Note: This is by no means a complete account of my many years in ActiveWorls. This is the first version of this page and updates will be forthcoming. Think of this as a rough draft. Many people that I know or have known in the past will be missing from this page. Screen shots are not yet available, either. Please consider this a "work in progress" and don't be offended if I didn't mention you.

Back when I first started using ActiveWorlds, telegrams didn't exist, you had to walk where you wanted to go (no teleport option back then), CY was the only avatar available to use, people vandalized property with ease, there was no media command, 3D Homepages didn't see the light of day yet, and there weren't as many objects to build with as there are today.

To be honest, I can't quite remember how I first found out about ActiveWorlds way back in late 1995 or early 1996. However, I could swear I saw a very short announcement or some sort of advertisement on an old CNET TV show called Cool Tech (or was it CNET Central?). Both shows are now off the air, but Ryan Seacrest (of American Idol fame) used to be the host of one of them.

Anyway, this is the first (and only) time I have seen AWI (or could it have been Worlds, Inc. or COF?) do some advertising on a cable TV network. I know, I know... it sounds crazy, but I think they really might have advertised back then (at least once or twice). For those of you who aren't aware, many citizens on the AW newsgroups criticize AWI for not advertising enough.

Moving on... The first time I logged onto AW as a tourist (I don't think we were called tourists back then, but I can't quite remember), I used the screen name "Adm Cool." Okay, you can stop laughing now. No, the "Adm" didn't mean my name was "Adam" (so many people asked me that, ugh). Remember, this was back around 1995 or 1996, when I was a young teenager. I used to like Star Trek (again, quit your laughing already) and the "Adm" was supposed to stand for Admiral. Where I got the "Cool" part, I can't recall. Although, I do remember there used to be a character on a local TV show called "Captain Cool," so maybe that's where I got it from.

So I messed with AW a bit and thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread. However, to get anywhere very interesting and find some free land to build on, you had to hold down the Ctrl key to run and then make your way to the Grand Central Teleport Station (I think that's what it was called) to be able to warp (yes, warp, not teleport) to another area. Teleports came later and it was a good, time saving feature.

Back then, citizenships were free. I think I really started using AW in late 1995, but my official immigration date shows Thursday, August 15, 1996. Oh well, that's good enough for me. Eventually, I met some very cool friends (who I've since lost contact with) in which we built a lot of stuff together (including one or two sci-fi themed build ages ago). One of the funnier moments we had together was when I stumbled across the Wild West world (not to be confused with WildAW). I tried to build there, and to my amazement, it worked! The world was completely barren and I had build rights there. I thought someone had misconfigured the world or something. It was my lucky day (an entire world all to myself)... or so I thought.

We all assumed that the world was up for grabs and free for the taking. Therefore, we ended up doing an all week build marathon and built an enormous underground city there. However, after we finished building and had time to enjoy the fruits of our labor, we started to notice that certain objects were vanishing and disappearing! What the heck was going on?

Well, it turns out that we got a bit too excited and didn't realize that anyone and everyone in Wild West world had build and eminent domain rights. So people were coming in and deleting bits and pieces of our beautiful city. Note that this was before you could backup property with a bot, so we lost all of our hard work and learned some lessons the hard way.

Another good friend I used to build with was Virtual God (I think that was his handle back then), which I used to call VG. He was from Israel, was good at making textures, and used to hang out in Yellowstone world. We built at least two large medieval cities together (forget the name of them at the moment), had fun messing with trial worlds, and talked on Powwow (anyone remember that?). We then built a huge movie theater and "party hall" and threw some small events. I'm not quite sure whatever happened to him, but the last thing I can remember was that he was going into the Israeli military.

Speaking of trial worlds, I had a trial world that was supposed to expire a month or two ago, but was able to use it for an extended period because whoever was in charge of shutting it down never did. This was during the transition between Worlds, Inc. and COF. In addition, Protagonist came to my world for about ten minutes once and we chatted for a bit. I thought that was pretty dang cool.

Around this time, I got interested in hosting (and computer security, networking, etc.) and later got some of my real life high school friends interested in AW. One of my good friends (Foreman1) bought the world Techno and he and his brother became citizens. Techno was bittersweet. It went through so many changes and so many redesigns I've lost count.

Phyren, Foreman1, Brace, Lanezeri, TheMask, and others all tried to keep reviving Techno and making it better. It was once a public building world, an RPG, a chat world, a gaming world, and many other things that we tried to turn it into. Nevertheless, no matter what we did, we weren't able to keep the community interested in Techno for a long period of time.

It was during a long summer that I spent literally two months working on Techno's object path (which TheMask later used to base his object path off of that is now in use by a few worlds today). I learned all about the avatars.dat file, SEQs, RWX editing, zip passwords, etc. I hosted Techno on my DSL connection. The object path was hosted by SimpleNet (which I think Yahoo! later purchased or acquired).

After gaining more experience with hosting, I started Stuff-X in late 1998. How did I come up with that name? Before high school, I was talking with some people about a school newspaper name. One person there always used the word "stuff" to describe things. So I was joking with them and suggested "Stuff-X" (just take the word Stuff and add an X after it). You know, like X marks the spot or X can stand for whatever you want. If you don't get it, that's okay (most didn't).

I later found out that there was a.. how should I put this... "nasty" site with a similar name (SnuffX, with an N instead of a T). One of my friends got confused when typing in the URL and thought I was some sort of a pervert. I corrected him and he finally found the right site (he was somewhat computer illiterate), but I figured others might make the same mistake. So in 2002, Stuff-X was renamed to 3D Host and I purchased the 3dhost.net domain name. When 3D Host started, I started offering world, bot, and object path hosting, but also web hosting.

While working and building in Techno, Foreman1 introduced me to 2MuChCoFfEe. It turns out we had similar interests and she lived only a state or two away from me (for you foreign readers, I live in the USA). We later formed a relationship (boyfriend/girlfriend) and met in real life for a date. A few months later we broke off the relationship, but it was a very rewarding experience and I still have fond memories of her. If a geek like me could find a date on the Net, there is hope for other geeky guys out there. ;)

We remained friends and I purchased and hosted a small world for her (or maybe she won it, I forget). It expired, we didn't talk for a while, we both went to college, and I haven't heard from her in ages. In a nutshell, that's that. Before all of this, another one of my high school buddies I and discovered Peace World.

If you never heard of Peace World, then I'm not going to tell you about it. Okay, well, maybe I will since you asked so nicely. :P Peace World was a small galaxy that was started a few years ago. There weren’t very many users on at one time, but my friend and I had fun building there (lots of land was available and it was free to become a citizen).

We built and built and took up a lot of land (no, not just by covering everything with walks or grass, we really did build a lot). Then my friend met a very annoying girl there and did some stuff he probably shouldn't have (let's just say he didn't obey Peace World's world rating).

My high school had an obsession with calling everyone and everything "gay." For example, if a student's pencil broke, they would say, "Ugh, my pencil is being so gay today." So, being the immature person he was, my friend put up lots of signs dissing people and calling them gay. Yes, he shouldn't have done it, but he did. He built those things under his own account so I tried to login under his privilege password and delete most of the signs. Maybe he was homophobic, I'm not quite sure. He later transferred to another school and I haven't talked to him for ages. For the record, I have nothing against homosexuals and tried my best to reconcile things. As you can imagine, I stopped going to Peace World after that incident. Why there weren't any PeaceKeepers around and why his account didn't get banned, I'm not altogether sure.

Moving on once again... Other things I've built in the past include police stations, theme parks with roller coasters with warp panels, cities with Ima Genius and Byte Me, and other stuff that I can't remember at the moment. At one point, I tried to make my own anti-vandalism group and called it the Cherubs of Justice (COJ). I had no idea what I was thinking at that time and shut the thing down a month or two later. Let's see... I built a city called Omni Alpha with a few others, log cabins, underground bunker things, and made a really cool replica of a Star Wars-type scene in my world a long time ago.

During the Stuff-X days, Lanezeri (another good friend of mine) made all sorts of bots using Visual Basic, one of them being a Bank Bot. I licensed the bots from him and tried to sell them on the Stuff-X site. TheMask helped me make about 100 textures in my world that I was going to either sell or give away for Stuff-X as well. Before that, I used to host bots for JKMT President. He had swimming fish, roaming deer, etc. He wanted me to host so many custom bots and Preston bots that my Windows server couldn't handle it. Some of the Preston bot GUI parts were missing from the screen and I was getting some memory errors. A little while later, JKMT vanished without a trace.

Another thing I remember was Protagonist was at AW GZ and was messing around with some pole objects. Maybe that was the first time we had building that was updated on the fly (others could all see changes immediately) or better animation commands. I also remember when a few of the desk and computer objects' sizes changed and it messed up a few old builds in AlphaWorld.

I could go on and on about Just In and OneSummer, but I won't. I've known them for quite a long time and started hosting bots for them soon after I met them. I'll keep it brief and just say that they hold some of the very best and most popular events in AW that I've ever been to -- hands down. Their dedication and resourcefulness never ceases to amaze me.

In 2003, I met UberMonkey and helped him with his Proxima RPG gaming world. I hosted his bot (back then it was called Omni.bot) for several months and gave him some feedback. Before that, I hosted a large paintball bot for the world Cyberwar (I think that was its name).

In 2004, I met Pyro Goddess. She's cool because she uses LightWave 3D to make objects. After watching an old sci-fi show that was later canceled called HyperNauts (they used LightWave to make some great mech animations), I wanted to get a copy of it myself. After getting a legal copy from one of my friends at a discount, I was heartbroken at the 300+ page manual and the complexity of the software. So my hat goes off to Pyro for learning how to actually use the darn thing, and doing it well.