Chase Walk ComputingBeginingsThe first Chasewalks were managed by a program that members of the Nationwide Communications team had written (on a Commadore PET, if I remember), that was designed for individual events, such as marathons. The team structure of the Chasewalk didnt fit this very well, and so in about 1985, I volunteered the use of my IBM PC (8088, 256k, twin 5.25" 360kb floppy, 80x25 green screen) and my very rudimentary programming skills to do something better.The first program was in interpreted BASIC, only one computer for all the input and output, and with about 100 teams through 14 checkpoints thats 1,400 entries to be made, what seemed to work well in test wilted under the strain... however, we got the results out, the small army to typists worked all night to create the certificates, and we learned some lessons. In the second or third year, I was joined by Andy Smith as co-programmer. Early experiments with sharing data between 2 PC's over a serial link - all written in BASIC, led to us adopting a utility called $25 Network, which we pushed well beyond its design limits with 5 daisy-chaned workstations up to 100m apart across Beaudesert. We did some rather natty things like calling machine code subroutines that Id written to do some of the things BASIC was just TOO slow at (really simple things like moving screens of data in and out of the display buffer) - but then we aquired a copy of Borland's TurboBASIC compiler, and finally lost the confines of the BASIC interpreter. Subsequent upgrades to PowerBASIC Version 3.2 is what the code is now run under-- though there are still fragments of early BASIC code in the programs that work, though God knows how, I've no idea and I wrote them! Getting seriousBy about 1995 I had assembled enough cast out bits of Token Ring kit to go seriously up-market to a real LAN. My new 486 was running OS/2 Warp with LAN Server, and the clients still ran DOS, but this proper file sharing system wouldn't allow us our original method of leaving all the files open and managing data integrity ourselves, so a major re-write of all the code ensued, completely changing the way we accessed data, using some of PowerBASIC 3.2's powerful Flexstring abilities, though on the surface, or should I say screen, things remained much the same.
Where are we today?Well, you're reading this arn't you? We are using computing and the internet in a much wider role to add more to the Chase Walk for competitors, spectators and even staff. Better results in more depth than we can publish on paper, first tried in 1999 and fully working from 2000. Encouraging people to join us and discover the pleasures of achieving something they might have thought beyond them, and sharing information about their performance on the day to help plan for future improvments...Andy Upton. |