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Subject: Re: Experience of chess programmers

Author: Dave Kuntzsch

Date: 11:40:59 06/28/03

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I took Fortran in college for which I was graded poorly. It seems my logic did
not solve problems the way the instructor thought it should be done. Then in a
career with IBM, I picked up 360/370 assembler (including "zaps" in machine
language), Cobol, PL1 and PLS (a combination of inline assembler and high level
compiler language.) In my spare time, I built a Z80 computer from a kit that
interfaced with a re-PROMed IBM 3270 keyboard that converted EBCIDIC to ASCII,
and a Hitachi TV modified so that I could feed the computer's video output
directly into the TV's video stages. Bulk input was through an audio tape on an
ordinary cassette recorder. The whole thing is still in the basement. After
fooling around with Z80 machine language typing programs directly into memory, I
acquired an assembler and over the next five or six years, wrote a chess program
that had much of the function found in today's programs. Alas, the 4Mz, 8 bit
processor did not allow going much further than 4 plies deep, although it had
the capability to do so if I wanted to wait  long enough. Then the IBM PC came
along, chess programming ended, and I learned Basic and Pascal writing various
stuff, some of which ended up on the old bulletin boards. After leaving IBM, a
consulting career led to adding REXX. Now after returning to work after a two
year semi-retirement, I'm writing PERL scripts to monitor a unique
hardware/software communications environment. Maybe some day, I'll return to the
chess stuff again. Who knows what language it will be in.

Dave

Dave



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