[PaulHoule]

I invented (more or less) Crockford Base32 back in 2001 which I called "Base32t" (t for Tapir, because it was part of the "Tapir User Management System") for encoding password reset tokens and such. (Minus those squicky check symbols... Right out of the mind that left us the seductive but slightly flawed JSON [1])

I used T.U.M. for a number of sites including one that was in the Alexa top 2000, even though it was open source it got no pickup from anyone else. The standard at the time was to pick up some software like PHPNuke which did a lot of things badly as opposed to my Yahoo-inspired approach of "pick the best of breed software and plug them into a common user management system".

The idea didn't get any traction until 2013 when things like this popped up like mushrooms. Seemed the missing features were "vendor lock-in", "somebody else owns your user database", "they might shut down, get bought by Google or kick you out of the free tier."

[1] I've seen it enough that I'd expect higher uptake if you inject small flaws into a specification like that.