Today June 24 2015 it's about 35 years ago (summer 1980) I went to a store to buy a computer to write a chess program. I could not imagine what started as a hobby would change the course of my life.
The computer was a TRS-80 and for the money (2600 dutch guillders, aprox. 3000 euro nowadays) I got:
Processor Z80 running at 1.77 Mhz (about 5000 times slower than nowadays average PC).
16 Kb memory (about 200,000 times less than nowadays average PC).
Casette recorder for storage. No harddisk, USB stick, not even a floppy drive those days, saving a souce file of 10-12 Kb took about 15 minutes.
Not an ideal starting point, but from one thing came another.
This website is a summary of REBEL products in chronical order basically divided into 4 sections:
The Dedicated area of the 80's, Fidelity, Mephisto, Novag, Saitek etc.
The MSDOS area of the 90's.
The ChessMachine of the 90's.
Transporting REBEL as ProDeo as an engine runing under different interfaces in 2003/4 and beyond.