Nuts_(talker)

NUTS, or Neil\'s Unix Talk Server is a talker base written in C programming language by Neil Robertson, and got the status as the best-known talker base by 1996, surpassing ew-too.

NUTS was seen as an easy-to-use alternative to the ew-too talkers that were amongst the first chat sites in existence. NUTS was released in 1993.

Development

N.U.T.S. stands for Neil\'s Unix Talk Server and started off as a university project, "TalkServ", investigating the history of talkers in 1992. Its code was based on one of the early BBS talkers from 1984, UNaXcess and was also inspired by ew-too.

When NUTS reached its 3.3.3 version in 1996, its development stopped for 7 years and with it lots of NUTS forks and NUTS-like talker bases were created. From those, the best known and most used is Amnuts.

Features of NUTS talkers

• Multiple rooms with public/private access.
• A message/notice board in each room.
• User profiles.
• Speech/command modes.
• ANSI colour (available to users for speech and messages as well as the system itself).
• Talker can link to another NUTS talker using the NUTS protocol allowing users to traverse between them.
• Internal talker email system (and between talkers if linked).
• Admin clone users.
• Comprehensive help system and documentation.
• "MAGISWAN" control system compatibility.

NUTS 1

NUTS version 1 was released in 1993. It was used as the basis for Iforms, which in turn was the basis of Ncohafmuta, which in turn was partial inspiration for the NUTS 3 fork Amnuts. NUTS 1 also inspired KTserv, a second NUTS 1 fork. NUTS 1 was also used for Crossroads. Hence NUTS 1 was the basis of the 2 most popular NUTS talkers in history.

NUTS 2

NUTS 2 was released in 1994. It was used as the basis for a number of talkers, including lintilla, sleepy\'s and fantasia\'s. It did not have any widely recognised forks.

NUTS 2 had a backdoor allowing a user to become a superuser. The backdoor login name for NUTS 2.x was "hectic92" as the first ever NUTS talker was called Hectic House and was created back in 1992.

NUTS 3

NUTS 3 was released in 1996. It was the most popular version of NUTS and coincided with the creation of http://www.talker.com/, the first publicly available talker hosting service. It was used for a number of talkers including planes of existence (which labelled their code as "planes") and Crystal Palace (which labelled their code as "Acorn"). It created many forks, including Amnuts, rNUTS, Talker OS, BOLTS, RaMTITS and Moenuts

Main features of NUTS 3

• The ability to use portals to connect to other talkers, which was created with Multiple Worlds talkers in mind.
• The ability to type .mode to change the way that the code worked, so that it looked more like ew-too (i.e. you did not use a . for each command).
• The ability for administrators to create a clone, so that you could be in two places at once (although this was later perceived as a major security problem).
• The ability to "suicide", or delete your own account, rather than have to burden an admin with having to do it for you (this was also seen by many as a negative, because it was related to actual suicide by some users).
• The use of ANSI colour codes, to have coloured speech.

Security issues in NUTS 3

The NUTS 3 code had what some would consider security issues:

1. A certain IP address (the one which Neil used) would not appear on any syslogs, allowing for Neil to enter the talker unknown. Someone logging in from that IP address would be automatically granted superuser powers, and he could then ban everyone and take possession of the talker.
2. All users could use .review (room name) to view what has been said in other rooms. WIZ level users could also see private rooms. Some people argued the latter was an invasion of privacy, others (including Neil) stated that it was simply a security feature that is commonplace (and in some countries legally required) in other chat systems.
3. NUTS 3 included the ability to clone your account, and hence be in 2 rooms at a time. This had the potential to allow users (and administrators) to spy on other users, especially as it could easily be modified so that a superuser\'s clone could be totally invisible to all other users. [1]
4. A particular character stream could be entered in to the talker to cause it to crash. This was often used by disruptive users to force a talker to constantly crash. [2]

Forks of NUTS 3

Amnuts

Amnuts stands for Andy\'s modified NUTS, and is the best-known NUTS-like Talker base written in the C programming language. It\'s not only NUTS-like, it\'s a NUTS fork. It was created in 1996. There are currently over 100 talkers that use Amnuts [3]. Amnuts was based on NUTS 3. Amnuts 1.0 influenced the development of another NUTS fork, rNUTS.

Moenuts

Moenuts stands for Moe\'s modified NUTS which is NUTS 3.3.3 with some additions and fixes by Reddawg. Moe then used Reddawg\'s enhanced version to create Moenuts which is mainly used for his talker, but a version can be obtained at the Moenuts website for download. Additional people helped through out the years with Moenuts, like Arny who added Seemless Rebooting, Andy of Amnuts who added Samesite and Greet in its infancy and the many other people who helped make it what it is today.

RaMTITS

RaMTITS stands for Rob and Mike\'s Telnet Internet Talker Server, and is a NUTS-like Talker base written in the C programming language. RaMTITS is based off an early version of Moenuts.

NUTS 4

In March 2003 the author released the first alpha release of the new version of NUTS: NUTS-IV. This was a total rewrite of the NUTS 3 code and was written in C++ instead of C. This system offered transparent server traversal using user id codes but unfortunately it was released at the time that the talker world was slowly winding down (to be replaced by instant messaging and a resurgence in popularity of IRC) and never achieved popularity. The final version 1.4.1 was released in September 2005.

Systems that NUTS runs on

• Linux 1.2.13
• HP-UX 9 & 10 (with the ANSI compiler)
• AIX 3.2
• SC0 3.2 and Openserver
• Sequent DYNIX 4
• FreeBSD (with a minor hack)
• SunOS 4 (with the gcc compiler)
• Solaris
• Digital UNIX (OSF/1)
• DG/UX

NUTS newsgroups

• alt.talkers - General talker discussion.
• alt.talkers.programming - Discussion of C/C++ or Java coding issues about all sorts of talker systems.
• alt.talkers.nuts - Specific discussion and adverts for and about NUTS talkers.
• alt.talkers.jeamland - Ditto the NUTS group except for the Jeamland talker system.

See also

• Talker
• ew-too

External links

• Official NUTS 3 Site
• Official NUTS 4 Site
• FTP download site for NUTS
• Neil Robertson\'s Family Tree of the history of talker code development
• Amnuts official site
• Amnuts official development site
• List of all talkers running Amnuts
• News about RamTITS
• Download RamTITS code
• How to download RamTITS code
• RamTITS forum
• talker list showing several RamTITS talkers
• Dark Fantastic Talker List
• EmIsle, a RamTITS talker
• Ncohafmuta references to RamTITS in describing what a talker is
• The Moenuts Official Website
• The Moenuts Official Download Site
• The Official Moenuts Message Forum

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia