The Origin Point -- not "the first sim", but the Anchor of the Grid, the place from which all other regions (as of June 6, 2010: 31,978 of them) are located.  In the photo above, the conical point of land at the lower right is The Point (give or take a centimeter or two).

The name itself invites being played with: "Badda bing, ba Da Boom!" or "Life is but a dream, Da Boom Da Boom..."   It turns out to have been partially a typo.  The first 30 regions are all named for streets or alleys near Linden Lab's original office, and have in the past been called "the San Francisco sims". However, the street name is De Boom, which I learned here. If you go to Google Maps and enter "De Boom Street, San Francisco", you get this, from whence you can zoom and pan around and find all of the other sim names from that earliest bunch.

The most symbolically significant artifact, though not the oldest, is The Burning Man, created by jovino Zircon on the last day of March, 2004.


It stands atop a building called Lakshmi (by Shijuro Romulus, May 2003) and next to the "home" of Mystic Sunshine, which she built mainly in April 2003, right after joining.


The house contains Corbusier-style furniture created by Alberto Linden (of Grand Arch fame) that goes back to October 2002, some of which you can see in the next image.  It also has one of these:


Why would a private residence have a vote box?  Beats me... but then again, I don't understand the purpose of them.  When all of Second Life was 16 regions, approximately a quarter of a kilometer square, was it necessary to use Search to find anything?  Or, was this just the first of many popularity contests that have come, been "gamed" somehow, and then gone.  If you click this 7-year-old vote box, where does the click register (if at all)?


While not an artifact of SL Beta, no survey of Da Boom would be complete without a mention of this piece of "skywriting", which has been prominent on the World Map since its creation (October 2006).  You might wonder, as I did for the longest time, "Which web page?"  It is, in fact, the name of its creator -- Web Page -- who owns the empty shopping area beneath it.  (We'll meet Web Page and his empty shopping builds again, in Aqua).



Note: A couple of weeks ago, by way of a Tweet from Headburro Antfarm, I learned that the Forest of Kahruvel had been told to take its "sign" out of the sky because it violated some rule against advertising that way... and yet "Web Page" remains. More inconsistent enforcement; unfortunately all too common.

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