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REBEL's Early Days (1980-1990)
In 1980 I became interested again in chess when the first personal computers entered the market. I felt it was a challenge to write a program that could play chess just for a hobby, I gave it the name REBEL.
It was developed on a poor TRS-80 computer of 1,77 Mhz. With REBEL I entered the Dutch Computer Championship of 1982 and it became the sensation of the tournament, a third place. Later during the 80's REBEL became Dutch Champion 4 times.
In 1984 I received an attractive offer from the world's biggest Computer Chess Manufacturer at that time Hegener & Glaser, Munich, Germany to write chess programs for their dedicated product line. I accepted their offer and in the period of 1985-1995 about 12-15 models of the so called dedicated chess computers have been sold worldwide with my signature, roughly estimated at 350,000 copies.
REBEL during that time was developed on an APPLE IIe 2 Mhz personal computer and the chess program moved via a so called eprom programmer into an EPROM, a small chip which became the beating heart of the dedicated chess computer.
In those early days of Computer Chess the Computer Chess Manufacturers (mainly SAITEK Hong Kong, Fidelity USA, Hegener & Glaser West Germany, NOVAG USA) met each year somewhere in the world during the yearly World Championship for Micro Computers. REBEL did well, it conquered on several occasions the second place, yet REBEL's absolute breakthrough had to wait until the
90's.
With thanks to Kurt's Chess Computer page for the picture of the dedicated chess computer the Mephisto RISC.
Click on the picture to enlarge.
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