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Subject: Re: Historical Question ...

Author: Paul

Date: 12:25:20 04/03/01

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On April 03, 2001 at 13:37:12, Heiner Marxen wrote:

>On April 03, 2001 at 06:15:46, Paul wrote:

>>I have the Chess 0.5 sources (by Peter Frey & Larry Atkin) in "The Byte Book of
>>Pascal" from 1979. You are right about the readability ... I've been tempted
>>several times to type it into my computer over the years, but couldn't bring
>>myself to it because of it! Does anyone know if it's available online?

>Oh, those old days!
>
>I just talked to an old friend, who (around 1980) did type in exactly this
>Pascal program.  It did not run properly at first, because of a missing
>but crucial semicolon... that was a tough debugging job.
>He suspects that it could still be on one of those old magtapes, but we
>don't know where we could find a magtape drive...  so: sorry, it is not
>available online, here.

That's a pity ... but nice to hear someone was brave enough to type that in! :)

I know your "old" friend wasn't the only one because there was a program called
Chess 0.5x by Wim Elsenaar participating in the Dutch CC Championships in the
eighties. See http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/thstorm/dcc_hist.html .

He won in 83 & 84, but later Frans Morsch and Ed Schröder took over from him.
His program was way better in those years than anyone elses ... wonder what
happened to it/him. You can even download the games from all those CCC's in pgn,
didn't know that ... great job, Theo!

Anyway ... in those days I didn't even have a decent Pascal compiler for my
Acorn BBC Master computer, just a little interpreter ... that was another reason
not to type it in ... and later I switched to (Algol68 &) C. I can only say ...
those weren't the days! ;) Well, this brings back some nice memories ... think
I'm gonna replay some old games now ...

Groetjes,
Paul



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