[Tim Y]

Many of us were left "high and dry" with the unexpected and unannounced demise of PIRCO. I can distinctly recall hearing that people wanted poor Ailne Best's head on a platter (Doc's secretary) when their money from updates and subscriptions were not honored as if it was her fault (What is the old phrase? Don't shoot the messenger?).

Without a printed forum, many of us searched the internet to find kindred spirits. Usernet groups, other horse player sites (ones that allowed conversation) e-mails etc. From about 1999 to 2002 a few of the old group found one another and one member from Maryland actually set up the first post Follow Up forum at yahoo called Sartin Alums. Many of the people here were there in December 2003 (seems longer ago than that) when began (Ty, Earl, Harry (Hook 'em Horns), Dylan, Counterenergy, Binder, Gerald [from Trackmaster], Mark, Kitman etc.) Our moderator here, Bill, actually designed the logo for that group which is there to this day. We talked and compared notes until a long time member, Peter, first introduced us to Guy Wadsworth.

Peter had stayed in touch with him (Sartin Alum posts 333,371,391,443) and reported that he had been the "transition" between the ideas of the methodology, to the practical (program) side of the selection method for years and that now, he was ill with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease- same thing that killed my wife) and without an income. He reported that Guy had written a new program which allowed him to incorporate ideas heretofore NOT ALLOWED in the previous programs, and which he was planning to sell in some way. We contacted him, he became a part of that group, and began offering the earliest phase of the new Speculator program to those interested at a cost much less than the previous versions of Validator (less overhead I guess).

A group of us volunteered to test it versus the older Validator (at that time Val3c was the final version from PIRCO), and report to the group as well as to him. He posted his feedback from various members as in Sartin Alums post 390 where he stressed THERE ARE NO RULES as all had in the Follow Up. As feedback generated new ideas, SpecNF, SecEX, Span, and SpecPa (my favorite of these with the preview lines filtered by pace factors) came into being.

There were problems with these iterations and he tried hard to remedy them. There was a strong request to make them Windows compatible and one of our group had the code and started work on that idea (it was only later that Ted actually accomplished this). I found out later that the intertrack variants were not updated and this allowed for certain tracks (even with the normalized Trackmaster data) to be too fast or too slow. Ted saved the day when Trackmaster changed their speed ratings and Spec160 was the result.

I was amazed at the negative feedback this fellow received all the while he was stating that this was a work in progress not a final version. Comments like "crook," "the guy selling programs out of the trunk of his car" were being posted about a poor guy having NONE of the infrastructure available to him at PIRCO, and the SAME fellow who had written the last several standard programs. I still find that hard to understand.

Guy finally succumbed to his disease (I don't know the final diagnosis but form experience understand it is usually Congestive Heart Failure or pneumonia) and left the programming code with two people so that it would not be lost.

We owe this gentlemen a big dose of gratitude for keeping things alive and changing to the discoveries of those innovative enough to see where improvement could occur.