History
This site bases on work done by Tim Robinson during 1994 - 1998.
Tim maintained a collection of '99 Bottles of Beer' programmed in 227 different programming languages. The idea has been initiated by a post to an humor mailing list, where somebody sent the full lyrics in early 1994. This was seen as a waste of bandwith, the job could have been accomplished with six lines of BASIC:
10 REM BASIC Version of 99 Bottles of beer
20 FOR X=100 TO 1 STEP -1
30 PRINT X;"Bottle(s) of beer on the wall,";X;"bottle(s) of beer"
40 PRINT "Take one down and pass it around,"
50 PRINT X-1;"bottle(s) of beer on the wall"
60 NEXT
The original poster made the mistake of slighting C++ programmers, so Tim rose to the occasion with his version of '99 Bottles' in C++. It opened the floodgates and programmers from all over the world gave different versions in assorted languages.
Tim's list started with about 20 languages and exploded to 227 from there:
In 1998 I asked Tim for his permission to mirror his pages as part of my collection Best of Internet. Up to April 2002 I used his original pages and layout. Somewhere around middle 2001 Tim's pages disappeared from the web and he and his collection never came back. In April 2002 I decided to restart the site with a fresh design. Within four months I got 90 contributions with more silly or obscure, sometimes even useable implementations. In middle of June 2002 there were more than 315 languages, and 2004 there were 621 examples available:
Some more obscure contributions received by Tim are the Aleph-Null (for the non mathematically inclined, you might replace Alpeh-Null with infinity):
Aleph-Null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-Null bottles of beer
You take one down & pass it around
Aleph-Null bottles of beer
or even the Zen-beer:
No bottles of beer on the wall,
No bottles of beer.
Take one down, pass it around,
No bottles of beer.
Between 2004-2005 I received more examples by mail, but did not issued any updates. My daughter was born and this was much more interesting...
Late 2004 two volunteers (Stefan and Gregor) started to change the backend from Perl with WML to MySQL with PHP. Together they developed the new design and the new nifty functions (voting, guestbook, top lists). A huge thank you to you both.
On January 2, 2006 Lynn Greiner wrote an article [local copy] about this site for devsource.com.
Some people I would like to thank for their support:
- Philipp Winterberg - he submitted 99 additional examples, which are available at his Project-Page. Additionally he has programmed a Windows screensaver and wrote an article about this project.
- Thomas-Martin Kruel - he spent bandwidth and server-colocation during 1999-2002
- Gregor Scheithauer and Stefan Scheler - both redesigned
the site in 2005, implementing a MySQL backend, template-based design
and code seperation and introduced PHP. The former solution based on
some ugly perl-scripts using WML and gfont, both not available for any
modern Linux-distribution.
Thanks to you both. Without your support this site would not have this nice design, the new updates and new features!
Thanks for your help!
Oliver