PBMSERV History

[Richard Rognlie <rrognlie@gamerz.net>]

You asked for it...  Here's the "history" of pbmserv...

I started this server about 4 years ago as an experiment in automated
email processing.  I had been playing Trax on a server at UC Berkeley
(munch@soda.berkeley.edu) but was bouncing between email addresses weekly
(it seemed), and the administrator there was hand maintaining the user
database, etc.  I decided to create a "generic" email processor for
playing games, and pbmserv was born.  I ran it on my office machine during
its initial development and announced it to the public in June of 1993.
Trax and Twixt were first two games on it.  It ran on netcom.com for
a while, but as the number of games grew, I was rapidly running out
of my 5MB space allotment so I moved the server to my office machine
semi-permanently.

This worked great.  The number of games supported grew and grew with
lots of help from Soren (pingel).  However, it was getting quite hard to
manage all those games when bugs were found or new features were added
(there were each seperately maintained code bases).  So, Soren and I
designed a set of C++ classes for the server, and ported the games on
the server to that.  Now new features and bug fixes tend to be easily
done (and only need doing in one place) and the server supports 40+
game types, and 600+ users and 2000+ requests/day.

However, the evil office monster reared its ugly head about a year ago.
It seems someone was doing a net search on the company and they were
dismayed with 12 of the top 20 matches for the company were related to
<gasp!> GAMES!  I was ordered to shutdown.  I moved the server to my
home machine, and limped long over a 28.8 modem for a couple months,
and changed jobs.

My current employer (Erol's Internet) has no problem with my running the
game server on one of their boxes.  In fact, I've recently been asked
to create an on-line gaming division with the *purpose* of attracting
customers to our service by providing web based and realtime games.
We are early in the life of this endeavour, but I'm excited!  

-- 
 /  \__  | Richard Rognlie / Internet Developer / Erol's Internet
 \__/  \ | E-Mail: rrognlie@gamerz.net       
 /  \__/ | Phone:  (Office) (703) 321-8000 x2222  (Home) (703) 361-4764   
 \__/    | WWW:    http://www.gamerz.net/rrognlie/