If you are interest in ancient history, and the ability to relive it for yourself, see this thread: https://powdertoy.co.uk/Discussions/Thread/View.html?Thread=17844

Basically, TPT started development in late 2008 / early 2009. The current server started in 2010.

I know the history from ~2011 onwards. It's a lot to describe and I can't do that right now, but maybe I'll see if there's any good writeups on that later before I start writing a whole novel.


I can give you the specs of what TPT runs on:
Windows:
  XP SP2 or 3 minimum (unsure)
  Online functionality requires Vista or later
macOS:
  64-bit (I think 10.6/7)
  Online functionality requires 10.9 or later
Linux:
  glibc 2.18 or later. OpenSSL 1.1
Android:
  4.1 or 4.2 minimum
  Online functionality requires 4.3 or later

All (besides Android):
  CPU must support SSE2 and above. Your cpu supports this, I promise.

The reason online functionality requirements are different is that we require TLS 1.2 support. Note that Android and mac were both supposed to have the higher requirements, but due to separate issues my attempts to lock out older versions of these OSes didn't work. So now you can run them on slightly older versions than you are supposed to. This will probably be fixed in the future.
Windows XP support I'll probably drop sometime too, but I don't feel like putting in the effort here to drop support for an OS nobody uses.