SL factbook

[Deej Kasshiki]

Some of the very first sims (like DaBoom) were named for various streets near Linden HQ in San Francisco. Other early sims were named to honor major company investors (like Omidyar-- named after Pierre Omidyar, co-founder of eBay).

[Storm Clarence]

Deej, I thought the first sims were the color sims, am I wrong?

[Canoro Philipp]

Philip Linden idea of the virtual world he was starting to develop didn't include Avatars, he thought "why would you want to put yourself in it?"

[Deej Kasshiki]

That's why I said "some of the first" Storm since I couldn't remember whether the street-named or the color-named ones came first. The street-named ones are quite old, though.

[Peewee Musytari]

Before the introduction of Windlight, LL used to put different textures on the sun & the moon in SL for various holidays & significant occasions. Such as Halloween,  Valentines,  Easter,  Martin Luther King Day & Millionth member (18th Oct 2006).

There are 2 "Easter Eggs" in the SL client.

[Venus Petrov]

Abbotts Aerodrome sadly ended today after providing years of fun to residents. It is where I learned to skydive without going 'splat'.  Fortunately, it has been purchased by someone who says,  'I didn't want to see it go.'

[Chelsea Malibu]

OMG Abbotts went offline today? I've not been there in ages but it was such a great sim.  Remember when we had a separate Beta Grid? They where one of the few who had replicate sims in that grid.

edit:  YaY!  I didnt catch the part about someone buying it. 

[Venus Petrov]

It is under new management and will experience some changes I am sure.  One interesting tidbit in my brief chat with the new owner was that the huge building was never LINKED!!!!

[Penny Patton]

Ruth is a "petite" 6'4" (that's 193cm)!

 

 The tallest an avatar can be without tricks is 8'10" (270cm). That's the male avatar mesh using the shoe options.

 The tallest without "shoes" is 8'3" (256cm).

 The female avatar is more limited, topping out at 8'6" with shoes, 8'2" without.

 

 The shortest an avatar can be, without any hacks, is 4'1"/126cm but it is impossible to maintain proper proportions at that size.

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 The female avatar mesh has substantially shorter arms than the male. So much so that it can be difficult or impossible to have proper arm length with avatars over 6' tall, a problem the male mesh does not have.

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Avatars all move at the same speed and there is no way to change it without using scripted push tricks.

SL Walk Speed: 7.16Mph / 11.5 Kph
SL Run Speed: 11.4Mph / 18.3 Kph
SL Fly Speed: 35.8Mph / 57.6Kph

[Void Singer]

aftrer beta, accounts cost a one time fee of 10$US, for this price your avatar was guaranteed for life, and you received a 50$L Stipend every week that you logged in... premium at that would also get you a 500$L stipend.

there used to be a program called "first land" which would sell mainland 512 plots to new avatars for 1$L/sqm

using the two above facts, I calculated at the time that a person could crash the entire enconomy of SL and make $L nearly worthless with a modest investment of ~10k$US in aproximately 6 weeks.

lindex and marketplace did not originally exist, originally LL had claimed that would never get into the buying and selling of $L

there didn't used to be point to point teleports... you would be placed int the closest telehub to the place your were trying to get to and had to travel the rest on your own (interestingly, region crossings were most stable back then)

Traffic was original used to determine "dwell" a system in which the more people that visited and spent time on your land, the more you were paid.

originally everyone started as Ruth.

before 07 (it hink that was when it changed) the maximum build height was 768m, and there were a few tricks that allowed you to push builds as high as 1024m.

The first TPV's weren't actually TPV's... they add-ons and patches created before the viewer source was open.

there were originally over a dozen grids, most of which could only be accessed by Linden staff except when opened for various project testing.

Goreans and Furries have been on the grid since Beta

the original forums were open to paid accounts only, and several long time residents served as moderators on them until it was replaced by the Jive forums.

The LSL wiki was originally started by someone else, then hosted by LL later.

~98% of wiki documentation for LSL is written by residents, and was discovered only through experimentation.

there used to be live help inworld through the viewer for everyone.

The hippo is the unofficial company mascot of SL.... all thanks to a coding error that displayed "hippos" when names of avatars or groups were loading, and a long running joke thread.

The oldest non-lineden prim in SL was created by Stellar Sunshine

Linden avatars in god mode are not visible to sensors owned by other residents.

 

 

I could probably go on, but thats a good start.

