Talker: Encyclopedia II - Talker - Multiple worlds talkers

Talker - Multiple worlds talkers

Some talkers linked together with each other, to form a "multiple worlds" talker. The first of these, lintilla (1994), used the same code in every world, while later versions including planes of existence (1996) and Worlds of Syrius (1996) had almost entirely unique code in each world.

Multiple Worlds talkers allowed a user to go to a talker with their desired theme, type of interest, and users, whilst still maintaining the same account. Multiple Worlds talkers allowed users to still log in to all of their worlds at the same time, through different windows. A user could feasibly send an e-mail from one world to a user on another world entirely.

Some people referred to Multiple Worlds talkers as "one talker" while others referred to each world as its own "talker".

Talker - Lintilla

Lintilla is based on the name used in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where a beautiful clone is created with 3 trillion sisters. Thus, each world can have a lintilla on it, and be beautiful.

Lintilla was created by Bushtail, a Swedish woman who wanted to have a place for older women to go to share sexual explorations in a safe environment. At the time, there was nowhere to go for this, as none of the existing talkers catered for adult ages, and did not encourage sexual conversations. Bushtail wanted to make sure that the women were never harassed, so decided to make a rule that only women could be made in to wizards, a rule that exists to this day. There has never been a male wizard or superuser on lintilla. Even when Ratatosk took control, he was not permitted to become a wizard. [26]

Eventually, Bushtail had to leave the internet, and her friend Ratatosk took over.

Lintilla was the first ever talker to have Multiple Worlds, or a number of talkers that were linked together, all acting as one talker.

Lintilla began because of aims that Bushtail wanted to explore, and hence had a place for women-only - the first ever talker to make such a ruling (although many exist now), so as to explore lesbianism and bisexuality, as well as just to have a place where she could go that men did not go. Bushtail was also interested in exploring BDSM, and so created a world for these explorations, which she wanted to be separate to her exploration of lesbianism. She was also interested in exploring zoophilia, and hence created The Forest. She also thought that some men might like to explore homosexuality too, so created a men's port. These 4 were the main 4 ports, but Bushtail also recognised that some people might not want to explore sexuality, or else might want to explore some other form of sexuality besides these 3, or might simply want a break, so she made 1 port just as a general welcoming port, which she numbered 5000 so that everyone realised it was the main one, as well as 5003 which was meant to be as a place to go to when you wanted to get away for a while.

Over time, more worlds were added, including a world for bikers, a world for hippies, a chapel, and a more serious BDSM world called Roissy, and many others. Lintilla has had as many as 15 worlds at a time, and additionally at one stage hosted Fantasia's multiple worlds as well as a MUD.

Users can see who is on other worlds quite simply by typing in .who (port number) and they use the same mail account for all worlds.

When Intimate Delights, Fantasia's multiple worlds, Miramar and The Rainbow Room were hosted on lintilla's server, they all had new accounts from the other worlds, and were not officially a part of lintilla.

Talker - Sleepy's multiple worlds

In early 1995, the manager of Lintilla, a super user named Sleepy was fired by Lintilla's owner Ratatosk (who Sleepy believes was the same person as the creator Bushtail). Graeme, the coder of Lintilla, controversially gave Sleepy the Lintilla code, which she took to make her own multiple worlds, calling it Sleepy's multiple worlds as an almost identical copy of Lintilla. [27]

There is ongoing dispute as to whether Sleepy's multiple worlds is the "original" multiple worlds, or whether lintilla's multiple worlds is.

Talker - Fantasia's multiple worlds

Fantasia's multiple worlds was an adult-orientated talker that ran NUTS 2.1. It began initially while Fantasia was Super User of lintilla in 1995, then was hosted on lintilla itself, and eventually became its own Multiple Worlds in its own right. It operated from July 1995-late 2002.

Fantasia was the second ever Super User of lintilla in July 1995 (and the first that lintilla recognise), after Sleepy was fired and went on to make her own chat site. A friend called Tick coded her first worlds "The Castle" and "The Island" which were opened with help from Ratatosk, the owner of lintilla, and they were hosted at a site in Germany. In December 1995, Ratatosk offered Fantasia lintilla's 4000 ports to store her talkers. She agreed, and began to create more talkers on lintilla's server in her own vision, and had 2 copies of her original worlds "The Castle" and "The Island". On October 26, 1996, the talkers were moved to galaxynet, and at that point had 15 worlds. Fantasia retired as SU of lintilla at that point, and became owner and manager of her own talkers in her own right. From 1996-1998, the talkers grew to number 30 worlds. In 1998 Fantasia moved her 2 original talkers, "The Castle" and "The Island" to talker.com. Shortly thereafter she closed the remaining 28 worlds. The two talkers remained on talker.com until 2002.

Talker - The Planes of Existence

The Planes of Existence started on 28 October 1996 and was opened by a former lintilla user, Cat, and was hosted on http://www.talker.com/ and http://www.skinart.com/ before changing ownership on 28 November 1998 when it was run by Sabrina, Vamp and Kiwi on http://www.planes.org/ which was hosted by http://www.betterbox.net/ until May 2003 when it closed.

It was the first multiple worlds talker to use NUTS 3 portal code to link the talkers together, the first talker to include both all-ages and adult-only areas, the first talker to use its own unique word "plane" to represent individual worlds, and was one of a handful of talkers to open on the day that the first ever talker hosting place, talker.com, opened its doors.

The Planes of Existence in its early days helped to revert controversy that had plagued talkers, but then was embroiled in its own controversy over such things as hiring a staff member on their women-only port who was a man, having one admin ban another admin, and hiring a vegetarian activist who tried to tell everyone else not to eat meat. It also had several hacking controversies, which resulted in the removal of its first 2 coders after allegations of them spying on users or putting in backdoors in to the code, and then the 3rd coder, also the creator Cat, who promoted himself to a higher level so as to ban someone who he believed to be a hacker. When Cat eventually gave up the talker, he was banned from the talker by its new owners.

Planes of Existence has also been heavily associated with rumours relating to getting a hold of personal information about different users, and at one stage a number of users were arrested and blamed Planes of Existence for their arrests, accusing PoE of getting their personal information so as to blackmail them and contact police. These rumours eventually led to the talker closing down permanently, and are associated with the closing down of a lot of other talkers, and the rapid decrease in talker popularity overall.

Because the creator of PoE was named Cat, and the author of the original internet talker, Cat Chat was also called Cat, both were male, and the author of Cat Chat was not seen again online from 1991, there was much speculation in the talker community, especially amongst the ew-too community, that Cat from PoE may be the long lost Cat who created the first internet talker. This query was neither confirmed or denied by either party. It had the result of meaning that, at least early on in its creation, PoE helped to bridge the gap between ew-too and NUTS talkers, as well as also helping to bridge the gap between adult and all-ages talkers, by being the only talker with both sections. There is still speculation in some corners that, since both talker owners behaved in a similar manner, they may have been the same person.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Multiple worlds talkers", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki