator of NUTS, does not list a single adult (18+) talker in his family tree of talkers, and as far as he is concerned, they didn't exist.

Some examples of NUTS-style all ages talkers include:

Hectic House (1992) - Neil Robertson's talker, which ran on TalkServ, his university project that would later develop in to NUTS
Ancient Realms (1992)
Crossroads (1993)
Ncohafmuta (1994)
Brecktown (1995)
Crypt (1996)
Southwest (1998)
Enchantment Under The Sea (1998)

Ew-too style all ages talkers

Ew-too style talkers, which are originally based on LPMud have code that is very easy to use for people who are used to MUDs, and hence attracts many MUD users who are used to the interface. Regular ew-too users are sometimes referred to as spods, a term that is unfamiliar with NUTS users. Ew-too users were very unlikely to ever go to a NUTS talker, because the interface is so very different. Ew-too talkers were almost exclusively all ages. Ew-too users were more likely to go to a MUD or a MUSH than to go to a NUTS talker.

Cat Chat

Cat Chat was created by Chris Cat Thompson, who was a university student at Warwick University in England, as LPMud but without any of the monsters or the game element. It commonly had about 20 users on it at a time. It used the University's network to the internet via JANET (Joint Academic NETwork), which only connected to a sample of other Universities, and was never connected to the entire internet. It was shut down in February 1991 out of fears that the "JANET police", i.e. representatives of the Joint Academic NETwork might have found out about the talker and Cat might be prosecuted for stealing bandwidth and misusing the university's computer systems.

After it was closed, Daniel Cheeseplant Stephens, a user of the talker, was inspired to create his own talker, Cheesehouse in honour of Cat Chat, and thus talkers were born.

Cheesehouse

Cheesehouse was opened on 8 February 1991, using the same ports that were previously used by Cat Chat, and indeed a lot of the users to the talker were unaware that it was an entirely different talker. Whilst Cat Chat had been down for several months, a few Warwick University students tried out the old port number just in case, and thus the "refugees" from Cat Chat formed the basis of the early user numbers.

Cheesehouse was initially only opened whenever Cheeseplant was physically in the computer laboratories, however that was several hours per day. But as time went on and the code was developed and Warwick University was opened up to the internet in all of its glory, Cheeseplant made the decision to occasionally leave the Cheesehouse talker open when he was not in the computer laboratories.

On 4 February 1992, the Warwick University administrators, under the direction of the Director of Computing, closed Cheesehouse, removed access to the network port, and placed a banner message indicating that it had been withdrawn. Cheeseplant also received a threatening e-mail from Mark Brady, a system administrator from UMIST, requesting for personal information about the people who used Cheesehouse, as well as access to logs of what they said.

Cheeseplant was unable to respond to these requests, primarily because he had never logged any conversations, and as a result received a number of other threatening e-mails from Mark Brady, suggesting that the talker was a "hotbed of hacker activity".

On 6 February 1992, Cheeseplant was suspended from the Warwick University computer system, as penalty for operating the Cheesehouse talker on their network, and stealing their computer resources. Cheeseplant met with the administrators of the Warwick University computer services, and explained his case, which was successful in that he managed to get his computer account back. However, he would never again open his talker.

Foothills (Elsewhere)

Elsewhere, as it was originally called, was created as a kind of offshoot from Cheesehouse, and, like Cat Chat and Cheesehouse before it, was written by a university student at Warwick University, Simon Burble Marsh, and hosted there, with its original site name being lily.warwick.ac.uk 2010, thus making Warwick University being known as "the home of talkers".

The talker existed at Warwick University for 6 months, hidden from administrators due to its small size and low bandwidth, rarely having more than 20 users on at a time.

In November 1992, system administrators from Warwick University discovered Elsewhere, as they had similarly discovered Cheesehouse in February 1992, and they shut Elsewhere down.

It almost died then and there, if not for one of its users, Michael Footsteps Wheaton. Footsteps provided Elsewhere with a new site in Florida, loligo.cc.fsu.edu 2010. In acknowledgement of his efforts, Elsewhere was renamed Foothills, a name that it carries to this day.

With Foothills, as it was now called, hosted in USA, and a much faster connection speed, American users had a much faster connection, without the massive trans-atlantic lag, and the popularity of the talker, especially to users in America, increased exponentially, and before long it had as many users as Cheesehouse had had while at Warwick University a year earlier.

