September 1997
by Paul Mclachlan
aka subtle
Key represents literally thousands of man-hours of work in thought, design, and code. Even so, it had very humble beginnings...
At midnight1, on the 12th of May, 1995, 'Key' was born because of four university students sitting around on level 3 of UTS with nothing better to do.2
Since then, I've been principally responsible for its design and development, yet I am far from its sole author; others have contributed varying amounts to the project effort. Hence, the credits page.
Key was originally intended to be a replacement 'Forest'. Forest started its life using 'EW-too', a piece of extremely buggy (but popular) C code from Simon Marsh. (I suspect, and I feel it worthwhile to add here, that the original EW code produced by Simon was quite well written. Since then, and before we recieved it, however, it had been almost completely hacked to pieces.)
The actual Key development 'team' consisted of the Directors of Forest:
All the directors did at least a smattering of commands work (all the stuff you see in key.commands.*, and let me tell you now, there's a lot of them), and so, outside of that, I'm only going to list 'additional effort' and credits.
The original four were Jason, Eric, George, and me, ahh... Paul. I was originally planning to write Key in C++, and indeed, I had about 250k of code written before Java came along and disrupted all my plans. I was stuck trying to write garbage collection anyway ;) I actually started the Java version of Key in Jan 96 (gee, that seems like so long ago...)
Jason, in a monolithic effort, actually wrote all the commands for clans, although he was always bitching about how big it was... ;) I just marvel that he was dumb enough say 'yes' when I gave it to him for something to do.
George was our fearless project leader, ensuring that we all went to basketball training and generally completed things on time. He also sat down and wrote all our new public room descriptions. (You'll have to trust me when I say that most of the old ones we had on Forest truly sucked).
Scott wrote the interface commands to the site tracking code, and a lot of the normal su commands.
Eric had a lot to do with the initial design of rooms, way back in the beginning, and kicked off a lot of the room and exit classes.
Andrew has helped me reason some design things out over lunch - the email validation and priv checking stuff, for instance, as well as writing the admin port, and, uh, 'playing' with the colour code.
Nathan did a lot of the initial commands work on the mail and news system.
Adam Teague (brann) fleshed out a lot of the online editor (don't blame him for the design, though, we thought the EW one was complicated enough, without having everyone learn a new one), adding some nice features (all that .5d stuff).
I've obviously taken a lot of inspiration from Simon Marsh's original EW-too code, as well as LambdaMOO and the various MUD servers out there. (diku, circle and all their varients).