Wow, in October Nightmare has its 30th anniversary.
Cheers,
Gerd
Hi Gerd, Thanks!
But this is not entirely true, I programmed the first version during the fall of 1977 and it played it's first moves in januari 1978. It played some friendly matches against schak-123 (later schak-H) and the first program of W. Rens (later Gambiet 81). Unfortunately all these games are lost for humanity. It didn't play in the first Dutch championships because they had the strange rule that you had to play 3 games in parallel. It was just a little bit too much work to program in assembler on a small micro.
Now I'm retired early, mainly because of the economic crisis, and I have more time to spent on the engine than I ever had before.
Gerd Isenberg wrote:
Wow, in October Nightmare has its 30th anniversary.
But this is not entirely true, I programmed the first version during the fall of 1977 and it played it's first moves in januari 1978. It played some friendly matches against schak-123 (later schak-H) and the first program of W. Rens (later Gambiet 81). Unfortunately all these games are lost for humanity. It didn't play in the first Dutch championships because they had the strange rule that you had to play 3 games in parallel. It was just a little bit too much work to program in assembler on a small micro.
Now I'm retired early, mainly because of the economic crisis, and I have more time to spent on the engine than I ever had before.
Interesting, I didn't know that you are such a real CC dinosaur
"Schak123" aka Schak-H ran on a self built system around the Signetics 2650 by the brothers H. and H. van der Liet in Amsterdam (http://old.csvn.nl/pre_hist.html). I think Wim Rens is still working on GambitVB as well.
Gerd Isenberg wrote:
Wow, in October Nightmare has its 30th anniversary.
But this is not entirely true, I programmed the first version during the fall of 1977 and it played it's first moves in januari 1978. It played some friendly matches against schak-123 (later schak-H) and the first program of W. Rens (later Gambiet 81). Unfortunately all these games are lost for humanity. It didn't play in the first Dutch championships because they had the strange rule that you had to play 3 games in parallel. It was just a little bit too much work to program in assembler on a small micro.
Now I'm retired early, mainly because of the economic crisis, and I have more time to spent on the engine than I ever had before.
Interesting, I didn't know that you are such a real CC dinosaur
"Schak123" aka Schak-H ran on a self built system around the Signetics 2650 by the brothers H. and H. van der Liet in Amsterdam (http://old.csvn.nl/pre_hist.html). I think Wim Rens is still working on GambitVB as well.
The brothers van der Liet lived very near by my home in Amsterdam.
I went to their house on several occasions and took my computer with me to play the matches. My computer was already modern because it had a real terminal. I remember Schak-123 was entirely programmed with toggle-switches. And these guys were unbelievable good at that.
Gerd Isenberg wrote:
Wow, in October Nightmare has its 30th anniversary.
But this is not entirely true, I programmed the first version during the fall of 1977 and it played it's first moves in januari 1978. It played some friendly matches against schak-123 (later schak-H) and the first program of W. Rens (later Gambiet 81). Unfortunately all these games are lost for humanity. It didn't play in the first Dutch championships because they had the strange rule that you had to play 3 games in parallel. It was just a little bit too much work to program in assembler on a small micro.
Now I'm retired early, mainly because of the economic crisis, and I have more time to spent on the engine than I ever had before.
Interesting, I didn't know that you are such a real CC dinosaur
"Schak123" aka Schak-H ran on a self built system around the Signetics 2650 by the brothers H. and H. van der Liet in Amsterdam (http://old.csvn.nl/pre_hist.html). I think Wim Rens is still working on GambitVB as well.
The brothers van der Liet lived very near by my home in Amsterdam.
I went to their house on several occasions and took my computer with me to play the matches. My computer was already modern because it had a real terminal. I remember Schak-123 was entirely programmed with toggle-switches. And these guys were unbelievable good at that.
I see, so real machine programming, enter (increment) address and op-code/data with switches - amazingly. I did that for a digital clock on my self-build 8080 system
Are the Van der Liet brothers still alive? Do you have their given names?
And what was your computer, a TRS-80?
They were three brothers, I vaguely remember the names Hans and Henk. (But I could be totally off after all this time. Googling confirms the initials H and H, however.) And I remember shortly after the first CSVN championships, one of them was killed in a stabbing incident. Very sad...
I also remember they already had invented the concept of overclocking on their home-built machine. They brought a special quarz crystal in a small box with a higher frequency, and swapped the regular crystal for this 'match crystal'. It was only used during the game.
Gerd Isenberg wrote:
Are the Van der Liet brothers still alive? Do you have their given names?
And what was your computer, a TRS-80?
I don't remember their names, it is all a bit vague after 35 years.
There is a Prof. Henk van der Liet working at Amsterdam University, there is a big chance that he is one of the two brothers I met.
At that time I was working for Heathkit in the Netherlands and I bought the first Heathkit H8 that became available. It was a 2 MHz. 8080 with 16 kB RAM. It costed a fortune, the 16 kB static RAM alone was already 1800 Dutch guilders, and that was a lot of money in 1977.
hgm wrote:They were three brothers, I vaguely remember the names Hans and Henk. (But I could be totally off after all this time. Googling confirms the initials H and H, however.) And I remember shortly after the first CSVN championships, one of them was killed in a stabbing incident. Very sad...
I never met three brothers, only two, maybe one already left their parents house. You are probably right about their names, Hans en Henk certainly rings a bell. And now you mention it, I also remember something about a stabbing incident at the beginning of the 80's.
Very sad indeed.
Gerd Isenberg wrote:
Are the Van der Liet brothers still alive? Do you have their given names?
And what was your computer, a TRS-80?
I don't remember their names, it is all a bit vague after 35 years.
There is a Prof. Henk van der Liet working at Amsterdam University, there is a big chance that he is one of the two brothers I met.
At that time I was working for Heathkit in the Netherlands and I bought the first Heathkit H8 that became available. It was a 2 MHz. 8080 with 16 kB RAM. It costed a fortune, the 16 kB static RAM alone was already 1800 Dutch guilders, and that was a lot of money in 1977.
I worked for Siemens at that time, quality control of 8080/85 controlled relais phone systems. Sometimes there were transportation damages and it was possible for employees to buy slighly damaged processor and static ram boards for scrap Kg prices. So in the late 70s I had an 8085 system with seven segment display and hex-switches. A year later I had a rack with huge power supply, two 8 inch 250 KB floppy drives and 64 K static ram, own build CP/M system already with turbo pascal. Unfortunately this was more than 10 years before I started with computer chess
I had a Heath H89 (the one built into a video monitor chassis). It was Z80 based and I eventually expanded it with 8" floppies and a memory disk (hard drives were incredibly expensive back then). I wrote some assembler programs for it including a complete word processor that was sold commercially for a while. The word processor code was so large it had to use overlays and swap different parts of the program from disk to memory as needed.
I don't think I did any chess programming on it. I think the first chess programming I did was on an early Tandy system (post TRS-80).
jdart wrote:I had a Heath H89 (the one built into a video monitor chassis). It was Z80 based and I eventually expanded it with 8" floppies and a memory disk (hard drives were incredibly expensive back then). I wrote some assembler programs for it including a complete word processor that was sold commercially for a while. The word processor code was so large it had to use overlays and swap different parts of the program from disk to memory as needed.
I don't think I did any chess programming on it. I think the first chess programming I did was on an early Tandy system (post TRS-80).
--Jon
After the H8 I also got a H89 and after that a Tandy-2000.
The Tandy-2000 was a real rip-off, I paid almost 15000 guilders for it, and one year later they were sold for something like 2000. I never bought anything from Tandy again.
