Stone Soup

mdobbins · #1

HTTP://hellogovernance.blogspot.com/2010/04/stone-soup.html
The above is a link to my blog where I talk about my 25 year history with online go. It includes an interesting parable.

Phelan · #2

Interesting writeup.

Did you know that stone soup actually exists? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_soup ... _tradition

fwiffo · #3

"The Stone Soup Group" was the name of the group (organized over Compuserve!) that maintained Fractint.

Chew Terr · #4

Thanks, Mdobbins, it was a nice telling of the story. Is it bad that I thought this was another roguelikes thread, since the game I've been playing is called "Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup"? Heh.

mdobbins · #5

Phelan wrote:

Interesting writeup.

Did you know that stone soup actually exists? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_soup ... _tradition

Yes, I had heard some version of it years ago. But I had not seen the variations described in Wikipedia. Most of those have a negative connotation. I like my positive twist to the story.

Phelan · #6

I meant the dish, not the story.

Mef · #7

Nice story! Until reading it, I hadn't realized it had really been 4 years since GD.com was started...crazy...

Nikolas73 · #8

That's a nice blog you have there, I enjoyed reading it.

Sorry to go slightly off topic, but you mention that IGS started up in 1991 - I have it listed on my Go Timeline as starting in Feb. 1992. Can you please give some more details on this, if possible? I want to keep the timeline as accurate as possible.

Thanks.

xed_over · #9

According to this online article from the New York Times in 1998 it started in 1992.

And IGS' own history pages says Feb 1992 too.

POGO · **#10**

Very good read.

And i had stone soup once.

bear meat in soup is very good

Solomon · **#11**

Looks like I wasn't the only one who blogged on the GD/L19 business

. Great read, thanks mdobbins.

mdobbins · **#12**

Nikolas73 wrote:

That's a nice blog you have there, I enjoyed reading it.

Sorry to go slightly off topic, but you mention that IGS started up in 1991 - I have it listed on my Go Timeline as starting in Feb. 1992. Can you please give some more details on this, if possible? I want to keep the timeline as accurate as possible.

Thanks.

Thanks, everyone for reading.

I wrote the article from memory so I may be a little fuzzy on specific dates. Feb 1992 stands out in my mind as the public availability of IGS. I remember playing on it in 1991 when you had to know someone to get the URL to connect. Tweet (one of the founders of IGS) was my Go teacher for several years before IGS. We played teaching games via email (I have over 100 games recorded in sgf somewhere on a CD, I was about 15k back then.) I helped develop a shell script and modified the sgf editor named mgt to be able to play directly from the unix email program by sending around sgf files. The first easy turn-based system

I also contributed the first (the first that that I know of, someone else may have also coded it independently for some other program) flood fill scoring algorithm to mgt, which got incorporated in IGS. The flood fill algorithm came from a peer to peer go program I wrote in 1987 or 1988 which ran over the Burroughs Network Architecture protocol between mainframe systems so I could play Go with my co-workers using character based terminals.

The original IGS ran on a university server in UNM. It then moved to a server at the Wharton School of Business in NJ (I remember the server name as being hellspark, that name stuck in my mind.) Then, I think, in early 1992 it moved to CA where it was on hardware big enough to go public. That is what I remember, but that was almost 20 years ago and I would not take the dates as fact without correlating with some actual email records (If I could find them.)

Even though I have I have never let my original login from the beginning expire on IGS, I lost contact with the IGS founders in the late 1990s as my life, for about 15 years, became focused on my kids and their activities.

Kirby · **#13**

My favorite part was when Al Gore invented the Internet.

mdobbins · **#14**

Kirby wrote:

My favorite part was when Al Gore invented the Internet.

I though that was so funny when I heard it on the news that I always looked for some place to use it, and I finally found one

schultz · **#15**

mdobbins wrote:

Thanks, everyone for reading.

I wrote the article from memory so I may be a little fuzzy on specific dates. Feb 1992 stands out in my mind as the public availability of IGS. I remember playing on it in 1991 when you had to know someone to get the URL to connect. Tweet (one of the founders of IGS) was my Go teacher for several years before IGS. We played teaching games via email (I have over 100 games recorded in sgf somewhere on a CD, I was about 15k back then.) I helped develop a shell script and modified the sgf editor named mgt to be able to play directly from the unix email program by sending around sgf files. The first easy turn-based system

I also contributed the first (the first that that I know of, someone else may have also coded it independently for some other program) flood fill scoring algorithm to mgt, which got incorporated in IGS. The flood fill algorithm came from a peer to peer go program I wrote in 1987 or 1988 which ran over the Burroughs Network Architecture protocol between mainframe systems so I could play Go with my co-workers using character based terminals.

The original IGS ran on a university server in UNM. It then moved to a server at the Wharton School of Business in NJ (I remember the server name as being hellspark, that name stuck in my mind.) Then, I think, in early 1992 it moved to CA where it was on hardware big enough to go public. That is what I remember, but that was almost 20 years ago and I would not take the dates as fact without correlating with some actual email records (If I could find them.)

Even though I have I have never let my original login from the beginning expire on IGS, I lost contact with the IGS founders in the late 1990s as my life, for about 15 years, became focused on my kids and their activities.

Great story, and thanks for the added information above. This sort of thing is fascinating to me, and it's always interesting to see how a community like this started and morphed as time went by.

Stone Soup

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