A Verbose History of Playground by astyanax
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	In May of 1995, I (Chris Allegretta, or astyanax) went to visit
Valerie Kelley-Gosser (vallie) for three weeks at the University of
Cincinnati, Ohio.  Having been recently disappointed by the experiences we
had had at other Ew-Too talkers, we decided to put up a talker of our own,
"just for fun."  Val suggested the theme of a school playground, and hence
Playground was born.  The original incarnation was a copy of summink (back
in the days before SensiSummink) which I slowly hacked up into a
semi-unique, if unstable, talker.

	Playground was run on a Linux machine (connected to the net by
simple a compressed SLIP connection) called magic.netdtw.com.  The
administrator was very nice about the whole thing, but PG quickly outgrew
the bandwidth it had available (due mainly to the amount of time Val and I
spent on-line - there was almost someone on to talk to =-) But the visit
was short and we needed jobs for the summer in our respective states, and
the talker was shut down.

	That fall, Mike Bourdaa (traP), who had already established
himself as an excellent coder on another talker called Xtreme (where
vallie and I had first met, incidentally) joined the group and offered
PG a site at his school. I had known traP since back when talkers
like Forest and Resort were just starting out, which now seems like
forever ago.  Right about the same time, Hans Peterson (Nogard), the wise
sage/coder whom we all loved for his impartiality, ability to make sense
of any situation, and all around great-guyness, also came on the project.  

	My original code base for Playground, while nice, was simply
nowhere near as advanced and unique as the code (called Wonderland)
that traP had created.  A question then arose as to which theme should be
used with the Wonderland code, and a vote was taken.  (I in fact was the
lone supporter of the Wonderland theme, strange eh?).  So the code base
was switched, but the Playground theme and messages were kept and the
Playground that is so well-known today was truly born.

	PG96 was released while Playground itself was still running, and
now everyone could have their very own PG.  Apparently so many people
thought they could run PG better then we did, they went out and tried to
prove it ;-).  PG96 was popular because, while a little buggy and ugly on
the inside, it introduced some things that other talkers just didnt have
as standard fare, raising the standards of the average talker (and some
say, killing the Ew-too talker world in the process).  Our view was, code
should not make a talker, people do.  Resort and Foothills were chugging
right along with thousands of residents, and our little code should not
have been any serious threat to them.

	A problem arose with the PG96 code in that Phypor, a former
Superuser and friend to Val and me, was not credited for his many (if
sometimes zany) suggestions to the code.  His input and service was quite
important to PG itself, and to be honest I didn't remember until the code
was released. I apologized to him when he brought it to my attention,
thinking that it could be fixed in a later version of the PG code.
Unfortunately, no updates became available, and Phy went off to code his
own (semi-legal) version of the PG code.  After a lot of hostilities, the
matter was resolved.  SensiPG (his code) was changed to remove any
possible license violations, and I promised to rectify not crediting
Phypor for his work in PG by explicitly stating it here. Thank you again
Brad, for all your help.

	But back to our story.  PG96 had become the code of choice in
the land, though people were screaming for an update.  Slaine's
SensiSummink, which was (and still is) an incredibly well put together and
stable piece of coding, just wasnt enough for those who wanted as many
bells and whistles as possible.  Other projects close to scope of
Playground's were tried, but either they were too close to PG to have any
real distinction to them (i.e. the coder took out our names and slipped in
his/her own), or the code was just not released after all. Enter one Rich
Lawrence (Silver) of the UK.

	I first received an email from Silver asking for the "blessing" to
release his code in early 1998.  First off, I was interesred as to why my
blessing was so important when traP had written most of PG96's code.
To be honest, I didnt think much of this at first, because 800 other
coders had already been asking for my blessing when their code was clearly
not much better than what PG was already, and besides, none of them
carried the name of our little baby =).  Silver's Playground Plus, on the
other hand, sounded like an actually useful project: an update to the PG
code with many new improvements and features, and an emphasis on
stability, closer to what the SensiSummink project strives for.

	Well I could not resist this, and Val and I decided to give Silver
our full blessing.  I even contibuted some code bits that I had written
after the PG96 release (like the slot machine code and SU History), which
he took and incorporated into PG+.  Hopefully, his work will not be in
vain, as there are apparently so many other codes coming out that are
supposed to "blow PG96 out of the water".  PGPlus already does that, and
the fact that PG96 seems to be the standard by which people judge their
talker codes makes the developers of PG smile a little more. 

	But, nothing will ever be Playground, no matter how many claim
they are (or how many don't want to be ;-). It is now a piece of history,
something which those who were there to experience it can smile and
say, "yeah, I was a part of that".  And perhaps you will have that
same experience with your own talker, all it takes is a dream and some
willing fingers.  And now, with the latest version of PG (PGPlus), you are
already well on your way... Best of luck.