What was the inspiration for creating OGS? Just curious. And who started it? @anoek or @matburt? History of the development:
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I believe this is what you’re looking for 
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The original OGS was created by Graham (@topazg, still active here now) and Andrew (@Arathalion), who were software developers and Go beginners from England, I believe as a hobby software project. Back then it was correspondence only. After some years a French guy dmg become the main developer (and kind host to me for Bordeaux EGC!), but it got rather too much work for him so in 2013 it was merged with Nova.gs which was a real-time server built on a more modern tech stack.
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Minor nit pick, nova was a correspondence server that could be played in real time
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In case anyone’s interested, I actually found out that my game history on OGS covers my first ever games of go 
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Sorry, that was almost a derail. The inspiration was that I was a chess player who enjoyed correspondence sites that offered all sorts of interesting competitive play, and I found it far easier to commit time to correspondence games than live games. As a result, when I decided that Go would be a super easy way to get into AI development before having a go and doing a chess engine (lol!), I ended up wanting to play it enough to get to grips with the game, and was disappointed with DGS’ lack of organised competitions. So instead I decided to turn the basic rules and logic framework into a turn based Go server with all the competitions I wanted (albeit no player base to speak of!).
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Well, I’m glad that the hubris of a chess player, that thought that Go AI would have been a “super easy” stepping stone on the way to developing a chess engine, ultimately led to the creation of this site.
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I assume he meant “easy to make”, not “easy to make strong”.
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