ew-too

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ewtoo, short for Elsewhere Too, was the first publicly available code base for Internet talkers and was written by Simon "Burble" Marsh in 1992. It followed the demise of the previous internet talker, Cheeseplants House which had been closed down some months earlier.

The first talker to use the EW codebase was called "Elsewhere". After a few months the code was re-written and renamed EW-Too as a play on EW version 2. After Elsewhere suffered some of the same problems as Cheeseplants, it was moved to a new location, and renamed Foothills. Shortly after, more talkers based on the ewtoo codebase, such as Surfers and Resort were created. Surfers and Foothills, along with Resort, who all used ewtoo code, were the 3 most popular talkers in history, thus making ewtoo a very popular code base.

Neil Robertson, who created NUTS in 1993, was the main competition for ewtoo, and when he released his code base to the public immediately in 1993, it challenged ewtoo for dominance. The two codebases are still competing for dominance, with neither side really pulling ahread of the other. Soon afterwards, however, in November 1996, ICQ was released and with it came the quick down turn in popularity of all talkers.