Reportedly, this all started when Philip Linden was in the shower. He envisioned this vast green, continuous landscape, distributed across multiple servers... and went on to build it. Andrew Linden has said in the forums that Linden Lab (LL) was started as a hardware company geared towards the research and development of haptics. They needed a virtual world to go with their hardware, and so they started building what became Linden World and, later, Second Life. This hardware is also said to still exist, with the nickname "The Rig", sitting in a box somewhere in Linden Lab offices; it has been stated that the code used to interface with "The Rig" was most likely removed recently in 2005 around SL 1.6.