This is basically going to be a nutshell of the begging of where botting in Runescape really started becoming popular. Now, if you log into Runescape, probably 3/5 people are actually botting.
2001
March-May Early Spring, "The Nick Dude" created the first ever RuneScape macro known as "AutoMiner", it was a very basic color picking bot, but due to the fact that it was the first every RuneScape macro, it is what you would've called "****ing awesome." It was created by a very young programmer (14-16 at the time) by the name of Nick Sherlock, who was way ahead of most everyone else in the RuneScape cheating scene, in the area of programming (Kind of like how Jacmob is changing RSCheating now? )
2002
Early 2002 - This is when RuneScape botting first took off, it started with the creations of many bots such as "RuneBot," created by a user by the name of Subanark.
September 22, 2002 - AutoRune was released as the first ever scriptable RuneScape bot. It was created by a very talented programmer known as Kaitnieks (who also created SCAR, explained later). Kaitnieks released AutoRune with a sample script intended to surpass "AutoMiner" created by Nick a year ago. What the script did was:
Mine from the south-west of varrock
Smelt it in lumbridge
Smith it (into armour\weapons) in varrock
Bank it in varrock, and repeat.
AutoRune was not a bot at all like PowerBot, Nexus, or RSBuddy, because of the way it operated. AutoRune communicated directly with the RuneScape server, meaning there was no RuneScape client open at all (except for the GUI). There were The AutoRune GUI was created by Kaitnieks's IRL friend: Rapids. Due to the amount of flaming Kaitnieks received from RBcheats, he decided to not release it, and keep it private... Later on down the line one of his friends suggested that AutoRune be sold.
December 05, 2002 - Coran, a previous buyer of the bot, bought the source code (and copyrights) of AutoRune from Kaitnieks for $500 (not much, right?). Kaitnieks continued developing the bot because he enjoyed it.
December 13, 2002 - This was the date of the first ever RuneScape mass ban... Jagex had caught onto AutoRune and how it operated... how they detected AutoRune was the following: Jagex edited the client to send a "secret" command to the server every X amount of objects mined. So to the RuneScape server, it noticed a "Hmm, there were X rocks mined... but we did not get the secret code... wtf? BAN!"
After the mass ban, everything went dead. Kaitnieks ditched the project, killed his forum, as did many other cheating communities, and the entire RSCheating scene was quiet.
2003
April 04, 2003 - Cow, a use who headed a forum known as "RSCN" (rscheatnet) brought his forums back with a surprise, he had fixed AutoRune to do exactly as the client did, introducing "AutoRune v2.3." Not to forget, "Vee" returned as well with a fixed version of RuneBot (which died a week later lol).
This entire year is the time when Cheating and Macroing exploded all over RuneScape, EVERYBODY wanted to macro. This was the best thing that happened to RSCheating as it showed how much of the rs population actually wanted to cheat; however, it was also the worst thing to happen, as Jagex caught on quicker, and BOOM, down went AutoRune again... This time Jagex pwned them by encrypting the data sent between the server and client.
The RSCheating community did terrible in this time, most of the members began scamming other members and blah blah.
AutoRune was fixed, this time by Kaitnieks, and was never released publicly, it was kept VERY private to those that had paid for the bot (they later became known as ARC - the AutoRune Crew).
November 06, 2003 - This is probably the part that you all may have heard quite a bit about. Kaitnieks released AutoRune with AutoTrading support, and it was brought to his attention by a user named "SixFeetUnder" that it could be used to dupe items. That day, the RS economy suffered big times, thousands of partyhats were created, and other items (mostly Rune 2h's) were spawned averaging billions and billions of gp. Many of these dupers were banned, however a lot of the ARC didn't get banned, and kept their items, there were no items deleted, and no roll back. The duping was done by creating a lag in the game, and then sending a line to the server when the trade window was up (This can no longer be done). Here are some pictures from Kaitnieks:
Later on, Coran sent AutoRUne to APD, a known scammer. The last two attempts were unsuccessful because Jagex wanted AutoRune dead, and Kaitnieks didn't; however, after the second mass ban (around 15k accounts), Kaitnieks gave up. AutoRune had decimated the RS economy for the last time. Kaitnieks dropped the project and continued on with a new bot SCAR. APD was keylogged and the sourcecode was leaked all over the interwebz. AshleyRune (a AutoRune mod) had a built in keylogger, which a Jagex mod "Mod Mark" had run on his computer, and gotten his mod account stolen (Kaitnieks.com)
2004
2004 - RS2 was released (The RuneScape we know) and Kaitnieks had created a new program known as SCAR (Shit compared to AutoRune!). The program was a simple color clicker, with a basic design like AutoRune, in the sense that users were able to create their own scripts. SCAR is able to be used to other games other than just RuneScape, and is curently
Around this time, a new bot by the name of Aryan came on the scene, created by Aryan, it came out a little bit before SCAR, and many users prefered it as it did not control your mouse (as scar did) and it did not need a browser open to auto (as scar did). Aryan was created by 3 main people: Kamu, Regex, and pd. It became extremely popular as it's scripts were near flawless. It was an open source bot, coded in Java.
