What the Web Should Be

Services and infrastructure for online entertainment and community, built by people who had been at it since the web was young.

This is an archive. Chaos Limited stopped trading long ago and nothing here is on offer. The pages are kept as a record of the work.

Who we did it for

The portfolio

We had the privilege of working with some top names in online communities and entertainment. A few of our favourites:

What we did

Services and infrastructure

We developed services and infrastructure for online entertainment and community. Whether a website needed community tools like bulletin boards, or entertainment content like trivia and chat-based games, we could deliver the goods.

As the web evolved, so did we. In the early days the work was Perl and CGI — we had dynamic HTML generation tools before “DHTML” meant anything to anyone. Later we delivered Java servlets and EJB web applications that communicated with XML.

Consulting
Project management
Web site design and implementation
XML, XSLT, SOAP, web services
Java, J2EE, EJB, JSP
HTML, Perl, Python, CGI
SQL, relational database

Who we were

Two principals

Chaos Limited, LLC was managed by internet and entertainment industry veterans.

Brian “BK” Marcus

An internet professional since the invention of the web

Co-founded the web’s first weekly features magazine, and co-developed patented technology for SoftLock.com, a digital rights management company that grew to a market capitalisation of almost half a billion dollars and employed close to a hundred people.

He was instrumental in the early websites for the University of Virginia and for Kesmai Corporation, a multiplayer online gaming company owned by News Corporation, and contributed to the redesign of CapitalOne.com.

As Director of Production and Development for the online community developer PeopleSpace.com, he led the team building Multiplayer Trivia for SesameStreet.com, marking the show’s thirtieth anniversary. His abiding interest was electronic publishing: he worked on the first commercial ebook release by a mass-market author, Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet.

Albert “AC” Capehart

Systems, projects and people

A BA from Swarthmore College and a Master of Computer Science from the University of Virginia — technical depth, communication, and a knack for the big picture.

He was webmaster for the launch of Kesmai’s GameStorm, a massively multiplayer online game service, and did game hosting for Engage, Kesmai Studios, PeopleSpace, Castle Hill Studios, Mythic Entertainment, Masque and Electronic Arts. His teams supported close to a hundred machines in a datacenter environment serving tens of thousands of concurrent users, across as many as four separately budgeted departments, some of them over a million dollars.

Unix: Linux · SunOS/Solaris · HP-UX · AIX · DEC Unix/Ultrix · Minix · NeXT · A/UX
Desktop: Macintosh OS 4–10 · Windows 3.1 · 95 · 98 · 2000 · NT · XP
Languages: Perl · Python · Java · C/C++ · Pascal · Basic · Fortran · Forth · Smalltalk · Scheme/Lisp