Espian history
From espians
Since tav started setting up all the Espian projects back in around 1999, it's happened to be the case that he comes up with a new initiative to work on the projects once a year. For example, in 2001 he approached Aaron Swartz and Sean B. Palmer on IRC to chat about his ideas, and in 2002 Tav and Aaron worked together on a thing called the Plex.
Contents |
The Iterations
- 1999 - Early espian work. Details unknown.
- 2000 - Funding, and work on Windows tools. Some screenshots of this still exist.
- 2001 - Tav chats with Aaron Swartz and Sean B. Palmer, to form the 2002 iteration.
- 2002 - Work starts on the Semplesh (Aaron) and Plesh (Tav) parallel projects, after a messy fork.
- 2003 - The "non-iteration". Tav goofs off. Everybody goofs off.
- 2004 - The WTF conferences, Introlligencia, and many wonderful things.
- 2005 - Tav goes to Germany. C-Base, The Hub, and the like.
- 2006 - The Protoplex, eventually leading to green.tv, butterfly.tv, and the idea of 24 Days.
- 2007 - 24 Weeks.
1999
Following early involvement in CUT (The Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications), tav starts ESP with some members of #cut and friends from Dulwich College.
The first development was by Tim Jenks who created the very first xnet which implemented a very basic pecu system.
The aim was to create a completely free (no phone bills, no service charges) internet service provider called cabbages.net which was to be funded by a system called Advue which users were expected to run/use for at least 20 minutes every week.
2000
Through aquisition of the IceSphere project, Luke Graybill and Øyvind Selbek join the project.
This led to the development of espSetup, advue and starIM (a Jabber client) take place.
After discovering wikis, the xnet goes through 2 iterations and Plexnews is developed -- tying together RSS news feeds, wiki-like functionality with basic trust mapping.
The Tropus project is acquired and is renamed Espra.
2001
cabbages.net is fully abandoned in favour of the more ambitious Waveband.
A 3D gaming engine is developed alongside lastContinuum -- a nascent metaverse.
ESP crumbles as investment dries up and the flagship Espra is not completed.
The Plex, later to become The Plexnet, is conceived after experiences of the various developments (in particular, Freenet) and there's a picture of Ian Clarke and Tav from 2001 on Wikimedia.
2002
tav tries to get the Plexnet developed but it ends in a messy fork, and he buggers off to lead a multitude of different lives.
2003
The year that nothing happened.
2004
There were two WTF conferences in this year. For more information on what they were about, see WTF 1 and the WTF-1 writeup. It was a busy year; even 24 Days had been conceived of in this year, from the 24 hours project, eventually growing into 24 weeks.
2005
The fossil esp {web} now site seems to be from this period: "We have done two sprints in 2005: One in July in Biesenthal, near Berlin, Germany, at the wokule country community, another one in late summer at the hub - an office space in London and a working nomads dream." The page also mentions the Plexnet and Protoplex, so these aren't new concepts. The esp weblog was also set up in this year and continued quite strong into 2006. There's even a post from 2007.
From this lisppaste, it appears that 24 weeks had now been created as a successor to 24 Days, and that they were planned to take place in 2006. 24 Days, as it turns out, didn't seem to happen, and 24 Weeks had to wait until 2007.
2006
There's green.tv (described on esp.k42.org as "the world's first broadband TV channel dedicated to environmental issues"), and not much else. Planet Esp might've been set up at around this time, but it no longer exists. The Web Archive has no pages from it. The idea for 24 Days and 24 Weeks continued through this year, and even 24 Days was still being discussed in early 2007.
See also 2006 events.
2007
There was a pre-24weeks wiki that had quite a lot of information on it some of which should perhaps be merged into here! In May, kinda connected to the 24 Weeks project, Tav released a tarball: kalati-trunk-2007-05-14.tar.bz2. The relationship to the rest of the code is unknown.
- That tarball is effectively the first checkin to the 24weeks subversion repository. It's a cleanup of the various bits of "library" code that used to be part of the kalati repository -- removed of useless cruft that had accumulated over the years, and removed of non-open source code...
See also 2007 events.