The history of the Ginko brand, as told by Hinoserm [Part 1]
Some random history:
Back when I first started GinkoSoft — originally intended to be the name through which I would provide internet services and application development — in 1998, it was a hobby. I was living with family, didn’t need to worry about paying bills, and I had ample supplies of (albeit antiquated, but free) computer parts; my cousin worked as a private consultant dealing with computer technologies for several companies in the Boston area, and would often give me the components those companies would discard, or components that had failed in operation that I could easily repair, or even just the computers he didn’t need/want anymore or wasn’t using at the time. It is him that I thank — and simultaneously blame — for my interest in technology.
I used a local free dial-up provider (eventually my mother got me cable internet, because I was tying up the only phone line) and the equipment I cobbled together to host text games and websites for friends met through the text gaming community. I would hot things for free or hardware donations, since at the time I had no way to accept or spend money (I didn’t know about PayPal back then, nor was I old enough to use it or a checking account). I was also engaged in a few open-source text game development projects — and am still a developer for ProtoMUCK, even though I haven’t submitted anything in a couple of years.
I recall having spent some time looking into some of SecondLife’s very early tests, but it wasn’t until I rediscovered it (by accident, through a webcomic’s links page) in mid-2004 that it held my attention. I spent alot of time during my first year in SecondLife just playing around — building things, scripting things, scripting other things to build things, and then blowing them up. I remember my second or third day, me and my other online friends (who I immediately recruited into this interesting new virtual world) stopped over a random parcel and started a crude attempt at building an airplane. We didn’t understand land ownership back then, and it turned out we were building on the land of a small club — Blue Hair something — but the owners didn’t mind, and seemed to enjoy watching us maim what used to be perfectly good cubes (it took us several days to learn we could build other shapes, and several weeks to learn I could move prims without having to type the numbers in directly each and every time).
With the help of my friends (and some passers-by, who donated some L$ to pay the L$100 group starting fee), we created a group. The group was named GinkoTech Engineering, and it became the group for me and all of the friends I had recruited into SecondLife from the text games I was a part of. Eventually, we decided to buy some land of our own (by now, I had gotten a PayPal account and my PayPal debit card), pooled our money together, and purchased a 512sqm parcel in Riiki. We considered it our a personal sandbox, and did whatever we cared to at the time. Eventually, we decided we should build some type of “face” for our “company” (group) in SecondLife, and a large tower was erected on our land in Riiki (we had already expanded the land considerably, I believe up to it’s final size of about 2400 square meters).
This is about when I met Nicholas. I was sitting around building some (very ugly) chairs for my office in the tower, when he flew by to see what was going on. SecondLife was a bit friendlier of a place back then; there were very few regions compared to today, and it was fairly easy to check and see what all was going on across the grid on any particular day. I don’t recall exactly what we talked about, but it ended up with me asking him to make me a business suit (since I couldn’t ever find one), which he did, and eventually he “rented” a small section of land from us to build a shop on. I don’t believe he ever actually paid his rent, which was fine by us at the time. He built and sold furniture from an interesting-looking modern building, and then at some point vanished for what seemed like forever. Later, I learned it was his computer had broken down — and at the time it wasn’t that important of a thing for him to fix it.
It wasn’t until I had long since sold our land in Riiki — and moved on through several stages of personal development — that Nicholas and I met again. My group and I had purchased some land in Arena (a new sim at the time, with alot of wide open space to offer), when Nicholas came back to SecondLife. He had asked if he could use some of our spare land (which we had quite alot of) to start a Texas Hold’em group (which eventually expanded to include chess), and everyone agreed.
At some point in early 2005, Nicholas had an idea to start a virtual bank — which we all promptly laughed at. Thinking nothing of it and fully expecting the idea to flop, I let him use some land and the Ginko name, to start what was then known as GinkoTec Financial (the Tec was later dropped). He hired someone to build a basic off-world ATM/Server system, which promptly broke down with no word back from it’s author about repairs.
It was January 22nd 2005 when I officially started working with Nicholas on Ginko Financial. I remember the date clearly, because I was at a convention when he messaged me saying that the old ATM system had completely broken down, and he needed help. He had about 50 people, with a little over L$28,000 in the bank, and I agreed to repair the damaged code and move it to my server in co-location with Wolfpaw.net in Canada. At this point, I still considered SecondLife nothing more than a game and a hobby, and still refused to use an L$ exchange (Gaming Open Market and IGE at the time) — L$ was play money, my family took care of the bills, and donations from my text game friends and money from eBay auctions paid for my server in co-location (which at the time was only US$36 a month).
The work I did for Nicholas I did for free, as what I considered a hobby and to help out someone I considered a friend. It wasn’t until April 2005 that Nicholas became more demanding about expanding on the Ginko Financial system, and we discussed a method of payment for my time. He had decided on a profit-based payment; every week I would receive a specific percentage of whatever profits he made, credited to my Ginko Financial account balance. I didn’t care about the specifics, and the number only came out to few thousand L$ a week, but it was enough to help the group pay land tier (it was at this point I started selling L$ on the Gaming Open Market).
As Ginko Financial grew, so did customer (and system) demands. Nicholas decided he wanted to purchase the ginkofinancial.com domain, and I suggested to create GF Ambassador — as a shared account — to take the place of Nicholas’s personal avatar for banking activities. I registered both of these, since at the time Nicholas no longer had access to a credit card, and I wasn’t concerned with legalities or policies– I remember thinking to myself, “So what? It’s just a game. If it goes horribly wrong, they’ll cancel my account, and I’ll go back to my carefree bill-less open-source lifestyle.”
[to be continued at a later date]