Come 2009 and I’m wondering where things are headed. Not for SL, but for the greater virtual universe. Well, let’s take a step backward in time. . . .

I’ve had a long love/hate relationship with computers. I wrote my first program in 1979 and never looked back. In those days, things were simple. You had a computer or access to one. You programmed it. That’s it.

A few years later, I was introduced to a network that connected many universities, contractors and government agencies. It was an interesting world filled with bits of text and lots of doors, both opened and closed. Inside me began a passion for an interconnected world.

As time progressed, I began to toy with electronic bulletin board systems. I wrote one for my TRS-80 and did some heavy modifying to one on my Atari 800XL. I took a tech support job for a computer distributor and rebuilt their BBS. I wrote a program that gave the ability for our customers to access useful files from Simtel. That module also allowed people to play a rudimentary text-based space adventure game. Of course, that wasn’t on the company’s BBS.

In my spare time, I wrote a system with pluggable modules that gave access to Internet news groups and email. I never thought it would go anywhere, so I let it just sit. Silly me, I thought, when years later I came across Lotus Notes! Oh well, you snooze, you lose.

Somewhere along the way, I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and several books by William Gibson. I was intrigued, to say the least. Perhaps I was going through a tough time in my life, but I looked forward to a world with the level of interconnection provided in their cyberpunk novels. I wanted to live in that world.

Fast forward to 2007. . . .  I get a lot of spam. I also subscribe to a number of email newsletters. One day, I received one that had a link to Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people. I started up my browser and headed straight for Second Life.

First, I was amazed that somehow this whole genre had escaped my curious nature. Somehow, I had never heard of Second Life, Active Worlds or any of the other virtual worlds in existence. Well, I found that my passion for computers, which had been waning due to an unrewarding job (I’m still there, by the way, and it’s even less rewarding than before), began to grow again. I began learning new things such as texturing (getting better), 3d modelling (I’m really quite bad at it) and web programming (PHP, Perl, etc). I found my calling.

Everyone has a different path that they’ve taken to arrive at their virtual world of choice. I’m sure that everyone has their reasons for going to a particular virtual world. This blog is about how we got here and were we go next. I hope to create an open dialogue about virtual worlds, both from a user and a developer perspective. Perhaps we can use these ideas to help shape the future of the virtual universe.

So, what was your path to the virtual universe?