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By SimHQ on November 13, 2007 in _commentary

SimHQ is Ten Years Old

If I had a child ten years old, little “SimHQ” would be going to school, learning, having fun with his or her friends, all those things that ten year olds do. And this week to celebrate, we’d be having a big birthday party with friends, cake and candles and presents.

How does that translate to an internet site? It doesn’t equate, does it? An internet site doesn’t go to school, run around on a playground, go to summer camp. An internet site could be thought of as the server it resides on, the network connections, hardware and software, ones and zeroes. Let’s say I bought all the components, hooked them up, installed and configured the software, plugged it in. Maybe I’d have an internet site. Then, ten years went by.

Would that be cause for celebration? Not to me.

My first question to myself, on pondering SimHQ’s Tenth Anniversary therefore, was an elemental one:

What is SimHQ?

Is it the hardware that resides in a 100 foot deep bunker surrounded by bomb-proof concrete walls and banks of air conditioners? Is it the software, the code, the database that contains all the records?

Or is it something more? Something intangible, not defined by physical parts and pieces, but by the thoughts and the spirit of those who keep that database alive. More than the sum of the parts, gestalt. I won’t define SimHQ here, you all can do that in your own way. At the basic level, we are a hobbyist web site devoted to simulations. But not so basic and not solely so.

We are more than that, we are neighbors, talking across a virtual back fence or a front porch about our lives, our interests, our ups and our downs. People ask for help here, they get it. We can say things to other members that would not register on many people or just bore the heck out of them. When we talk about our “wow” factor on seeing a Heritage flight, other members echo that thought. A new simulation or a mod, and add-on comes out and we’re all chomping at the bit. An honored veteran of military service pay us a call and we are so thrilled that they are here, that they would care to be a part of us.

We are community, no matter where in the world we are.

My second question to myself on this Anniversary, was what SimHQ means to me.

It took a lot of thought, but I condensed it down into a list….

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