"History, as long as it continues to happen, is always another chance." -- R. Jackson Wilson

Ortwin Paetzold started programming the Lechenicher SchachServer in 2005, which then became the chess server of IECG.  Yours truly held the position of game archivist, whose main function was to aggregate the daily game reports and offer a monthly update for download. In its early days, the LSS was not stable and often crashed over night. Then, as a final sigh, LSS send a list of games supposedly finished the day before. But these lists contained all kinds of games, e.g. very old ones and continuing games, too.

To solve this and other problems, I began to maintain a program that undertook as much of the work as possible. Comparing PGN games was one feature, of course. While this program marks the beginning of my chess programming, this feature is somehow also the starting point of what much later became the Chess Suite.

The program for the LSS was written in the C++ programming language, which I gave up a few years later. In 2013 a fresh start was made with a Java program that compared games based on their game-scores. It was still a command line program of the kind that only programmers like to use. Games from one or two PGN files were compared and the differences of similar games were written to a result file. Todays PGN Comparer shares no code with it, but some of the old ideas, and the human readable file with the differences is still written.

This little program was used every now and then for years and it was adapted or extended from case to case. During this period I also tried to promote the idea and discussed it publicly. E.g., I published already in 2013 some results at chessgames.com. But there was little interest, to say the least.

In January 2016 I decided to renew my graphical programming skills with an extensive project. Everyone should be able to make PGN comparisons easily, and then view the comparison result and analyse the reasons for the differences, too. During the next ten months todays PGN Comparer and Result Viewer were developed. In 2018 this code was joined with some of my other chess applications, and for the first time I called it the Chess Suite.

In April 2019 I made the Chess Suite public on GitHub because I had to undergo a major surgery in May. And you never know ... Fortunately, I was able to resume programming a few months later.

When I programmed new features during the following years, it was an obstacle that the code on GitHub should always be stable and tested. Therefore I made the repository on GitHub private again and distributed copies only personally. As soon as I hear from programmers who want to work on the Chess Suite, that would be a very good reason to make the code public again.

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The Chess Suite is a desktop program using an old graphical library called Swing, which was a good choice back when I begun and still serves fine. But it is not cutting-edge technology.

Modern implementations would probably run in a browser by means of some JavaScript library. This would not mean any advantage for the user (rather the opposite is true), but code-wise one would not be sitting on a dead branch. Swing is however part of Java's JDK, and hence it can be used in the foreseeable future.