Surfers (talker)

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 the most popular talker 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 talker in the world 1 with 4,819 connections per day.

It is often closed to new connections 2 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 http://www.surfers.org/ on port 4242, probably in reference to The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Its official advertisement 3 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

Controversy

At the time of its creation, its code base, Ew-too, was not publicly available. The administrators from Foothills and Resort stated that, "Surfers has stolen Foothills code", and there was much friction between the two camps, especially when Surfers became the most popular talker. In response, Michael Wheaton, the creator of Foothills, released Ew-too publicly, and stated that he does not mind if other talkers use the code. Some camps within Foothills and Resort still maintain some animosity towards Surfers for this.

FACTS

Surfers WAS the most popular talker. Resort is now the most popular talker and has been since 1999. Both Surfers and Foothills have fallen to a slow death by users who much prefer to idle than to communicate. If you want to spend a few minutes and visit all three of these talkers, you'll see that Resort is the only one to have any activity worth hanging around for.

See also

• Talker
• ew-too
• spod
• Resort (talker)
• Foothills (talker)

References

• ewtoo.org listing of Surfers
• Official website - note: currently no info about surfers there, just used for connections.