A short history of UberWorld

UberWorld all began around September 1996 when Peter Hibbert moved into the Melville Grove Liverpool University owned flats and found that he had a perminant internet connection. By the end of October he had installed Linux on his computer and was running a server during the weekdays.

Around October Richard Lawrence asked Peter if he could run an internet chat program ("talker") on his machine after having been introduced to them by a friend of his, Scott Lamb during a moment of idle boredom brought on by a course in Ada programming.

After Peter agreed a copy of the Playground 96 code was subsequently downloaded and sucessfully started up on his machine. During the following weeks Peter set about learning how the code worked whilst Richard started work on customising it. What arrived at the beginning of November was UberWorld version 1.0. On the 15th of November 1996 its doors were officially opened and ten people were promoted to staff.

Despite being bog standard code, its unique (and quirky) style attracted 200 people who enjoyed the fact that people could say and do what they wanted without anyone telling them off.

However, it was realised that running the talker on Peter machine was not the best of ideas since it meant that he had to keep the machine on all the time. Indeed, UberWorld often went down whilst he rebooting into Windows to finish a disseratation. Richard turned to Andy Church who he had met via a mailing list and around December 1996 UberWorld moved to dragonfire.net.

Over Christmas UberWorld underwent its biggest ever overhaul. Many bugs were fixed, the default PG/EW2 presentation style was ditched for a more pleasant looking one and a large number of features requested by the residents were added. This newer version was met with added enthusiasm from everyone.

However problems were occurring at this site, UberWorld was suffering in connection speeds for both UK and European residents and even the Americans had problems at times. This was due to IRC which was using a large amount of the available bandwidth. A new site had to be found.

Rescue came in the form of Robert Pepperkamp who was one of the individuals who used the talker. He was a systems administrator for the University of Maastricht and offer space on his server for UberWorld to run on whilst we found a new site. In March 1997 UberWorld moved to educ0015.unimaas.nl and after a month it was offered its own account and the chance to run perminantly from unimaas (which later changed to educ0029uns50.unimaas.nl).

Shortly afterward one of the staff, Marcia, pointed Silver towards Monolith, a small web company offering subdomains re-routing. Shortly afterwards residents were able to connect to UberWorld via its new address, uberworld.ml.org.

However UberWorld was dealt another blow when in September Joseph announced that he required the amount of disk space that UberWorld took up (about 25 megabytes). So by the 3rd of October UberWorld closed down and moved off unimaas.

All seemed lost for UberWorld, the only machine available wasn't working properly and Richard began to contact as many people as possible. Salvation came when an account at benden.erols.com was offered by someone known only as Benden.

UberWorld had been barely running from Benden when John Whiting contacted Richard. Benden was suffering with UberWorld on (since it only had a 28.8 modem internet link) and this new server, which was based in the UK, offered an extremely fast internet connection on a server whose spec were excellent. It came as no surprise that Richard jumped at the chance and UberWorld moved to whiting.co.uk around 26th November 1997.

Around May 1998 Richard quit coding Uber because he wanted more time to work on his exams and the job of coding was handed over to Shaun. As well as exam pressures Richard also wanted to rewrite the PG96 base code to make it totally bug free. The result was Playground Plus which is fast becoming the EW2 base code of choice for new (and old) talkers. During this (and exams) Shaun quit coding UberWorld because of work pressures and the position of coder was unfilled for a long time.

After the finish of Playground Plus (and subsequent finals) Silver decided to come back to code Uber and took the radical (if not a little stupid) decision to use the Playground Plus base code and recode all of Uber's features on to that. This stable, feature-rich, and unique codebase is what the current version of UberWorld runs on today. During that time we were also blessed with the uberworld.org domain name.

In another twist, around August 1999 problems arose with the server UberWorld was running on which caused extreme connection difficulties for the residents. Help came by in the form of Martin Leach who kindly offered to host UberWorld on his server, rhubarb.custard.org, on which UberWorld was hosted for several years.

In 2001, UberWorld moved to opal.spod.org where it is hosted today thanks to the generosity of Ian Kirk.

What you see is a cumilation of more than 12 years of hard work. We hope you like it and we thank everyone who has contributed over the years to make UberWorld the place it is today: the coders, the admin and staff, and the residents.

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