Home Page

RaceManPro Benefits and Overview

RaceManPro Registration and Download

RaceManPro History

RaceManPro History

August 1989

When I was President/Race Coordinator/Race Director for the Hawaii Amateur Windsurfing Association International Inc. (H.A.W.A.I.I.), I found that conducting the events was only part of the job. Before the event, there was a lot of preparation, publicity and promotion to be done. After the event came the paperwork: checking the results, updating the recordbook, notifying the newspapers, and tracking event income and expenses. On event day, if the wind was light, we did Course Racing ... but if we had good wind, we went for Slalom Racing. Back then, Slalom Racing was usually done with the Elimination Competition Format and that wasn't really fun for anyone except the winners! After the second round, 75% of the racers were sitting on the beach watching the skilled or lucky ones have fun! We experimented with several slalom formats but none were exactly what we were looking for. Then H.A.W.A.I.I. member from Canada, Cam Rawlinson suggested a different system using random heat assignments combined with Low Point Scoring. The concept was excellent and we tried it. The racers liked it because it put the fun back into racing! No more sitting around on the beach. No more watching the good guys (or lucky ones) race. With everybody racing every race, it was "racing to da max!" and it didn't take any more time than the traditional Elimination system! But it took a lot of time to randomize the heats.

Turbo Pascal

One day I was talking story with some of my windsurfing friends visiting me from Europe. They had just graduated with a Computer Science degree so I asked them if it might be possible to write a program to randomly assign Slalom Heats. "Sure, that's easy!" was their answer. Several hours later, we had a prototype program and several weeks later, a working program which would randomize heats by Roster Line number for any number of racers and heats. That was the simple beginning of RaceManPro, written in TurboPascal for DOS.

Paradox 3.5 and Access 2.0

The next year my programmer friends returned and we agreed to expand our simple random heat assignment application. We chose Borland's Paradox 3.5 (and later upgraded to 4.0) as our platform. My friends wrote the kernel code while I did the databasing. The Paradox Application Language (P.A.L.) proved powerful enough but unfortunately, when the time came to begin making program disks, the Paradox Personal Programmer (P.P.P) was extremely buggy so we gave up on it and moved to third party software to build the application.

Meanwhile, Microsoft introduced Windows 3.0 and then 3.1 and then Windows for Workgroups 3.11, which was the first Windows platform good enough to use so we switched to it and Microsoft Access 2.0. It took nearly a year for my friends working part time (they both had fulltime jobs and had to do it in their spare time) to modify the kernel code and it took me six months working full time (8 to12 hours a day) to build the objects (tables, forms, reports, queries, and macros) and another six months to modify the kernel code for specific tasks. Every time we had an event, I would use RaceManPro and I kept thinking of new features which would make my life easier. We finished RaceManPro just about the time Microsoft released Windows 95.

Windows 95

It's been said that in this high tech computer industry, whatever is released today becomes obsolete tomorrow. It certainly seems that way sometimes! When Windows 95 was being promoted and beta tested, it sounded great! My two programmer friends were part of the beta testing program and they told me that if Microsoft fixed all the bugs the beta testers found, it would be a great operating system. Well, as we all know now, Microsoft spent a lot of time and money developing and promoting Windows 95, yet the first release was extremely buggy and unstable. How buggy? Well, when Microsoft VP Steve Balmer promoted Windows 98, he boasted it resolved 5000 Windows 95 bugs! Of course, that was probably just a promotional remark (and an understatement at that!!!) since very few people ever remember Microsoft admitting any "bugs" in Windows 95 at all, just "non-issues" which would be resolved in the next release and "user errors" which would require users to learn how to avoid making errors :-) .

Nevertheless, we switched from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95. After that, our productivity went down, down, down while Windows 95 crashed, crashed, crashed. I'm sure it must have had 50,000 bugs, not just 5000!

Serious Challenges

Not only was Windows 95 crashing constantly, it also was misbehaving in other ways as well. First, we discovered that disks made under Win95 wouldn't run on Windows 3.1 or 3.11 anymore. Seems the hype about Windows 95 being "backwards compatible" wasn't totally correct after all since Windows 95 covered up a lot of Windows 3.x 16-bit Dynamic Link Library files with its own 32-bit versions. Microsoft's answer was, "Not an issue, just get your users to switch to Windows 95". We polled our users and found they didn't want to switch. Finally we found a workaround but it was time consuming and prone to developer error ... just one mistake and we could take out our user's operating system!!! Some workaround that was!!!

Next, our users complained that the forms ran off the page and they couldn't access the entire form. Seems Access Runtime lacked the ability to automatically resize and rescale forms like the Interactive Version of Access did. Microsoft's answer was, "Not an issue, just make a version for each screen size and resolution you expect your users to have". I still can't believe that came from a Microsoft Tech Support person! Fortunately, we found a third party workaround from Germany which does the job we think Microsoft should have done in the first place.

None of us ever found a workaround for Windows 95's frequent and unexpected crashes. On reboot, Win95 automatically ran ScanDisk, then reminded us to shut down the operating system properly next time ... as if the crash was our fault. Believe me, we would have been happy to shutdown properly had Win95 given us a chance! Finally, our frustration levels reached critical mass.

One team member switched from PC to Apple

Another to UNIX

I switched to IBM's OS/2 Warp 4.0 (and when the latest RaceManPro version was finished and uploaded in 2000, I switched to Apple iMac G4 with OS X Jaguar ... which by the way, is the finest computer, operating system and software I've ever used.)

OS/2 Warp proved to be an excellent choice. It was powerful, fast, very stable and a great multitasker. Moreover, it didn't coverup any of Access's DLL files and RaceManPro disks worked under Windows 3.x, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, OS/2 (WIN/OS2) and even Apple using PC emulation software (Note: Apple computers require a G4 processor for satisfactory PC emulation speed). The software should also work on Microsoft's latest offerings, i.e. Windows XP but we haven't personally tested it ourselves.

Costly Venture

Three windsurfers worked seven years to design and develop and field test RaceManPro. My two programmer friends worked part time and I worked full time. Several years ago, they had to get on with their life and careers. I'll always appreciate their hard work and commitment! Right now, the full responsibility of further development falls on my shoulders and I wonder about the wisdom of continuing to develop a "niche" program with virtually no market. Yet, the technology exists to instantly record each racer's crossing at the finish line! Just think of what that would mean! On the other hand, the costs of further development are substantial and I often think the $750,000+ developmental costs to date are enough already!

Meanwhile, enjoy!

While I contemplate what the next step will be, I encourage you to enjoy RaceManPro. Consider RaceManPro your friend ... who is really knowledgeable about windsurfing race management ... who can look over your shoulder and let you know when you make a mistake ... who can do in seconds or minutes what would take you hours or days ... and best of all, is ready to give you a hand anytime day or night. I hope you enjoy using it as much as the three of us have enjoyed making it.

<<<