2005
2005 - This is when RuneScape private servers started coming into the cheating scene, the entire movement was lead by Mopar. There was also the RuneScape's client source code floating around (from mopar) that was 100% deobfuscated (No encryption at all).
In 2005 there was the return of a lesser known bot known as SBoT (This was for RSClassic, so it was before Aryan), and the return was known as SBoT2, the final version of this bot was in 2005 @ version 6.6.
There were many other bots that seemed to copy SBoT and Aryan: ReiBot, RuinedBots.
At this time, there were only 5 main cheating sites:
RSCheatNet (home of AutoRUne 2.3, as well as TLM - Run by "Mediator")
ReiNet (Home of STS, Canibalistic, and ReiBot) - Run by "Reines"
TheIntensity (Home of AutoBot of SBoT) - Run by "Shaya, Intensity, and Antiyou).
Kaitnieks (This was considered the KING of RuneScape cheating, you were unable to call yourself a botter or a cheater if you did not know this site, it was the home of AutoRune and of SCAR). - Run by "Kainieks, and Dylock)
Sythe (This was a VERY new site at the time) - Run by Richard (Sythe).
2006 - This is when RuneScape cheating takes another big hit. Jagex bans about 5,000 users from RuneScape classic, which they then follow up by making it so only certain players can get into RuneScape classic.
Also, those pesky player mod's caught on to common Aryan locations!
Jagex also shutdown Aryan after many attempted lawsuits (just as they have been doing for powerbot), and "RegeX" the main developer quit. Though the bot was dead, some people have been making private versions, of which came a new bot known as RSBot (later). Jagex then implements the new "private" macro detection system (of which the current one has grown from), and 15,000 aryan users are pemabanned.
Sometime during this year, Kaitnieks, probably the most influential person of all macroing in RuneScape, left the scene as he had just become a father. His connections to this scene are through Freddy1990 (the new maintainer of SCAR), and WT-Fakawi (leader of SRL [SCAR Resource Library])
-RSBot(Which really started *present day* botting)-
RSBot was created due to one of the most successful automation softwares being taken down by Jagex. Aryan is what it was called, and it was taken down in 2006. This led a Swedish programmer who went by the name of "Speljohan" he created a team to pick up where Aryan left off, thus the creation of RSBot.
In 2008 the first version of RSBot was released to the public. It was highly anticipated in every way, because after Aryan being taken down, there was nothing "up to par" with Aryan, until now.
However, RSBot was different from all of the other automation softwares available at that time. Speljohan made the actual code that made the client operate available for everyone to see. This is called "Open-Source development" which is popular to Linux enthusiasts. Because of this, tons of Java developers where rushing to get a piece of the newest thing.
Though, in 2009, Speljohan was unable to keep up with the payments for the server. He then handed the entire project over to a person who went by the name of "Quarters" The next few months brought even more attention to the project that ever. Developers helped the bot to such an extent, to which every single line of code was re-written from the initial version, released in 2008.
In 2010, Jagex managed to track down and sue Quarters, the managing director of the site. The result was a court fine of 1,000 pounds, and a contract that issued him to never reverse engineer or play Runescape. Luckily, the site was saved by a popular Runescape black market site and company, Gold4RS. They now act as a parent company to RSBot. Now, the person that takes the place of Quarters is a man who goes by the name of "Paris"
In July of 2010, Jagex acquired the domain name "rsbot.org" by means of a hostile takeover. Their legal claim was that "RS" infringed on their copyright as an unregistered trademark. However yet again the community managed to bounce back on the new domain powerbot.org, amazingly all within the hour. Many have viewed the actions by Jagex as futile attempts to disrupt our activities. Ironically in every instance it has done more to increase our visitor base as more people learn about the events and come to explore first hand.
The unspoken incident that many staff of the community try to avoid is the fact that in early 2011 there was an infected version of RSBot downloaded by thousands. The alleged hacker which goes by the name of "Gh0$t" hacked into the server(How he did is unknown) and inserted his hacked version of RSBot. This version took all of the account information from the user, and sent it to Gh0$t directly. This was the first ever massive attack upon RSBot that affected tens of thousands of RSBot users.
-RSBuddy:-
RSBuddy was started by a former staff member of RSBot who goes by the name of "Arbiter". After the attack, he resigned and started a new botting client at the perfect time. When all of the powerbot users thought at RSBot itself was hacking people. He started the site with his superior knowledge learned from coding RSBot for such a long time. He took some of the best script writers with him, such as Jacmob who was the co-devolper that worked alongside Arbiter, and created RSBot's main competitors.
This client has become heavily popular due to the ease of use. Such as adding script with the click of a button.
Not much can be said about the client, because it is "Closed-Source" meaning the source code to make it operate is not viewable to anyone except a select few. Also, the fact that RSBuddy is fairly new, and there is no history to be said.
Please don't be all like "tl;dr" because it is actually quite an interesting story.

This took a while to compose, so I hope you enjoy it!
Also, most of the information about powerbot was taken from the site, so not all of the credits go to me, most go to Paris.
