GibberServer is your one stop shop for a mind-numbing dose of pure, unadulterated, guaranteed 100% sense-free gibberish!

More English words describing GibberServer are featured below, but if you're the impatient type, then feel free to get to the point - gibberish, plain and gezornen-platz.

Fun stuff to do with gibberish

Your gibberish has a thousand and one fun uses! ...

• Amaze your friends!
• Confuse your co-workers!
• Attract members of the appropriate gender!
• Get top marks in your English Lit class without putting pen to paper!
• AND SO MUCH MORE...!

The best use I've found, personally, for the gibberish produced by GibberServer, is a game for two or more people (the more, the merrier):

• Cluster around the computer monitor with your friends and generate an essay.
• Everyone must immediately begin scanning the words on screen for English (or <insert language of choice here>) words of three or more letters.
• Advance to the next page or essay only when all participants agree.
• The first person to find three such words wins.

History

GibberServer grew from humble beginnings as a high school compsci project back in 1993. The rather inspired task was to create a DOS-based program (in Pascal, but of course I always wrote in C) to generate nonsense words, and with my usual propensity for expanding programming tasks out of all proportion, I immediately churned out a monstrosity with a nice user interface, `advanced' output options, and even such spurious options as zany pc-speaker sounds and eye-boggling colours.

Thus, Infinite Essays of Meaningless Gibberish was born. And thus, one or two years of lunch breaks were spent playing the aforementioned word-seeking game.

Since then, gibberish has been an integral part of my first forays into many new programming languages and environments. I figure that when I go back to my first programs in any language a year or two later, they'll look like gibberish anyway, so why not?

When I learned Perl, I wrote something a little like the GibberServer of today; unfortunately it was too slow to be really useful. When I finally broke down and bought a copy of C++Builder, I wrote a windows screen saver version in C++ called GibberSaver. I never did track down that memory leak, though.

Finally, I ditched windows in favour of linux. Though I haven't yet tried to port GibberSaver to X (who has time?), I finally decided to polish up and UNIX-ise a bit of my C++Builder code and schlep it into something web-friendly, so that the world at large might be priveleged to enter into my nonsensical world.

Note: I'd release the source but I think I might be embarrassed by it in its current state. More recently, I wrote an emacs major mode in elisp to insert words, sentences and paragraphs of gibberish into a buffer - but it's pretty ugly too.

Future plans

Yes, disturbingly enough, I hope that GibberServer (or some incarnation thereof) has a future.

With each iteration I have added various elements to bring it closer to being the shell of a natural language generator. Eventually I would like the output to be fully customisable; to be able to, for instance, churn out gibberish that looks like (i.e. follows the basic phonological rules of) English, or another language, or just something else that's uniquely zany in its own special way.

But again, who has time? Perhaps this will end up being a retirement project... I've got enough to work on in my spare time already. Ah well.