Author: Karsten Bauermeister
Date: 13:01:12 04/17/98
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On April 17, 1998 at 13:57:19, Steven Schwartz wrote: >On April 17, 1998 at 13:49:16, Christophe Theron wrote: > >>On April 17, 1998 at 08:22:48, Steven Schwartz wrote: >> >>>On April 17, 1998 at 01:34:13, Christophe Theron wrote: >>>>I remember playing once in a store against a Scisys model which had a >>>>mechanical arm. It was maybe christmas 1981 or 1982? It moved the pieces >>>>itself! The program was Sargon 2.5 I think. People from the store had to >>>>throw me out every evening! >>> >>> >>>If it had a robotic arm, it was the Robot Adversary by Novag, >>>programmed by Dave Kittinger. >>>-Steve >> >>It is strange, because I remember the unit seemed to be exactly the one >>of the Sargon 2.5 or Morphy computer. >> >>Maybe I'm just mixing two old memories... >>Christophe > >I think you might be. >Applied Concepts (Texas) introduced the big beautiful, wooden >Sargon 2.5 Auto Response Board (actually manufactured by >A.V.E. Microsystems in California) around that time. >It had no robotic arm but was autosensory. Then when Applied >got out of the business, A.V.E. marketed it by themselves, and, >finally, I convinced Fidelity to buy the boards and put the >their latest Spracklen program inside. Now, THAT was a nice machine. >The best looking board with the strongest program at the time. >-Steve Hi Christophe, hi Steve, it is possible, that Christophe is right! There was a model from Applied Concepts with an robotic arm!! This machine was called Boris Handroid! It was not as elegant as the Novag Robot, but it works. It had an long brown body with an small board in front of it (~20x20 cm). The arm came out on two splints. The Novag Robot is made of metall (the only chess computer, which is made out of metall!!), silver and black, and had a black and mobile arm with a joint. But it is nearly improbable, that Christophe played against this model. My information is that there were only 3 or 5 units were produced. One is in Denmark, one is sold to Japan for 10.000 Dollar a few years ago on a auction in London, and a few are meanwhile scrap. This infos came from Mr. Bauerle, who was the distributor in Europe (seated in Munich) for some years. Karsten
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