Footsteps left Florida State University soon after the talker was first hosted there, and, whilst its systems administrator initially tolerated it, early in 1993 he decided to boot the talker.

Footsteps gave Foothills a 3rd home, at backus.mtsu.edu 2010, however everyone knew that it would be for a short time only, as the University would eventually find it and shut it down.

Foothills moved to its 4th home at vulture.dcs.king.ac.uk 2010, thanks to another of its users, Jeremy Fox Doran, who hosted it at Kingston University. However, this meant that the talker was back in the United Kingdom and hence its lag was again terrible for American users, and its popularity suffered because of it. Eventually, however, for the 3rd time in its history, the system administrators blocked the talker from operating.

Another user, Rod Ecthelion Morgan found Foothills another home, at marble.bu.edu 2010. This was the site of largest growth for Foothills, as it had a very good connection, and the user base quickly grow to have over 200 users on at a time on a regular basis.

After 2 1/2 years of relative secrecy, Neil Althanasius Soveran-Charley placed the source code for Surfers on an FTP site, and soon Elsewhere-based talkers were everywhere.

Today, Foothills still operates, at foothills.tk 2010.

Surfers (Marble Madness)

Surfers, originally called Marble Madness, was created using ew-too code in 1994 and was the first internet talker to have 1,000 users logged on at the same time, and is among the most popular talkers of all time. It is currently run by Demi, Sanman, Mike and Furry. Its current coder is Saraphale. It is currently (November 2005) the most popular ew-too talker among those charted in [30], having over 4,800 connections per day, and an average of 20-40 users on at any point in time according to GRIM's talker list..

A few of the superusers of Foothills became disenchanted with the way that Foothills was being run and stole a copy of the code to create their own talker, calling it Marble Madness, on shadowfax.surr.ac.uk 2010, named Marble Madness to reflect the super users' anger at the way that Foothills was being run on marble.bu.edu 2010. Marble Madness was never developed extensively while at shadowfax.surr.ac.uk 2010, but by November 1993 it was fully developed, when it was renamed Surfers and hosted on muscle.rai.kcl.ac.uk 4242 thanks to Ian Roosta Dobbie.

After Surfers was made public, there was a shift, European users started to use Surfers whilst American users continued to use Foothills by perference. Both talkers boomed, Foothills remaining the busier always, due to it being the oldest, and first thought-of, and also having the quicker link for the more numerous American users.

It is often closed to new connections [31] due to its high popularity, and a user must e-mail the administrator in order to log in for the first time.

The talker is run on surfers.org on port 4242, probably in reference to The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Its official advertisement [32] is of being "A talker inhabited by a group of lazy long-haired, tanned layabouts who bum around on the beach all day desperately trying not to do any work."

It is regarded as important to the history of ewtoo, and hence to the history of talkers, and is the primary focus of LiveJournal's spod community

Resort

The following is an authoritative recount of the Resort's history by its founder, Adam J. Foxson. A less verbose version of the history of the Resort can be found on the Resort itself, by telnetting to resort.org 2323, and typing 'help resort_history' (without the single quotes).

The Resort was created in October 1994 by Adam J. Foxson (Fox), Brian Teyssier (apocalypse) and Gwendolyn R. Schmidt (vampyra) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. The source code upon which the Resort was originally derived (EW2v2) was released to us directly by Simon Marsh (Burble) and Michael Wheaton (Footsteps) of Foothills, a few weeks before its public release. The port number (2323) that we chose was the numerical part of the street address at which Adam resided at the time.

We had one goal in mind. We wanted to create the best Talker in the world. It was our desire to create a free, internationally accessible service that would positively impact and benefit people across the globe by providing a place where people could relax and make friends and meet people. We wanted to create a Talker with a drastically better user experience over the alternatives that existed at the time.

A close friend, Ethan Nason (eth) graciously offered to host the Resort from his account at netcom for testing purposes. Adam spent weeks upon weeks adding new features, customizing, fixing bugs and testing in preparation for our public opening.

Meanwhile, Brian and Gwen handled administrative and operational tasks. They also tirelessly searched for a permanent place to host Resort.

The first version of Resort was based on EW2v2 (Foothills version) running at netcom9.netcom.com. Shortly thereafter, Neil Charly (Athanasius) provided us with EW2v3 (Surfers' version), which was more stable and featureful. We happily upgraded.

Weeks later, we found what we thought was a permanent site; A site in Zaire (central Africa) that was willing to host us. Unfortunately, our connection to the machine was extremely slow and disqualified the site.

