The Glad codebase was written by Richard Woolcock (aka KaVir), but it takes 
inspiration from many different sources.  In April 2000 Erwin Andreasen held 
the 16K mud competition (http://www.andreasen.org/16k.shtml), which finally 
encouraged me to write my own codebase.  My entry was called Gladiator Pits, a
bare-bones mud in which players could challenge each other to automated bouts 
of combat.  The primary inspiration for Gladiator Pits came from Dan Elrod's 
play-by-email game "Wardawgs", in which each player controlled a small team of
gladiators who could be trained in various weapons and fighting styles.  When 
I decided to turn Gladiator Pits into a proper codebase, my first objective 
was to redesign the combat to make it more interesting and enjoyable.  For 
this I drew inspiration from yet another play-by-email game, Firetop Mountain 
(http://www.gamerz.net/~fm/).  The other features were added after much play 
testing with Matthew Chaplain (Kastagaar), Chris Clutton (Rotain), Steve Read 
(Shimian) and several others.  I also received feedback from a handful of 
people who had taken an interest in my 16K competition entry.  I decided that 
the codebase needed a more compact name, so I called it "Glad".  It is assumed
that Gladiator Pits was Glad 1.0, with the various minor revisions I made to 
it being Glad 1.1, 1.2, etc.  Thus this major rewrite is called Glad 2.0.