Gravity History

A Brief History of MicroPlanet Gravity
Gravity has been a popular Usenet client since 1996. Originally, Gravity was shareware, written and developed by MicroPlanet Inc.(Version 1.0) in Raleigh, North Carolina. MicroPlanet staff included Albert Choy, Tony Edwards, and Marwan Shaban. Gravity was selected as PC Magazine's Editor's Choice in October 1996.
Gravity was acquired by Anawave briefly (Version 2.0), then re-acquired by MicroPlanet. Numerous features were added over these years, including multiple server support and scoring. Tom B. set up an unofficial user's site called Tom's Gravity Pages, it eventually (and unintentionally) became the de-facto unofficial source of Gravity news and information.
The last shareware version was 2.3. Because of a declining shareware market, MicroPlanet gave away Gravity as freeware in November 2000  (Version 2.5). The company engaged in contract programming for a time, but eventually disbanded.
After MicroPlanet closed, Al Choy, co-founder of MicroPlanet and Gravity's principal architect, continued improvements and unofficial releases known as "Super Gravity" (Versions 2.6). These unofficial versions were available free from 2001 through 2003. Al continued to add features including preliminary MIME support, complete binaries filters, the Quick Filter, yEnc decoding,  and 8-bit character support. During this period, Al and Tom B. ran a "fly by night" operation with Tom's Gravity Pages as the only source of Gravity news and downloads, although bandwidth demands were a problem. Al worked in North Carolina and Tom worked in Florida and communicated by e-mail.
Al Choy later stripped out licensed proprietary code, set up the SourceForge project (November 2003), and made the source code available under the BSD License. Regular expressions were replaced with PCREs. MySpell became the new spell checker. These Builds were numbered 2.7 (2.7.0) with the last version 2.7.0 Build 2067, dated August 1, 2004. Al eventually moved on to other pursuits, but will always be known as Gravity's co-founder, godfather and principal architect. Gravity is what it is and survived because of Al. Al later popped up and gave us the new Gravity icon you see in Version 2.9 because he had a free afternoon and was fooling around with the GIMP.
In July 2008, after a period of SourceForge inactivity, Richard Wood from Merry Old England, emailed Tom B. and asked if he was interested in a Gravity version compiled with MSVC++ 2005. Thus began the next phase in Gravity's history. Richard joined the SourceForge team as lead (and only) programmer and began compiling Gravity on newer development platforms optimized for Windows XP, restoring some lost functionality, improving performance, and adding numerous tweaks and new features. These builds begin with Version 2.7.1.
With Version 2.9, the databases and settings were moved, enabling multiple users for the Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 operating systems. As of Build 2.9.13, Hunspell replaces MySpell as the spell checker.