History
Croquet is the confluence of several independent lines of work that were being carried out by its six principal architects, Alan Kay, David A. Smith. David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, Julian Lombardi, and Mark McCahill. The present identity of the project has its origins in a conversation between Smith and Kay in 1990, where both expressed their frustration with the state of operating systems at the time.
In 1994 Smith built ICE, a working prototype of a two user collaborative system that was a predecessor of the core of what Croquet is today. Also in 1994 Mark McCahill's team at the University of Minnesota developed GopherVR, a 3D user interface to Internet Gopher to explore how spatial metaphors could be used to organize information and create social spaces. In 1996 Julian Lombardi approached Smith to explore the development of highly extensible collaborative interfaces to the WWW. Later, in 1999, Smith built a system called OpenSpace, which was an early-bound variant of Croquet. Also in 1999, Lombardi began working with Smith on prototype implementations of highly extensible collaborative online environments based on OpenSpace. One of these implementations was a prototype implementation of ViOS, a way of spatially organizing all Internet-deliverable resources (including web pages) into a massively-scaled multiuser 3D environment.
Smith and Kay officially started the Croquet Project in late 2001 and were immediately joined by David Reed and Andreas Raab. Reed brought to the project his longstanding work on massively scalable peer-to-peer messaging architectures in a form deriving from his doctoral dissertation that was published in 1978. The first working Croquet code was developed in January 2002. Simultaneously and independently, Lombardi and McCahill began collaborating on defining and implementing highly scalable and enterprise-integrated architectures for multi-user collaboration and were invited by Kay to join the core architectural group in 2003.
From 2003-2006 the technology was developed under the leadership of its six principal architects with financial support from Hewlett-Packard, Viewpoints Research Institute Inc., the University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of Minnesota, Japanese National Institute of Communication Technology (NICT), and private individuals. On April 18, 2006 the project released a beta version of the Croquet SDK 1.0 in the open source. Since then, the Croquet technology infrastructure has been successfully used by private industry to build and to deploy commercial-grade closed source collaborative applications. Open source production-grade software implementations for delivering secure, interactive, persistent, virtual workspaces for education and training have at the same time been developed and deployed at the University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin–Madison, University of British Columbia, and Duke University.
As of 2009, continued development of the original Croquet technology is taking place through the Open Cobalt project.
Read more about this topic: Croquet Project
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