SMOnline started as SMLAN which was a private experiment during the fall of 2003 between Charles Lohr and Joshua Allen at UMBC. They wanted to be able to play DDR (Stepmania) with more than two players at once during the DDR Club meetings. The club supported the very early development of SMLAN and was even supposed to provide funding for club computers to use SMLAN with. However, as soon as a working prototype of SMLAN was completed, the club pulled its support. They went so far as to unofficially ban the use of Stepmania at all DDR club events.

Operating System: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista, Linux, Mac OS X,

CPU: Pentium II or higher, PowerPC G3, Celeron, Athlon, or compatible processor, 266MHz minimum (400 MHz recommended)

RAM: 64 MB

Video: Video card that supports High Color 16-bit color) and has 8MB video RAM and OpenGL or Direct3D drivers.