 |
| Early 2007. An Elegantly-Attired Cheyenne Reaches Her Destination Only To Find Her Shoes and Hair Up Her Butt |
You Young Whippersnappers!
You youngsters have no idea what it was like back in the old days of 2005 and 2006. Why, there were no, no, what were there not? No sculpties! That’s right. No sculpties! No Black Swan, no fancy-schmancy shapes. If you couldn’t build it out of cubes and spheres, why, you just didn’t need it. And believe it or not, there were no torii.
No, not the Japanese gates, you young smartass, the other kind, the plural of torus torii.
Not only that, there was no Windlight. Everything was much more… pastel.
We had no voice. No voice. If you wanted to talk, bigod, you downloaded Skype. Not that anyone NEEDED to talk. We were all convinced voice would mean the end of Second Life.
We didn’t have the Havok4 physics engine, either. If you couldn’t build whatever you were building within the 30-meter link limit and below 768 meters, you just didn’t build it.
Nor did we have Mono. We made do with the 64 k script memory limitation , and we made amazing scripts like, like, uh, oh, yeah, those circling birds and fish you used to see everywhere. And smoke. We made lots of smoke, too.
We had no fancy Class V servers back them. Everything ran on Class II and Class III relics. It took five minutes to rez a prim sometimes! And there was only one asset server, and it was based on an eight-bit Commodore 64.
We didn’t even have flexible prims. There were no fancy waving flags, no wavy skirts. Hairdos were like concrete sculptures that sat on your head. Why does hair need to move, anyway? And you know the amount of our weekly stipend? $500L, that’s what!
And what else? Oh, we couldn’t make conference IMs. We couldn’t double-click landmarks to teleport. We couldn’t put HTML on a prim. We didn’t have Homestead or OpenSpace sims. We had no SLURLs. We had no llRegionSay to let our scripts talk to an entire region. We didn’t have a half-dozen Linden blogs, just one. And we didn’t have M. Linden, just good old spiky-haired Phil.
The things we did have didn’t work all that well, either. Local water was always disappearing. Imagine jumping to your home and the river is dry and all your fish are swimming around in mid-air! And you’ve not lived until you’ve teleported to a party and arrived bald-headed with your hair stuck up your bum! And the dreaded black bands of death ran rampant. Ask your grandparents about them.
We had a lot of things you youngsters will never see. Banks, for instance. We had banks! They paid 100,000 percent interest, too, until the Lindens shut them down. And we had gambling! Gambling everywhere, with and without whores. Sorry. Prostitutes. Sorry. Sex workers. We just called them whores back then. There was no age verification. Those of us who were from Europe didn’t have to pay the horrible Value Added Tax. Age-playing sex kids were everywhere. Everywhere! And Copybots! Copybots!
You know when it all began to go downhill? The first time the concurrency rate passed 10,000, that’s when! Before that we all knew everyone, pretty much, because we were always tripping over one another because there were only a few dozen sims. After that—pah!
We had a Friends button on the user interface. Now we just have “contacts.” That’s so shallow twenty-first century! And you know what we didn’t have? Clackety shoes that’s what!
I would give up all this new stuff if I could just go back to a Second Life without clackety shoes!
You young kids! You don’t know how fortunate you are!
p.s. Oh-- and we had only about six sizes of huge prims! Imagine that!
4 comments:
The new asset servers based on clustered and load-balanced Amiga 1000s are much faster.
Tell that to kids these days? They won't believe you.
We did not have torii? I forgot about that. I tried building on day 2, was shocked by the primitiveness, and did not try again until a year later I think.
Peter, I think torii were the last next best thing before flexible prims. Late 2005 or early 2006, I believe.
I didn't need torii for my first building/scripting project: a mortar. I didn't figure out how to get the bombs to explode, but if one of those sold-shots hit you by gosh you knew it!
Post a Comment