Single Comment

I think it was around 1991 (??) that NOST held a straw poll, and came down hard on English Descriptive Notation, in favor of Algebraic. This action disappointed me because it seemed they wanted to say it was okay if a couple people decided - between themselves - to employ Descriptive, but the default notation, at least in their NOSTalgia newsletter, was going to be algebraic. After all these years, I don't know if my memory is serving me rightly. I don't know what came of their 'Algebraic First' policy, or where they went with it, because that was close to the time I dropped out of it. It's just that there were some people who simply preferred English Descriptive Notation because that's the way they'd learned to read (and write) their moves. Of course, for the many, many boardgames that NOST described in its newsletter, and therefore appeared to promote, Descriptive simply had no place, but still, deep down inside, the diminishing frequency of games in English Descriptive Notation might be one of the reasons NOST lost a number of members.