 

[Venus Petrov]

The color sims were not among the first 16 sims.  The first 16 are depicted on an early version of the world map dated Nov 21, 2002.  I found the map in the basement of the Governor Linden Mansion awhile ago and I took a photo of it a few moments ago.  On another map next to it, the sims are listed along with their maturity rating.  They all were either PG or M.

I am sorry you cannot click on it to expand as you could in the old forum.  Below is a list of just the sim names (they were called 'areas').

[Venus Petrov]

Great stuff Void.

[Storm Clarence]

That's a great start Void.  Thank you for this contribution.  

[Canoro Philipp]

There was a form of getting Lindens that was called "camping", the users were paid by the owners of places to sit on a place for a certain period of time, for example L$10 for 10 minutes, the owners used this method to create more traffic to their place, because the popularity of the place was based on how many people were there.

[Shelby Silverspar]

TPs used to cost 1L.

[Deej Kasshiki]

Thanks Venus. Those are the street/area-named sims.

The First Land program was awesome. I made a killing by selling mine to a land speculator for a stupidly inflated price toward the end of the first Great Land Bubble. Very soon afterwards the bubble burst leaving a lot of very unhappy (and very broke) ex-baby land barons stuck with huge swaths of mainland that they'd never be able to sell for anywhere near what they paid.

Those were also the days of "grey goo" attacks; griefers would unleash mountains of self-replicating prims and particles that overloaded sims and spread to bordering regions also taking them down.

[Perrie Juran]

 

The oldest (known) object in Second Life is the Beach Ball, created by Phillip Linden.

[Venus Petrov]

@Canoro:  While I never camped, my recollection was that campers earned closer to L$1 for 10 minutes.  It was not very lucrative.  Two variations on camping were sitting in chairs (for hours) or pole dancing.  I recall one club had about a dozen poles setup where avatars could 'dance' and earn meager Lindens.  No stripping or emoting required. 

[Claireschen Hesten]

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Void Singer wrote:

the original forums were open to paid accounts only, and several long time residents served as moderators on them until it was replaced by the Jive forums.

 

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i remember that well the first time i needed help with something the forum was my first port of call then i discovered not being a paid account meant i couldn't use it and i ended up going to one of the help islands

on the camping thing the typical rates i remember were always L$1/10min L$2/15min occasionally you get something more exotic like L$1/3min or L$15/hr

[Venus Petrov]

The first combat, or damage-enabled sims, were in Outlands. 

[Storm Clarence]

Where is Marianne?  She is chock-full of SL facts.

[Orfeu Miles]

Teleporting could result in attatchments ending up in your ass ( Hair and shoes )...very commonplace.

What was  more rare... and highly prized...was somtimes a glitch in the grid resulted in your head ending up in your ass.

I say highly prized...but this depended on the point of view of the  operator.....some were amused and some were miffed.

 

When I joined SL...I had no idea there was any sexually related content.

And yet I ended up on a XXX pose ball within 40 mins of joining.

I inoocently clicked to teleport to a castle...and...um....learned the strange ways of Sl pronto.

I have often wondered if this initial view of SL has coloured my view of the grid. :matte-motes-big-grin-evil:

[Caitlin Tobias]

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Orfeu Miles wrote:

Teleporting could result in attatchments ending up in your ass ( Hair and shoes )...very commonplace.

What was  more rare... and highly prized...was somtimes a glitch in the grid resulted in your head ending up in your ass.

I say highly prized...but this depended on the point of view of the  operator.....some were amused and some were miffed.

 

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Yeah that I remember!

And also the frustration on Wednesday-evenings when the grid was closed for maintenance, once open it could take up to 2 hours to finally login. (Evenings for Europeans that is, LL did it of course in their morning...)

[Kenbro Utu]

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Caitlin Tobias wrote:

... also the frustration on Wednesday-evenings when the grid was closed for maintenance, once open it could take up to 2 hours to finally login. (Evenings for Europeans that is, LL did it of course in their morning...)

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There were times when the grid did not come back up in the scheduled time.  I cannot remember the exact time it was down, but one time it looked as if the "maintenance" was going to run into the weekend.  Anyone remember the longest down time from Wednesday maintenance?  It also seems that invariably, most Wednesdays, someone would come onto the forums bemoaning the fact that they had scheduled a wedding for Wednesday night, having spent tons of Lindens and weeks of preparation for the event, even though everyone knew maintenance day was Wednesday, the grid was never guaranteed to come back up, and usually did not within the predicted time frame.

[Gypsy Quixote]

Awesome OP Storm. I love this kind of stuff. Nothing to add myself, so much to learn! Thanks to all, keep 'em coming