Cheesehouse

Cheeseplant's House was the second ever internet talker, and was opened on 8 February 1991 and closed on 4 February 1992.

Cheeseplant's House was written by Daniel "Cheeseplant" Stephens, a friend of Chris "Cat" Thompson, the creator of the first internet talker, Cat Chat (talker), who attended University of Warwick with Chris Thompson.

Cheeseplant's House was the first really popular talker, and led to the massively popular Foothills, and Surfers.

The code used for Cheeseplant's House would form the basis of the "Elsewhere" code, which would later be developed in to "Elsewhere Too" or ew-too.

Cheeseplant's House was eventually closed due to university staff shutting it down after false complaints of illicit activity from systems administrators from another university.

Pre-history

Cheeseplant's House began when its creator, Daniel "Cheeseplant" Stephens, was introduced to a MUD in 1990 while studying as a Computer Science student at University of Warwick. The MUD was called Warwick LPmud, and was used by other students at University of Warwick. However, "Cheeseplant", who would later create the Cheeseplant's House talker, was frustrated with the MUD as he did not really enjoy the roleplay or game environment that was required to use the MUD. He wanted somewhere just to chat.

"Cheeseplant" was then led to visit Cat Chat, which was the first ever internet talker, hosted on University of Warwick's server by Chris "Cat" Thompson, which he enjoyed using.

However, when Cat Chat was threatened by people from JANET (Joint Academic NETwork), which was what University of Warwick students used to access the internet, Cat Chat closed its doors, never to reopen. Warwick University was not at that stage (1990) connected to the internet as a whole, as that did not happen until mid-1991.

Seeing that the talker was shut down, "Cheeseplant" had the idea to start his own talker so that he had somewhere to go to talk to people. Thus Cheeseplant's House was born.

History

Cheeseplant's House 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. While 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.

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

The end of Cheeseplant's House

On 4 February 1992, the Warwick University administrators, under the direction of the Director of Computing, closed Cheeseplant's House, 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 personal information about the people who used Cheeseplant's House, 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 Cheeseplant's House 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.

ee also

* ew-too
* talker
* Cat Chat (talker)
* Foothills (talker)

External links

* [http://www.cheeseplant.org/~daniel/pages/cph.html History of Cheeseplant's House]
* [ftp://ftp.cheeseplant.org/pub/cph/ Cheeseplant's House talker source code]
* [ftp://ftp.cheeseplant.org/pub/cph/README.SRC About the Cheeseplant's House talker and code]