Compass had its genesis in the late 1970's. At that time I was working at NZ Forest Products in Tokoroa where I wrote a small program in FORTRAN to calculate the NS & EW pair numbers for all Mitchell movements, running it on the NZFP mainframe computer. The input to that program was punch cards.

In the early 1980's I purchased a Commodore VIC-20 from the Farmer Trading Company (on the corner of Bridge St and Rosebery Lane) and the developments then started in earnest. The purchase price was around $500 (a fortune in those days) and it came with 5K on ROM. A 32K cartridge "dramatically" expanded the memory. The initial development was done using QBasic and the functionality was limited to the scoring of a duplicate session and aggregation results for a club ladders and tournament sessions.

The next advance came with the advent of the PC in the early 1980s. Compass was reinvented using the GWBasic language which was a huge leap forward. PC based databases were only a twinkle in ones eye at that time so we had to rely on random access files for the storage of the club members file and the calendar of events.

The next leap in development occurred in the 1990s with the introduction of MS Visual Basic. This opened the world to what Compass is today.

This advance in technology allowed the integration of functionality that includes Electronic Scoring and the integration, via APIs, to third party applications such as Hello Club (which enables club to be cashless) and email.

The serious development that has occurred using VB6 has been a two edge sword. It was always my intention to convert the program to VB.NET and event attempted it a few times, but the complexity was like going from Snap to Bridge so that idea floundered.

So Compass continues to be developed using VB6. This is not really a problem as we still provide the bridge communtity with a world class system.

Bob Fearn
October 2020