Timeline

It all started with a graph database. While taking a database course in my computer science studies, I learned about graph databases and the unique way they work to capture the state of things and their relationships with each other. I had an idea for a knowledge system that formed around a model for knowing things about any particular thing — the system would keep well-connected and orderly graphs of all the people, places, things, and ideas for whatever you wanted to know about, with smaller atomic apps constantly running to feed it with updated information and news. In 2016, while working in legal marijuana business news, the idea formed the center of an un-realized pitch for a new product.

In 2014, I started a Minecraft Realms world to build for my kids and kept building even after they stopped playing. Sometime in 2017 I started building Loop 1.0 — a giant sprawling redstone computer centered around a loop-line memory system inspired by mercury tube memory systems made for real computers back in the 1940s. For seven years I tinkered with the build.

In 2024, I finally figured out how to build the last parts needed to run basic operations — the serial-to-parallel latching system, which allowed the bits of data flying around my memory loop to be ‘captured’ and used to run ALU operations, the basic math of computing. It was slow and clunky, but this machine that I had constructed, running with the Operator as the program, was actually Turing complete.

Eighteen months after first getting Loop 1.0 to work, the very last piece snapped into place — the ability to load the five-bit answer back into memory. The loop was literally complete on that. The redstone was a little ugly, but it worked and could be improved later.

I could see that Loop 1.0 was fun, but I could also see SO many places where I could make things better, so I started building what I called Loop 2.0 — taking all the basic ideas from Loop 1.0 but making them more powerful and flexible. I built out the full display and most of the controls before I ran into a problem.

Minecraft was going to be too slow. Loop 2.0, as conceived, would be entirely too slow to have fun operating, so I opened up a Claude window and asked it ‘Hey, you can code, right?’, and the work on Loop 2.1 began.

While working nights and weekends on the Loop 2.1 computer, I managed to build a beautiful 18,000-line manual flow computer in a single browser file. The thing worked and the code was not spaghetti.

In just a few days, the pattern behind the machine crawled out of my head through my keyboard into a standalone methodology: Loop MMT — Multi-Module Theory. Twenty documents in one twenty-seven-hour stretch.

I called out of work on Friday after waiting the week — I could not wait any more. By Monday, the Butcher Constellation had shipped — the first real project built the Loop MMT way and the first real demonstration of its capabilities.

After Butcher shipped, it was clear to me that this system I was building could do more than just write software, and Loop MMT opened as its own line of work. I did not go back to work again as a carpenter.

As with so many things with Loop MMT, ‘derive, don’t read’ came out of the work itself and soon became the center core of the system.

A molt system was developed, allowing Loop MMT to expand its shell five times over the span of a month, leaving behind everything it didn’t need and coming out fresh and ready to evolve each time.

A large part of my professional background is in media production, so a Content Management System seemed like a no-brainer to develop.

The final molt — from Field to Shrubbery to Young Pine to Mature Pine to Young Maple to Mature Maple — each molt allowing Loop MMT to transcend where it came from. The Mature Maple is the last molt because it was where Loop MMT found its final state and store through the git system.

As I developed first our CMS app, it got lonely so I added some more apps, and then some more, and then shapes started revealing themselves, and now there’s an entire ecosystem.

Being terminally online, I wanted to finally own all my data — my email, calendar, contacts, files, everything — and that became the Forest.

I saw it as a way to flex this new system I was building AND to score points with my fiancée Jamie, so I built her Jamie’s Garden, a falling-block game that rhymes with Dr. Mario.

This was a concept I had in college but never ended up finishing enough to play, so I dragged out my old notes and threw them into the system — out came Beam Wizards.

A fun idea: Sudoku smashed into Tic-Tac-Toe as a head-to-head strategy game, which became Battleganza. Play on a giant field of Sudoku boards where if you solve a 3x3 region, you get to place a tic-tac-toe mark — first one to get three in a row wins. Loop MMT nailed it. Or I should say, is nailing it, since development is still ongoing.

Today Loop MMT continues to evolve, weaving and wobbling its way towards running better and more elegantly and cleaner, creating beautiful things along the way. Loop World and all the other systems under the Loop MMT umbrella continue to evolve and, generally, everything is getting more stitched up together by the day. The future looks very bright indeed.