A week later, we got our big break. Randy Hagan from the University of Denver, Colorado offered us hosting on a Sparc10 running Solaris. This was positively ideal. The Resort officially opened to the public shortly thereafter, running at evans.cudenver.edu 2323.

We then went on an advertising, marketing and promotion blitz. We announced and advertised the opening of Resort on dozens upon dozens of places: the web, mud lists, gopher, and Usenet. News about the Resort started to spread via word of mouth. The result of which ended up with us granting hundred of new residencies per day.

Not much more than a year later, the Resort became the most popular and frequented service of its kind on the planet. On Wednesday, February 14 1996, we reached our highest resident count ever--even to this day--of 539 simultaneously connected users with over twenty thousand residents.

Well over a decade later, the Resort has grown and changed in many ways. We are now hosted on a private machine thanks to donations from our user-base, and hosted on a private network thanks to Mitch Franzos. The codebase is almost wholly different now than from what we started with; It's rock-hard stable, and includes hundreds (if not thousands) of new features, enhancements, improvements and bug fixes over that which we started from.

The Resort enjoys friendly relationships with other Talkers, having provided honorary staff privileges to various other Talker's Administrators. Additionally, we have collaborated and shared code that implements various features with other Talkers, and vice versa.

Throughout the years, our residents have organized several "fests" which provide users the opportunity to meet each other in real life. We are particularly pleased that many marriages and long-term relationships have been forged on the Resort and through these fests.

Not without its downside, the Resort has had some hiccups in the past. In the beginning, we suffered from some stability (crashing) issues that sometimes resulted in the loss of data. Likewise, we initially had--for a period of time--certain quality-of-service issues; To be precise, a number of residents were dissatisfied with the service they received from staff. In fact, some long-term residents might remember the infamous day a decade or so ago, when one of our superusers, who went by the name "Myth", randomly nuked hundreds of accounts. We have since established a high priority on quality, training, and service.

The Resort is a non-profit volunteer-run service. We have never, and will never charge users to use the Resort. However, there was a time in our past where we experienced financial complications and instituted ads inside the Resort itself, and our website. Due to an outcry by our user-base, we scrapped the ads, and were summarily rescued by the kind and generous donations of many individuals.

The Resort has been used for some unexpected purposes over time, including business-based virtual conferencing, and distance education for some universities.

Resort's core is a C/C++ system with various sub-systems implemented in Perl and shell, totaling over 100,000 lines of code. The Resort is currently hosted on a Linux box, with a T1 connection to the internet, using an internal/custom database format. We use CVS as our revision-control system.

The Resort's staff structure is comprised of superusers and administrators, in which there are several levels in each category. Superusers generally handle operational tasks, whereas administrators handle administrative tasks, including the training and management of superusers.

James Hawtin (Oolon), Daniel Stephens (Flickering), David Thompson (David), and Adam J. Foxson (Fox) are the primary architects of the Resort's source code as it exists now. Each have spent an an immeasurable amount of time, effort and energy into enhancing and improving the Resort's code. The Resort would not be what it is today without the contributions of these individuals.

Similarly, the Resort would never have found its success without the tireless efforts of the following people, who have all made very significant contributions throughout our history: Vinodh Abeygunwaradeen (boomarang), Jeff Balaz (Jeans), Jeff Brown (Reds), Carol Brophy (nala), Carolyn Mae Bull (StarryEyed), Dawn Engle (phantom), John Forrest (forrestperson), James Greenhalgh (slaine), Chris Hamilton (imagination), Nancy Heslin (bonbon), Erica Hoard (artemis), Biff Joanes (Biffjoanes), Chris Kehl (pooh), Leen Kievit (Xample), Wayne Mccredie (dardalion), Ethan Nason (eth), Kelli Sheppard (Coyote), Pete Tikkanen (Trudeau), CJ Woreth (Chicki), Neil Charley (athanasius), Simon Marsh (Burble), Michael Simms (Grim), and Michael Wheaton (Footsteps). We would also like to profoundly thank each and every superuser that served the Resort's user-base, of which there have been entirely too many to mention individually.

While to this day the Resort continues to have a solid community, it has largely lost its relevance with the advent of instant messaging, and MMORPGs. However, as long as people continue to enjoy and visit the Resort, we will continue to keep it running.

