Surfers (talker)

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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

[edit] 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.

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