I take it you mean ‘AC’…that being After Computer. Since my rating actually went over 2000 twice, at least according to the label on my CHESS LIFE, I appealed to USCF many years ago concerning my floor being 1700, in lieu of 1800. I was told (can’t recall by whom) that if it was not in a year end supplement, it did not matter. I was also informed that what transpired before 1991 was ‘ancient history’.
Yet I see you are able to ‘go back in time’ and quote stats from ‘BC’, that being Before Computer. Is it possible for us, the members, to ‘travel back in time’ online, or is it only possible for the members to go back and retrieve old ratings from printed material?
And no, I no longer have my copies of CHESS LIFE, as they were ‘lost in the flood’ so to speak.
I think the office has a complete set of printed rating supplements, not just annual lists. (If not, there are codes that were used in the printed supplements in the 70’s and 80’s to indicate peak 100 point levels that may help figure out your peak rating.)
My understanding is that they will research your old rating if requested, though it is done on an as-time-is-available basis. (It helps if you can narrow down the search a bit, otherwise it could take an hour or longer to look through 100 or more separate supplements.)
They can then give you an appropriate floor based on your peak published rating. A rating between 2000 and 2099 would qualify you for an 1800 floor. However, it would only be retroactive to the start of the rerate window, ie for events initially rated after January 1, 2004.
That’s a common misconception. It actually stands for the Latin phrase anno computatorum.
In the year of our computer.
Which is why there is a drive by digital historians to replace this with “BDE” and “DE” for “Before Digital Era” and 'Digital Era," respectively (aerae digitalae.)
This movement is also supported by technicians who think AC is for “Alternating Current,” and shouldn’t be so computer-centric. BDE/DE is also roughly equivalent, and sometimes used as, “Database Era,” (aerae dBaseum.)
Revisionists and brand fanatics, however, tended to appropriate this as “Before Dell Era” and “Dell Era.” Opposition from the print publishing industry, coupled with confusion that DE might refer to “Dzindzichashvili Era” have also therefore prevented universal usage of the terminology. Not to mention those who are confused by the pronunciation of such and therefore want to refer to it as “GE.”
There is a concern among archivists that many old computerized records are no longer readable, either because they’ve deteriorated or because there isn’t any equipment that can handle the media they’re on, or drivers for them on current systems.
In the USCF’s case, though they were first computerized in the mid 70’s, they didn’t keep copies of data from the old servers or convert all that data over each time they migrated to new equipment. Worse, they would periodically purge lapsed memberships due to disk space issues. (Back then disk space was very expensive.)
One reason we have the rating supplement history back as far as we do is that we were able to convince the USCF office to start issuing supplements on diskettes starting in 1992.
When I started working on building the current generation of servers, I was able to use the copies they had at the USCF office, plus the copies I had, plus a few that Al Losoff had, to build up a complete set of the bi-monthly rating supplement files. Fortunately, Laura Martz was also keeping annual files of crosstable records, back to when the dBAse-based ratings programming went into effect in late 1991.
The only reason we have as much membership history as we do is because in August of 1998 I was able to convince the ED (Cavallo) to start sending me copies of the two membership files (one was a COBOL file, the other a dBase file), usually shortly after the end of each month.
Staff turnover and network issues kept me from getting a full set of those monthly files (I think I’m missing 5-7 months between August 1998 and around June of 2000.)
While those point-in-time records don’t give us a complete history of all the transactions that occurred before March 2004, when the first version of the current transaction processing system went into effect, it does give us at least some record of what someone’s membership type and expiration date was over time, which gives us some idea of when people renewed.