Forest

The first big talker not associated with the Foothills administration in any direct way, Forest was started by students at the University of Techology, Sydney (UTS), and ran for many years at ftoomsh.progsoc.uts.edu.au 3000, and then later at realm.progsoc.uts.edu.au 3000.

Derided by both Surfers and Resort users as being highly cliquish, Forest was ran by a group of admins who were almost exclusively Austrailians, and was considered at the time one of the "big 4" by the peak of ew-too talkers in the mid 1990s, although it was closer to running at Foothills user levels than Resort or Surfers. Forest suffered from massive trans-pacific lag at times, hampering its growth among American users, although it was by far the place of choice for Austrailians.

The cliquish nature of Forest was manifested in several ways, most notably by the decision to implement clans, which were effectively resident-level member run permanent channels complete with their own internal hierarchies. As a result, becoming a clan leader was nearly as sought out as becoming a superuser.

Forest suffered in its early days from code problems more severely than the other big talkers, perhaps most because of its lack of connection with the other major EW developers, but it eventually became a highly specialized and relatively stable code base, and was arguably the most innovative of the big talkers, implementing new features well before they were adopted elsewhere.

However, one fateful decision seems to have sealed the talker's fate. The administrators (or Directors, as they were known as) decided that their best move would be to switch to an entirely new base code, called key, which they developed to be fairly similar in interface to the EW base, but wrote in Java. Unfortunately, this switch, along with the decline of talkers generally, caused Forest to be the a casualty, and by 2005 Forest was gone entirely.

Forest's legacy does live on through some descendants, however; a former Forest Admin (trap) joined with two former Forest superusers (astyanax and Nogard), to start their own talker called Playground in 1995, which became the base code for many of the later talkers of the EW line, particularly after UberWorld's Silver fixed most of the bugs. Additionally, virtually all codes today include Forest Director Subtle's anticrash code, among other features first developed in the Realm.

Adult (18+) talkers

With the introduction of Lintilla in 1994, and its split off of Sleepy's multiple worlds in 1995, adult talkers became increasingly common. Because these 2 pioneering adult talkers used NUTS, hence the vast majority of subsequent adult talkers also used NUTS-style codes. Much as how ew-too users rarely visited NUTS talkers, similarly NUTS users who used adult (18+) talkers rarely visited all ages talkers. They were communities within their own community. Indeed, there were further splits within different interest groups, including the following categories:

general (any type of sex), usually for "plain" or "vanilla" sex
lesbian
gay men
zoophile
BDSM

There were many other less common sub categories as well. And indeed many users who used for example BDSM adult nuts-style talkers would never use any other kind of talker. Whilst they may broaden it to occasionally visit other adult only nuts-style talkers, it was very unlikely that they would go to all ages talkers, and virtually unheard of to go to ew-too style talkers. Thus the distinctions were made.

Crystal Palace

Created in 1996, Crystal Palace (talker.com 9900) is currently among the most populous telnet-based talkers in the short history of talkers (according to Grim's talker list). Crystal Palace is geared for adult audiences interested in roleplaying of bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM) scenes with other consenting adults. Crystal Palace combined the ease of a simple talker-style command interface with added atmosphere of roleplaying and economy (not to be confused with the significantly more complex MUSH chats), allowing users to actively be a part of the evolving storyline of Crystal Palace. The backdrop of the Palace is a futuristic space station serving the elite Alpha (dominant) citizens who have at their disposal Beta (switches) citizens and the often genetically engineered slave caste Cetas. Users join and roleplay their desired caste, or they can just interact socially. Crystal Palace is located on talker.com port 9900 in reference to the space station ID.

Multiple worlds talkers

Some talkers linked together with each other, to form a "multiple worlds" talker. The first of these, Lintilla (1994), used the same code in every world, while later versions including planes of existence (1996) and Worlds of Syrius (1996) had almost entirely unique code in each world.

Multiple Worlds talkers allowed a user to go to a talker with their desired theme, type of interest, and users, whilst still maintaining the same account. Multiple Worlds talkers allowed users to still log in to all of their worlds at the same time, through different windows. A user could feasibly send an e-mail from one world to a user on another world entirely.

Some people referred to Multiple Worlds talkers as "one talker" while others referred to each world as its own "talker".

Lintilla

Lintilla is based on the name used in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where a beautiful clone is created with 3 trillion sisters. Thus, each world can have a lintilla on it, and be beautiful.

