- My chess club, Carasaxa Breitensee, hosted a
very popular chess tournament (the Carasaxa Tournament) in Vienna every summer, in which between
100 and 200 players participated. Therefore, my club colleague Franz
Ruppert and I decided, just before the 1985 tournament, to develop a program together. We
used my parents' company computer, an IBM PC-XT (4.7 MHz and 64
KB of memory), and BASIC served as the programming language. We finished on time,
but the draw still had some weaknesses. We therefore mostly set
the pairings manually and then printed out the lists.
- In the fall of 1985, I took a more professional approach. In September 1985, I was able to
redesign and program the draw program as part of an internship at the Technical University's Institute for Practical Computer Science
under Professor Barth. My parents' company computer also served as the computer, and the programming language was PASCAL.
- One year later, the program was converted to an Atari Mega-ST2 using the ST-PASCAL/68000 version 2.02 programming language. The program was continuously improved over the next few years and already contained more than 16,000 lines of code.
- In July 1991, it was again converted to IBM-compatible computers (80386). The programming language used was Borland's TURBO-PASCAL version 6.0. The program had a graphical user interface and
could be easily operated with a mouse and keyboard.
- The conversion to Windows 3.1x and Windows 95/NT took place from May to September 1997 using Delphi 1.0 and 2.0. The program has grown to over 25,000 lines of code. Starting with this version, round-robin and team round-robin tournaments are also integrated.
- Starting in February 1999, team Swiss System tournaments were also integrated. The number of code lines grew to over 38,000 by October 1999.
- Starting in September 2000, Delphi 5.0 has been used as the development environment. An extended version is available for the Vienna Chess Association and the Burgenland Chess Association, which manages the club/company championship. Player master data is stored in Access.
- Starting in 2001, all lists can be saved in Excel format (Excel
does not need to be installed).
- The program is continuously adapted to meet changing requirements. It currently comprises approximately 90,000 lines of code.
- I estimate the total time spent at over 3,000 hours of work.
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