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Subject: About Comet and about Ron Nelson, alive and kicking

Author: Fernando Villegas

Date: 15:25:45 05/02/01


First a word about Comet. My congrats to Ulrich. I do not even remember the one
hour test and less if it is telling or not of the playing strenght, but surely I
can appreciate that his program is getting more acumen, version after version.
He goes deeper, faster and has a lot better evaluation. I had felt that at my
own cost. BTW, probably Comet is the program with the highest rate of new
deliveries ever, some times for substancial upgrades, other times for just bug
fixes. How many? More than 50, I believe. This incredible and steady work
deserves an applause. If only Ulrich would decide one day to make it windows, as
much as being a DOS program it has the unpleasant penchant to disorganize the
screen display after being unloaded.

Then Ron nelson. I wonder how many people here remember that name. I myself
thought he was retired. Maybe even deceased. My God... Well, Ron Nelson was the
inventor of Fidelity computers in the 70's, in fact the programmer behind
Fidelity Challenger 3 to 8, plus Voice Challenger with and withoput sensory
board. Then the Spracklen team arrived and the star of Mr Nelson seemed to fade.

But it is not so. He is alive and kicking. After some questions related with the
man behind current Excalibur stuff, that I believed were refurbished old
Spracklen programs, the member of this site, Mr Krantack, has received an email
by Nelson - which I discover here as much Nelson himself has talked about this
in other site- in which he tell that he and only he is the author of, by
example, LCD Excalibur engine. What is more, he say with great force that He is
the owner of the program, not Excalibur, and that is not light feat to get so
much from such a tiny device. He say LCd program has not more than 16 Kb ram and
run at 6 Mhz. He insist that too many people has has been "brainwashed" with
huge processor. Clearly he is proud with his work and  in fact he has the right;
after all he is getting a lot more perfomance from these tiny devices that what
he got in the 70's, when he was 30 years younger. Sure even the tiny thing is
more powerful than the Zylog procesor -or similar- he used in the Challenger
family, but even so it is a happy new to know about his longevity in a field
where from one day to another great personalities just disappear.
Fernando



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