Lintilla was created by Bushtail, a Swedish woman who wanted to have a place for older women to go to share sexual explorations in a safe environment. At the time, there was nowhere to go for this, as none of the existing talkers catered for adult ages, and did not encourage sexual conversations. Bushtail wanted to make sure that the women were never harassed, so decided to make a rule that only women could be made in to wizards, a rule that exists to this day. There has never been a male wizard or superuser on Lintilla (however, there have been male coders). Even when Ratatosk took control, he was not permitted to become a wizard. [33]

Eventually, Bushtail had to leave the internet, and her friend Ratatosk took over.

Lintilla was the first ever talker to have Multiple Worlds, or a number of talkers that were linked together, all acting as one talker.

Lintilla began because of aims that Bushtail wanted to explore, and hence had a place for women-only - the first ever talker to make such a ruling (although many exist now), so as to explore lesbianism and bisexuality, as well as just to have a place where she could go that men did not go. Bushtail was also interested in exploring BDSM, and so created a world for these explorations, which she wanted to be separate to her exploration of lesbianism. She was also interested in exploring zoophilia, and hence created The Forest. She also thought that some men might like to explore homosexuality too, so created a men's port. These 4 were the main 4 ports, but Bushtail also recognised that some people might not want to explore sexuality, or else might want to explore some other form of sexuality besides these 3, or might simply want a break, so she made 1 port just as a general welcoming port, which she numbered 5000 so that everyone realised it was the main one, as well as 5003 which was meant to be as a place to go to when you wanted to get away for a while.

Over time, more worlds were added, including a world for bikers, a world for hippies, a chapel, and a more serious BDSM world called Roissy, and many others. Lintilla has had as many as 15 worlds at a time, and additionally at one stage hosted Fantasia's multiple worlds as well as a MUD.

Users can see who is on other worlds quite simply by typing in .who (port number) and they use the same mail account for all worlds.

When Intimate Delights, Fantasia's multiple worlds, Miramar and The Rainbow Room were hosted on Lintilla's server, they all had new accounts from the other worlds, and were not officially a part of Lintilla.

Sleepy's multiple worlds

In early 1995, the manager of Lintilla, a super user named Sleepy was fired by Lintilla's owner Ratatosk (who Sleepy believes was the same person as the creator Bushtail). Graeme, the coder of Lintilla, controversially gave Sleepy the Lintilla code, which she took to make her own multiple worlds, calling it Sleepy's multiple worlds as an almost identical copy of Lintilla. [34]

There is ongoing dispute as to whether Sleepy's multiple worlds is the "original" multiple worlds, or whether Lintilla's multiple worlds is.

Fantasia's multiple worlds

Fantasia's multiple worlds was an adult-orientated talker that ran NUTS 2.1. It began initially while Fantasia was Super User of Lintilla in 1995, then was hosted on Lintilla itself, and eventually became its own Multiple Worlds in its own right. It operated from July 1995-late 2002.

Fantasia was the second ever Super User of Lintilla in July 1995 (and the first that Lintilla recognise), after Sleepy was fired and went on to make her own chat site. A friend called Tick coded her first worlds "The Castle" and "The Island" which were opened with help from Ratatosk, the owner of Lintilla, and they were hosted at a site in Germany. In December 1995, Ratatosk offered Fantasia Lintilla's 4000 ports to store her talkers. She agreed, and began to create more talkers on Lintilla's server in her own vision, and had 2 copies of her original worlds "The Castle" and "The Island". On October 26, 1996, the talkers were moved to galaxynet, and at that point had 15 worlds. Fantasia retired as SU of Lintilla at that point, and became owner and manager of her own talkers in her own right. From 1996-1998, the talkers grew to number 30 worlds. In 1998 Fantasia moved her 2 original talkers, "The Castle" and "The Island" to talker.com. Shortly thereafter she closed the remaining 28 worlds. The two talkers remained on talker.com until 2002.

The Planes of Existence

The Planes of Existence started on 28 October 1996 and was opened by a former Lintilla user, Cat, and was hosted on http://www.talker.com/ and http://www.skinart.com/ before changing ownership on 28 November 1998 when it was run by Sabrina, Vamp and Kiwi on http://www.planes.org/ which was hosted by http://www.betterbox.net/ until May 2003 when it closed.

It was the first multiple worlds talker to use NUTS 3 portal code to link the talkers together, the first talker to include both all-ages and adult-only areas, the first talker to use its own unique word "plane" to represent individual worlds, and was one of a handful of talkers to open on the day that the first ever talker hosting place, talker.com, opened its doors.

