quillen's site
(madison, WI, USA)
the game began with quillen and his gang of young-ruffian friends, most of
whom were named ben, back around the turn of the nineties sometime. he
tells the story himself on the site.
this site (cambridge,
MA, USA)
aaron mandel introduced the game to his high-rent university chums around
1994-95; aaron and dave packer made the original website, which was hosted
on the late lamented dunster house unix machine, funster. they (i have
no idea which one of them) came up with the idea of a randomized card
server, which has since become ubiquitous, and coded the first one by
cannibalizing a guestbook script dave had written earlier in
the year in his excitement at learning perl.
after two years the site was languishing a bit - randomizer script broken,
no new cards added in an age - so ben (!) lee and i took it
upon ourselves to spruce it up in 1997.
around 2000 i finally convinced yahoo to list it under "card games", at
which point things really began to hop, thanks in part to the fact that,
since the name of the game begins with '1', it shot straight to the top
of the alphabetical list.
seattle electric grimmeldeck
(seattle, WA, USA)
of course microsoft had to get a piece of the action. this is actually a
direct offshoot of the cambridge group, where nina, james and several
different michaels wound up after graduating.
zannah (seattle, WA,
USA)
the ever-vigilant zannah picked up on it around the time of the yahoo
listing.
beebo trumps (melbourne,
australia)
corngolem.com (nebraska,
USA)
discordian
intelligence army (location unclear)
there are a bunch more, hang on.