Welcome, everyone, to the site.

I am your humble blogger, who finally decided to take the plunge and just start talking to whoever out there is willing to venture into this little corner of the internet.

So far, I’ve been seeing a lot of crazy things coming from people who probably shouldn’t be anywhere near a camera, especially when they’re talking about large companies being bought out by people who seem to despise their own user base.

Look at Microsoft, for instance. Look at all the nonsense they’ve forced down the throats of the masses, and all the technology they’ve destroyed in the name of making profits grow and grow. I still haven’t forgiven anyone over there for what they did to Netscape.

Now, in my humble and rather somber way of thinking, I believe everyone deserves a choice.

The mere thought of Big Brother, or people who seek the absolute blanket of protection offered by giant corporations, bothers me. Throughout history, there have always been useful idiots willing to help powerful people gain even more control, often without thinking about where that road eventually leads.

Where does all of this come from, you ask?

Well, it’s simply what I’ve seen throughout my time on this planet.

I remember a time when people seemed nicer to one another, when paranoia wasn’t constantly hanging over everything, and when the simple creature comforts of life still seemed to mean something.

Of course, I know I probably sound like a broken record when I say this, but I honestly believe that roughly 1990 through 2001 was one of the best periods for technology.

Look at the hardware that was available. Look at the projects people were working on. Look at the pieces of software being created. In my opinion, there was an incredible amount of creativity going on during that period.

I remember playing Killer Instinct when it first came out and being completely blown away by how beautiful and sleek that game looked.

It was one of those things where the first time you saw the arcade machine, you knew the world around you was changing.

I think the same thing can be said about operating systems.

I love Windows 3.1 with all my heart, and I also have a tremendous amount of affection for Windows 95. After that, and right up until Windows XP, most of Microsoft’s operating systems were, in my books, bloated trash. Everything after XP has simply never been my cup of tea.

Will we ever see the beauty of those older systems again?

Probably not.

And I think that’s honestly kind of pathetic, because you’d think people would appreciate simplicity. There was something beautiful about that average, run-of-the-mill sense of futurism you used to find in both Windows and Linux.

The older I get, the more I sometimes feel like the modern world resembles North Korea.

Not in the literal sense of thought police watching your every move. Although, with all the high-tech devices around us constantly collecting information, I suppose we’ve managed to create our own strange version of that too.

What I really mean is that everything today is glossy, modern, fancy, and covered in expensive-looking paint, but underneath it all there often doesn’t seem to be much substance.

It’s an empty shell.

Everything is designed to look impressive rather than simply work well.

What I miss is actual effort being put into creating something using only the pieces necessary to make it useful, reliable, and fast.

That brings me to something I’ve been working on.

I’ve been developing a simulation that I’ve wanted to make for a very long time.

Like I mentioned earlier, I truly love the idea of a simulation.

Not simply because it’s fun to participate in the bigger picture, whether you’re dealing with sports, trading, economics, or something else. What fascinates me is the idea of taking a piece of code and expanding it until nearly every possibility can be analyzed and accounted for by something you’ve created yourself.

You would not believe how many sleepless nights I’ve spent trying to work around some stupid little issue that was preventing me from properly testing my work.

I’m obviously not over here banging rocks together, but I’m also not pretending that I’m creating something that’s going to completely blow the minds of everyone on Earth.

That would be pretty cool, though.

For the most part, I’m simply trying to create something inspiring.

At one point I was sitting around, surfing the internet and wondering about all the technology we’ve lost over the years.

I know that sounds fucking stupid, but let me tell you about something you may never have heard of.

Did you know that simulation programs were once being written specifically to predict and simulate sporting events?

If you’re reading this website, there’s a decent chance you’re old enough to remember those old handheld betting systems for horse racing and other sports. You could put in information about teams, players, records, statistics, or whatever else you could find and then hope this little machine would somehow predict the winner of the next big game.

Of course, most of them weren’t particularly useful.

You were feeding the information into the program yourself, trying to collect every possible statistic you could find, and then expecting the software to somehow predict the future.

Honestly, using software to predict gambling results is fucking stupid.

But simulation itself?

That’s something completely different.

While looking into this stuff, I discovered a very interesting record that somebody had uploaded to Archive.org called The Greatest Baseball Game Never Played.

It was broadcast over the radio throughout much of North America, and the entire thing revolved around a really fascinating piece of software written for the Apple III.

The idea was to simulate a baseball game using some of the greatest players of all time.

I listened to the album and couldn’t stop thinking about how much work must have gone into that software.

Who wrote it?

How complicated was it?

How did the simulation actually work?

What statistics did it use?

Does a copy of the program still exist somewhere?

Who knows?

Maybe it’s sitting on an old disk in someone’s basement. Maybe it’s completely gone.

But in my mind, that software is a genuine piece of computer history, and something like that belongs in a museum.

If you don’t believe me, here is the description from the site:

“The Greatest Baseball Game Never Played was a 1982 simulated broadcast of a hypothetical baseball game between all-time Major League Baseball greats. The broadcast was aired on 200 radio stations in the United States and Canada, and an edited version was released as a record album.

The game was simulated on an Apple III computer using custom software and was announced by Jack Buck and Lindsey Nelson and set in Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. Following the format of the All-Star Game, it featured National League players against players from the American League. The National League won 5-4, on Henry Aaron’s game-winning RBI. For his effort, Aaron was awarded game MVP.

The Greatest Game Never Played documents the perception of who the greatest players were seventeen years before the selection of the Major League Baseball All-Century Team. All of the players in both starting lineups made the All-Century team except for American League shortstop Phil Rizzuto.”

And that got me thinking.

What if I wrote a simulator where the player could simply sit back and watch an entire baseball game unfold?

You start the program, pick what you want, and then just watch the sport of baseball play itself out.

Think of it as your own personal baseball league living inside a handful of megabytes.

That’s the kind of thing I find fascinating.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to include real Major League teams and players like you find in other baseball games, but I honestly don’t feel like getting myself into legal trouble, especially while Rome seems to be burning around me.

Maybe someday I’ll make a separate .dat file containing that sort of information.

Who knows?

For now, though, I’m much more interested in building the simulation itself and seeing just how far I can take the idea.

And with that being said, I think that’s probably enough rambling for my first blog post.

Welcome to the site.