CyberNet Worlds

» see cybernetworlds.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The registered address was PO Box 283, Danville, Arkansas 72833, a town of about two thousand people. From that box, for twelve years, somebody ran a universe.

CyberNet Worlds was an independent universe built on the Activeworlds engine, generally counted as the second spin-off after Outerworlds. The client was a rebranded Activeworlds browser, shipping as "Cybernet" from version 2.2 up to 4.1 build 982, and it inherited the whole model underneath: citizens who paid and tourists who did not, RWX objects streamed from an object path at objects.cybernetworlds.com, and a universe server holding the whole thing together. You downloaded an executable, picked a name, and walked into somebody's building.

The scale is worth stating plainly, because virtual-world nostalgia tends to inflate it. A third-party review in July 2002 counted roughly 180 people across the entire universe. Sixty worlds existed on the books, and three of them had anyone standing in them. Citizenship cost $19.95 a year. Call it a neighborhood with a server bill. Kane C. Smith built it, and the site and community work belonged to Carol Jirinec, who signed her studio output as jija3d.

Its own archive contradicts almost everything written about it. Catalogs of dead virtual worlds file CyberNet at 1995 to 2010. The domain was created on 22 February 2000 at 23:58:38 UTC, the first captured homepage carries a 2000 copyright line and a Grand Opening prize banner, and the 1995 belongs to Activeworlds itself, attached by mistake to an offshoot that did not exist yet. The 2010 is wrong in the other direction by two years.

~ the dossier ~

~ the last download ~

The site ran a server-side counter at downloads/download_stats2.asp, and it was still working when the crawler caught it on 21 July 2012. It logs the final pull of cybernet982.exe at 7/19/2012 11:03:30 AM, the 16,131st in the client's lifetime. Downloads had peaked at 40.56 a day in October 2008, against a lifetime average of 10.56.

On 21 July 2012 a full crawl of the site returned 200 on everything. By 27 August the homepage was a 568-byte stub, and from 29 August every asset on the host was a 404. The citizen forum, which lived on a resident's own domain rather than the company's, went dark in the same window. Somewhere in those five weeks a hosting invoice went unpaid, and that is the entire recorded cause of death.

~ dead for years before it died ~

The homepage carried a "Last Update: 06/10/08" line right up to the end, sitting there through four more years of uptime. The final news post went up on 21 April 2009. The forum's all-time concurrency record was thirty people, set on 16 April 2008, and in the last eighteen months of its life the whole board managed twenty-seven posts.

So August 2012 is the date the lights went out, not the date anyone left. The leaving had happened sometime around 2009, quietly, the way it does when a hobby world's regulars each decide separately that they will log in again next week.

~ the dial-up problem ~

I was sixteen in 2000, running a 33.6k modem in Turkey that got upgraded to 56k not long after, and the bottleneck was not curiosity. Streaming a few hundred RWX objects into a 3D client over that line meant watching a world assemble itself brick by brick while the meter ran, on a connection billed by the minute. The Turkish internet of that year was IRC and web forums, plus whatever you could carry home from an internet cafe. A persistent 3D universe was legible as an idea and unusable as a product, so my generation here skipped the entire Activeworlds branch and met virtual worlds later, through games.

What CyberNet had that the later ones did not was an address you could mail a letter to.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »