SL History

I have always been interested in the history of SL. I'm following the "Where's Magellan" thread, and have just started reading "The Great Erase" thread, and I'm left wondering...Is there a chronology somewhere of the history of SL? Or do I just need to spend hours searching?

And while I'm enjoying the "backstory" on The Great Erase, what really happened there?

I don't know, but if you find one, please let me know. I've been wishing for the same thing.

There is a (vastly outdated) timeline of sorts at http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page - the current home of what once was the SL History Wiki. There's still a lot of useful information to be had there, though.

From the above site, this might be of note, too: http://secondlife.wikia.com/wiki/Social_History

The current "Official guide" book also has a section of SL history.

Unfortunately, there isn't much out there as far as comperhensive guides to the history of our world. IMO, this would be a Very Good Thing.

Thanks Mari

There's the SL Historical Museum at Phobos (216, 166, 32) if you want to look at something in world.

From their welcome notecard:

"The Second Life Historical Museum is a project dedicated to chronicling and preserving the history of Second Life. The objective is to remember our past and where we have been and come from, while we continue to move forward into the future."

Awesome...I'll check that out this weekend!!

What WAS "The Great Erase"?

I was curious about that too. It turns out that it was a piece of SL fiction that somebody wrote in the forum some years ago.

The SL Louvre museum informally functions as a history of SL sculpture.

And, if the SLiterary writing project continues, it will function as an archive of SL-centric fiction. The SLiterary Art and Writing Gallery has one work of fiction on display on placards, it's pretty cool. The current issue of their writing journal is available for free there.
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I saw that, but I got the sense that there was a...forgive the term "real life"...occurrence behind it.

Isn't it based on the content loss thing that Marianne posted about a few days ago? Sort of extrapolating that and seeing where it could lead? I assumed that, but it might be because of the thread it was mentioned in.

Yup. It seems like we had a pretty volitile history, with disappearances of prims an even people dat make some of the losses we see today look purty minor. I hope we dun see it again!

Mari

At the Linden Village sim, our revered capital, there's a big display board down by the water with lots of clickable balls that each gives details of a different aspect of SL history. Everybody should visit Linden Village at least once and climb the steps to the temple collonades.

Ya know, I always seem to forget about dis. An I was jes at the temple in kirkby the other night, too!

Mari

Major Drama that comes to mind for me while I've been in SL:

-GOM (Gaming Open Market) Controversy, resulting in a new meme: "GOMed"

-The infamous 1.5 rollout in Fall '04, complete with downtime so bad that premium users were given a credit. (And resulted in TOS changes to cover downtime).

-Tringo madness & the pandora's box it forever opened on event calendar spamming

-The great 'Ratings Wipe' (We used to be able to pos/negative rate our friends/enemies for L$1 - many hijinks ensued)

-End of Event Subsidies (yes, Linden used to pay us for holding events!)/End of Dwell Payments & Developer Incentives

-Grey-Goo Sim Crashers and the martyrdom of Voter5

-Telehub Drama (a.k.a. The End of the World as we know it, and I feel fine™)

-"The Bush Guy" drama (And you thought AdFarms were bad )

-Age Play Drama

-Copybot Drama

-6/6/06

-Forum Wars & the closure of General Discussion

-Gambling Ban Drama


If there's one thing I've learned in SL: Drama is a constant

Good stuff.

I got here just after GOM got GOMmed, and just before P2P teleports, but I was here for the awesomeness that was 6/6/06, and a couple months later when the Lindens departed from the ghetto of the SL Forums to the more sterile platform of the official blog- oh, and they trashed the place before leaving.

I came in sometime around the change to P2P teleports (at the least, they were still considered "new" then). I was here before prims flexed, and when light was all-but-unused because of the lag it caused. The big bug at the time was avatars rezzing into world could get stuck as invisible, with only their prim attachments being visible.

http://sluniverse.com/pics/pic.aspx?id=58264

Good times

And sadly...ban lines all over the place

ok....what happened 6/6/06?

For some reason I had always thought this was a reference to when they did the transition from Alpha to Beta. Most everything was wiped when this happened.

I joined on my very first avie when it was 1.5. I still remember the disaster that was (SL is stable now almost by comparison), and also 1.7 (greystorm).

We have had times of impossible to log-in because of the log in queue, total inventory wipe, having to get naked to just TP, days of not being able to login, the list goes on.
There has been drama after drama as Travis mentioned.
But overall SL is still an amazing and wonderful place.

The erase could not have been THAT great. I think there were only a handful of Alphas. More like the little erase.

The only place where I regularly heard about The Great Erase was The Sims Online. For those of you who weren't wasting time in TSO Beta, The Great Erase occurred about two weeks before TSO went live. All the beta players had their accounts wiped clean and were allowed a two week head start on the rest of the world. A good number of SL residents who appeared around the time I started are TSO immigrants, and I guess that term came with us.

Over on the SLU forums there was a recent thread that had some really cool links to the web.archive.org site that show what the Second Life website looked like 4 years ago.

Plus a neat pic from Flip of the way the website here looked when I joined in 2004:



SLU Thread:
http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/9195-how-many-you-rememebr-old-old-second-life-site.html

webarchive links:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040616041010/secondlife.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/20030203084809/secondlife.com/login/splash.php

Linden Village Sim..where is this..nothing under 'Linden Village' or 'Linden Village Sim' and anything under 'Linden' generally comes back as 'Sorry, you do not have access to that teleport destination'

So how do we get there..?

Search for Linden Village under Places.

Aha..found it..and had a quick look. Climbed the steps..fought my way through the pillars (probably more pillars than is really necessary)..gosh a big green glowing hand (funnily I sort of expected a big green glowing dollar sign).

Somebody's just called me Pierre..I'm outa here..

(Actually it's very nice..I'll probably come back tomorrow)