To go along with Tom's birthday I thought a little history of Byond would be in order.

This is the history as told by DanTom.

"Once upon a place (called Mudd) many late nights ago, two young apprentices of code wizardry disguised themselves as physics students and attended classes (occasionally) to learn the secrets of the universe. This was quite good fun and they had just begun to hear some of the best juiciest secrets, obtaining awesome powers, and generally having a good laugh at the universe, when an old wicked career counselor stopped them in their tracks.

He snickered in their faces and pointed a long bony finger at the border of Mudd. "You young wise-apples," he said with a leer. "In one more semester you'll be out there in the REAL world. It doesn't matter out there if you can solve tensor equations in four dimensions. All that matters out there is your resume. I don't suppose you have one prepared?" The two young wizards looked at each other and shook their heads. The old buzzard cackled. "Well, it's too late now, pencil-heads. You'll be cleaning toilets for the rest of your lives." His ringing screech echoed in their dreams for nights to come.

It was in those troubling days that a plan began to form in the minds of our young code smiths. It was their most secret plan to avoid the toilets and resumes out there in the REAL world. The code name for their plan was DUNG.

They worked furiously in the final months as time was becoming scarce. The very keyboards on their desks began to melt at the severity of the onslaught and jets of pressurized code began to leak from the lands of Mudd into the REAL world beyond. At the final moment, the crown and robe of full wizardry was bestowed upon them and they stood upon the borders of the land they had known with their fellow graduates, who would soon be stripped of their wonderful powers, robbed of their tensor algebra, bled dry of their differential mathematics, and thrust into the great stinking toilet bowl outside with nothing but a resume for protection.

In that final moment when they stepped across the border of Mudd with their poor fellows, a wonderful and exhilarating feeling, like a butterfly bursting from its cocoon failed to happen. But that was just a bug (of a different species).

They hurried to a terminal and tweaked a few strands of code. And then a wonderful and exhilarating feeling, like a butterfly bursting on the window shield happened. Oops! They tweaked a little more.

Then at last in a dazzling display of color and light (because the cable was a little loose) the butterfly finally burst from its cocoon, dodged the oncomming traffic, and carried them on silvery strands of code into the sky and away from the toilet, now littered with sodden resumes. As they flew away, the distant figure of a grumbling pinch-faced counselor of careers could be seen stalking the borders of Mudd, oblivious to the sky above and the many wondrous lands beyond the REAL world.

Disclaimer: The places and characters in this story are not REAL. If you meet them, please do not show them this story, because they might have a REAL lawyer."