http://www.eqwatcher.com/docs/eula.html
EQWatcher was a popular log parser released in 2001. If you don’t believe this page then you can see the web archive of their free servers website going back to 2001 here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000701000000*/eqwatcher
That fits within the blue timeline. There were others before that that don’t exist anymore. If you genuinely believe that before these big releases people weren’t writing python scripts to parse their logs...
http://eq-companion.com
EQ Companion has a change log going back to 2001.
None of this was a big secret. People weren’t hiding it.
EQLog’s website goes back to 2000:
https://web.archive.org/web/20000701...org/~pasketti/
This took about 5 minutes for me to look back and find just by searching the names of these programs. Also, all this talk about how parsing couldn’t be possible before .NET is just weird. Lots of broad sweeping statements and assumptions being thrown around.