The Planes of Existence in its early days helped to revert controversy that had plagued talkers, but then was embroiled in its own controversy over such things as hiring a staff member on their women-only port who was a man, having one admin ban another admin, and hiring a vegetarian activist who tried to tell everyone else not to eat meat. It also had several hacking controversies, which resulted in the removal of its first 2 coders after allegations of them spying on users or putting in backdoors in to the code, and then the 3rd coder, also the creator Cat, who promoted himself to a higher level so as to ban someone who he believed to be a hacker. When Cat eventually gave up the talker, he was banned from the talker by its new owners.

Planes of Existence has also been heavily associated with rumours relating to getting a hold of personal information about different users, and at one stage a number of users were arrested and blamed Planes of Existence for their arrests, accusing PoE of getting their personal information so as to blackmail them and contact police. These rumours eventually led to the talker closing down permanently, and are associated with the closing down of a lot of other talkers, and the rapid decrease in talker popularity overall.

Because the creator of PoE was named Cat, and the author of the original internet talker, Cat Chat was also called Cat, both were male, and the author of Cat Chat was not seen again online from 1991, there was much speculation in the talker community, especially amongst the ew-too community, that Cat from PoE may be the long lost Cat who created the first internet talker. This query was neither confirmed or denied by either party. It had the result of meaning that, at least early on in its creation, PoE helped to bridge the gap between ew-too and NUTS talkers, as well as also helping to bridge the gap between adult and all-ages talkers, by being the only talker with both sections. There is still speculation in some corners that, since both talker owners behaved in a similar manner, they may have been the same person.

Other "talkers" by other names

There are many other types of chat program that are sometimes referred to as "talkers", which are also historically based on MUDs. These originated from TinyMUD in 1989. The most common of these are:

MUSH

A MUSH is A Multi-User Shared Habitat, Holodeck, or Hallucination, a text-based online social medium to which multiple users are connected at the same time. MUSHes are often used for online social intercourse and role-playing games.

Examples:

MUX

A MUX is a variant of MUSH. MUX originally stood for "MUSH X-Men" (the author of TinyMUX was enhancing the code for his own X-Men-based game), but these days it stands for Multi-User eXperience. MUXes are largely indistinguishable from MUSHes, except from the point of view of a coder.

Examples:

FiranMUX

MOO

MOO is short for MUD object oriented and is a type of MUD text-based virtual reality system. MOOs can be programmed using the MOO programming language.

Examples:

LambdaMOO

MUCK

A MUCK is a MUD that allows its players to create the online environment as well as playing in it. MUCKs can be programmed using the MUF programming language.

Examples:

External links

Grim's talker list
BBC h2g2 (wikipedia-style) Article on talkers
Neil Robertson's family tree of talkers
Brief History of Ew-Too
A history of talkers by M Simms
An academic look at MUDs by Sherry Turkle = can also be used to reference talkers
UNaXcess 2
londongeek.org: UNaXcess (currently down)
UNaXcess Code (like Geek Code)
History of UnaXcess
ewtoo - hosting and codebase downloads
Cheesehouse History
About the Cheesehouse talker and code
Foothills Official Web page
Crystal Palace Official Web page
Map of Foothills rooms
Foothills gallery of users
ewtoo.org listing of Resort
Reviews of Resort
Resort Official Web site
ewtoo.org listing of Surfers
Lintilla official site
List of past super users on Lintilla's official web site
The Rainbow Room
Site listing Miramar
1999 archive of Intimate Delights shop
Dr Date's review of net sex, describing lintilla
"lintilla's+multiple+worlds"&hl=en Scott Kristi talking about how he met his wife on Lintilla
Sleepy's multiple worlds official site
Sleepy's multiple worlds official site story about lintilla
Archive of Fantasia's official site
Archive of Fantasia's Official site history
Archive of Fantasia's links
Meta Hills - A technical talker for sane people, the alternate theology
TRE: Adult talkers
list of adult talkers
Cat's history of the Planes of Existence
Cat's brief history of the Planes of Existence
PoE story about spying
PoE story about hacking
Amnuts message board discussing the events that destroyed talkers
The psychology of cyberspace - in depth look at chat rooms
Chat danger.com - describing how to use chat rooms and talkers safely
What are chat rooms? - describing what chat rooms (talkers) are