Has it really been ten years? Yes. Today the original shareware version of Doom celebrates its tenth birthday. Approximately this exact time on Friday, December 10th, 1993, Jay Wilbur was in the process of uploading version 1.0 of shareware Doom to the University of Wisconsin Parkside's FTP server. In commemoration of this milestone we at Doomworld are proud to present our 10 Years of Doom celebration! We've chosen the 100 best (and 10 worst) WADs of all time, we have an article detailing the sordid history of Doom demo recording, and an article reviewing the also-sordid history of the Doom Source Port. Check it out!
Anyways, David Datta, an administrator at the university, volunteered to let id Software upload the shareware version of Doom to the university's FTP site. Jay Wilbur intended to begin uploading it at the stroke of midnight on December 10th.
The server was filled to its 125 user capacity. Jay wasn't able to connect to upload the file. As the clamoring gamers communicated with each other by uploading dummy files and renaming them, id was out of luck. An attempt to raise the limit on the number of users synchronized with Wilbur's attempt to connect failed. There was only one thing he could do.
Jay immediately joined the IRC channel where everyone was congregating. "Look," he said, "I'm sorry, but we have to kick you all off of the Wisconsin site because I can't get this uploaded. And your choices are either I kick you all off and I get this done. Or it doesn't get uploaded at all."
That was enough. Thirty minutes later, the last packet of data arrived at the Wisconsin FTP server. Thousands of gamers swamped the site, causing the server to crash. And thus was born the age of Doom and the launch of id Software into fame.
Information taken from David Kushner's book Masters of Doom.
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By Bloodshedder
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