History

The people behind this community have a long history of multiplayer gaming and have gathered a lot of experience in playing all types and genres of games on different platforms. In fact some of us have been playing computer games for more than 15 years now and still are not tired of continuing this exciting hobby.

1995
A few people started organizing LAN parties with their newly aquired Realtek 8019 ISA NICs and a 10 Mbit BNC chain. The games played were DOOM, DOOMII, Duke Nukem 3D and the original Command & Conquer.

1997
The network was upgraded with Realtek 8129 PCI NICs for 100 Mbit connections with Cat-5 cables and switches. Half-Life, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike beta3 and the first two Quake titles were added to the games portfolio.

2000
Some of those LAN gamers started playing online via the first ADSL broadband connections available. The first online games played were Counter-Strike 1.0, Quake III, Unreal Tournament and the UT based Tactical Ops modification.

2001
The first server went online powered by a Pentium3 700MHz with 256 MB SD RAM. The first public [TFB]Meatfactory for Counter-Strike 1.3 was created. The first website with just a few static html pages was made and published under the “fickbu.de” label – hence the [TFB] tag which was short for Team Fickbu.de. The first TeamSpeak server was also established.

2002
The Pentium3 700MHz was still providing the few services we offered. The [TFB]Meatfactory was updated to Counter-Strike 1.4 and later version 1.5.

2003
The server hardware was upgraded with a Pentium4 HT 2.6GHz and 1GB DDR RAM. Our [TFB]Meatfactory was updated to Counter-Strike 1.6 and Steam. The website was upgraded with a Postnuke CMS and phpBB forums.

2004
The hardware was again upgraded with a Sun Microsystems V20z server powered by two AMD Opteron CPUs at 1.8GHz and 2GB DDR RAM. This server became famous as “The Sun”. The website moved to “meatfactory.net”. The portal website was upgraded to Mambo CMS. The forums, the TeamSpeak and Counter-Strike 1.6 revieved some minor upgrades. The public [TFB]Meatfactory for Counter-Strike:Source went online on the first day of the public beta phase.

2005
A second Sun Microsystems V20z was added powered by two AMD Opteron CPUs at 2.2GHz and 2GB DDR RAM. As is became the “Sun’s” nearest neighbor in the 19 inch rack, we named it “Mercury”. Both servers provided all web services as well as TeamSpeak and several game servers for Counter-Strike 1.6, Counter-Strike:Source, Quake 4, Desert Combat and later Battlefield 2. The “Meatfreaks Clan” was founded and war servers were installed for online matches.

2006
The two Sun Microsystems V20z were still running all our services. The portal website was upgraded to Joomla CMS and our forums were upgraded to vBulletin.

2007
Both Sun servers were replaced with “Core” which is powered by two Intel Xeon DP 5160 CPUs and 4GB DDR2 RAM. All services are now provided by a single server. This includes the portal, forums, TeamSpeak and all gameservers.

2008
The “Core” server was moved to a new colocation facility within Frankfurt am Main and also upgraded to a single separate 1 GBits per second network uplink to the multicarrier backbone. The forums were upgraded to phpBB 3.x. All server and clan activities are now branded “meatfactory.net – The Gameserver Community” taking place over the obsolete clan structures.

2010
All web and voice services, such as Joomla, phpBB, Mumble and Teamspeak were moved into “The Cloud”. The “Core” now only provides dedicated servers for various source engine games.

2011
The „Core“ was replaced with a VServer on order to cut down hosting and housing expenses. All Webservices were replaced with WordPress in order to offer one communication platform for all purposes. The Battlefield 3 server was installed.

2012
Buddypress and bbPress were added to WordPress. meatfactory.net now offers social networking features such as groups, activity feeds and private messaging.

2013
Game server hosting was finally stopped after the contract for our BF3 server ended and game producers no longer offer dedicated server software. meatfactory.net provides a social media platform for gamers with several voice communication servers.

2015
The Voice Communication Servers were moved to Amazon EC2 Cloud Services providing higher performance and newer operating systems. The meatfactory.net website was stripped off most social community features resulting in a much simpler weblog system with comments.