To those of us who grew up on descriptive:

Remember in the '70s when the USA converted to algebraic, dragging many of us kicking & screaming to the new system?

When I was just past ten years old, I learned descriptive notation (DN) by placing masking tape of the names of he squares on a folding cardboard until the logic finally made sense to me. Reading what few available chess books went slowly, but eventually things started to click.

A few years later, I remember IM Kim Commons writing a column in Chess Life & Review (yes, before it became Chess Life) in algebraic notation (AN), scolding any reader who frowned at this (admittedly) superior system.

The switch seemed to really take hold of the chess world in our country. It seemed that the emotional battle raged in letters-to-the-editors as the number one topic, and some players threatened to quit rather than be forced to change (echos of the metric system). I recall one former US Junior Chess Champion from the late 1950s who had dropped out of chess for a while. When he returned and saw the blasphemous AN being used, he wrote to Chess Life, theorizing that this notation change was the primary cause for membership decline in USCF.

Like many others, I did not like changing, and still recorded my tournament games in good old DN; at the same time I felt a (secret) thrill at reading foreign chess annotations with my newfound AN (my first was a Swedish pamphlet on the Volga gambit.)

Eventually, when more and more of magazines and books crossed over to AN, I eventually also converted, and started using it in my tournament games (though more than once I would switch subconsciously to DN mid-game if time pressure approached.)

In a recent tournament, I was paired with an American IM from the 1960's, and I smiled to myself to see that he STILL used DN to record his game score.

I feel fortunate that I fell into the bracket of players who learned descriptive and then were "forced" to learn algebraic when the USA converted to the rest of the world. Now I can reap the benefits from the contemporary works as well as the classics which are not reprinted.

Now, if I can only learn how to program those dang digital clocks...

I converted to algebraic effortlessly, when the Informants started coming out in 1966. I still sometimes hear "Kings' Knight to Queen's Bishop Three" in my head though, when looking at moves. My main problem now, as a newbie, is to get chess.com to give me diagrams with lines and squares inside them!

I learned to play in 1942 at age 8, when the only books for beginners were Capablanca's "Primer," Fine's "Basic Chess Endings," and Nimzovitch's "My System," together with an oddity from Edward Lasker entitled "Chess for Fun and Chess for Blood." All of which I still own.

Hello to all.

I learned to play blindfold chess with the old AN and it was easy. Then the dreaded change happen. I kept playing it the old style and quit reading the new chess material.

Finally when I retired and started teaching chess to beginners and kids in the after school programs I had to accept and converted.

I haven't totally put it in memory cause it take me a while when I play blindfold chess using the new system.