Abraham Lincoln that is. The Alliance Libraries have secured funding for a "Land of Lincoln" immersive sim that will recreate Lincoln's birthplace, his Springfield house (please resist comments about Bart!) and will also look at his White House time.

This new area will run on a similar basis the Renaissance Island which looks at Tudor England, and is inhabited by volunteers who largely dress and talk in appropriate period style, as well as having the period setting. Land of Lincoln is still at the planning stage, if you would like to be involved please join the google group for discussion.

The Second Life History wiki, formerly at secondserver.net, has moved to http://slhistory.org/ and you should update your bookmarks to match. The history wiki is always looking for contributors who can keep a track of the goings-on in Second Life from a neutral point-of-view.

Today's happenings are tomorrow's history. While the grid is down, why not pop over and find out how things used to be in Second Life before you signed up. You might be surprised. History has this habit of repeating itself, if you're not prepared.

Recognise the fellow in the image? That's the Linden Primitar, the very first kind of avatar in Second Life, back when it was called Linden World.

The Internet is generally said to have been born in 1969, with ARPAnet. Or in 1977 when Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf introduced TCP (the transmission control protocol). Take your pick. Either way, the Internet (everyone just called it 'the net' back then)was in increasing use among software developers, research institutions and well-heeled hobbyists for quite some years before Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web in 1990/91. Better grab some coffee, this is going to take us a few minutes.

The World Wide Web was very much an ad-hoc and semi-anarchic collaborative medium back in those days. Some people used the CERN developed source code for the earliest web-servers. Others hammered out their own code. People began to work on HTML parsers and presentation managers/browsers. The Web at the time outside the core group of researchers and technical hobbyists was sparse, and stylistic variations led to assorted incompatibilities, and what one might charitably call 'uneven experience'.

The World Wide Web was a hit, however, and pulled people online not only for it, but for existing parallel technologies, like IRC, and the popular virtual worlds of the period. And that's approximately where the outcry began, in approximately 1994. One lesser Internet demagogue of the period summed it up like this: "It's like having a million people barge into your lounge-room, pushing and shoving each-other, knocking over the ashtrays and all shouting at once, and...most of all, complaining about your decor and furniture."