Yes I’m an old old over-the-hill chessnut who loves the old notation P-K4 etc and can’t get through an algebraic game without screwing it up an having to start over. And what’s with these digital clocks! Id rather see my opp sweating in time trouble just waiting for that red flag to drop. And oh for the good old days when mco and Fines bce sufficed. I still have a rotary dial phone too.
I’m from the same generation and grew up on the DN books and remember tournaments sounding like “TICK TICK TICK ticka ticka ticka”, but after reading an opening book in German, I led the charge of changing to AN. Am probably the first person to use the abbreviations AN and DN in Chess Life (Apr. 1968). Check the globe. →
Are you the guy on the Jimmy John’s commercial, with his pendulum wall clock and rotary phone?
Judging from your moniker, I’m two years older than you, but I had no trouble (decades ago) with the transition from DN to AN, and in the 1990s was among those leading the charge for digital clocks and the 5-second delay. And yes, my first three book purchases from USCF were MCO-10, BCE, and the Harkness handbook.
Carry on – we can still learn and adapt!
Bill Smythe
One of the great things about chess is that one can hold on to the past and still be successful. The change from descriptive to algebraic is only minor. I find myself using both systems to write moves at times. My tendency is to use the long algebraic rather than the shortened form, but I can’t help devolving into descriptive when in time pressure. The major change has been in clock usage. Early on I found the advantage of having the 5 second delay help me to win and draw games that under the old methodology would have been irrevocably lost. I have played under the 30 second increment method on several occasions. Game 90 or Game 120 with 30 second increment is acceptable. Anything faster stresses the body too much and favors younger players. One has to be careful and time bathroom breaks; consider how much one can drink or eat; and determine whether or not to take blood pressure medication. FIDE and the USCF have little respect for older players, which is ironic since without us many federations would go bankrupt.
I have a couple of beautiful analog clocks which sit idle. Fine craftsmanship in wood with large faces to see the time and indicators for the last 5 minutes. But, alas, can no longer use them for anything but casual 5 minute games. Feels like a sacrilege when I use the clocks this way. I prefer to use wooden sets to play on in tournaments. Unfortunately, there are too many players who like to bang pieces and have sticky fingers from eating while they play chess. Most of the time I use a cheap plastic set and vinyl board. Once it was almost an honor to play in a chess tournament. Now it is just a business.
I guess you guys are kinda right. It IS a big case of nostalgia for me. The good old days where experts were actually experts and masters were to be feared. I’ll just continue slogging along thinking and visualizing in DN. Until the red flag drops on me while I’m reading My System.
Nowadays, it’s anybody under 12 years old that needs to be feared.
Bill Smythe
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You are not alone in this experience Mr. DWL1945.
Chess notation has history of ineptitude.
The situation improved in the Karpov-Kasparov era when USA chess books switched from DN (Descriptive Notation) and began using SAN (with continued smatterings of LAN).
SAN has become sacred in chess, and criticism of SAN elicits more dismissive eye-rolls 
than thoughtful consideration.
SAN has several important strengths. However, SAN also has at least three major weaknesses:
[1] Tournament players usually fail to accurately record the moves of their games when they notate in SAN. Reconstructive guesswork is needed, usually involving inferences from other moves or earlier positions. Thus reconstruction is tedious and sometimes impossible.
[2] Chess enthusiasts at home who replay game scores from print magazines and such frequently make errors during replay. The enthusiast encounters an impossible move that he realizes was caused by himself mis-playing an as yet undetermined earlier move. At that point he finds it necessary to go backward through the moves to sense the location of his error. This is often difficult. Of course, SAN does not provide enough information to go backward on the board through the moves.
[3] Captures are major signposts in a chess game. Unfortunately SAN does not do enough to make it easy for the human eye to scan a block of moves and find the move where a rook was captured, unless you already know the game.
All else being equal, a “reversible” chess move notation would be better than SAN. The problem is that not all else is equal.
The tournament player does not want to spend any more time on writing moves on his scoresheet than he has to. Have you ever timed yourself as you write on paper the moves of a 40 move-pair game?: it takes a lot of time and energy to write.
Gambit chess books, which use a column alignment of move-pairs, have plenty of unused space to print the mainline moves in a notation better than SAN; in a reversible notation.
Some designs for a reversible notation are better than others. LAN is not quite reversible, and I no longer believe that LAN is the foundation for the best engineered reversible notation.
Another concurrent goal in engineering the best chess notation is to eliminate all reliance on context for the correct interpretation of any given move. Thus ideally each move would encode the color of the piece that moved, and end the reliance on the eye finding the move number and judging its spatial relation to the move.
Mr. DWL1945, I think you would prefer an improved and modernized design of coordinate notation over the old DN, if any publishers used one.
FAN should be improved so that when mainline moves are bolded and mere analysis moves are not, the figurines in the mainline moves are also bolded.
The lack of bold figurines is an oculatory nightmare 
that can be experienced in books like Gambit’s 101 Brilliant Chess Miniatures.
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Maybe tournament players who started off with descriptive notation do.
I was the editor of our state’s bimonthly newsletter and had to play over thousands of games during my 6 years on that job. Algebraic notation was just starting to catch on so well over half the games I looked at (mid to late 70s) were in DN.
Of course it is possible to make a mistake in (S)AN but many more mistakes were made in DN. In addition to the usual suspects (wrong rank, wrong file, wrong piece, omitted [half]move, etc.) it was very possible to not recognize when the side of the board must be specified or may be omitted (N-KB3 vs N-B3).
OTOH some tactics and endgame techniques may be easier to teach in DN such as rook on the 7th rank or the possibility of a pawn on B7 or R7 holding a draw against a queen when the superior king is too far away to help. It isn’t necessary to know what the color is or side of the board the action is on, it works in all four corners.
The single most important event in my chess career was abandoning descriptive and forcing myself to use algebraic notation.
I was barely able to play through a game with descriptive notation. What does “P-B4” mean anyway?? There are four B4 squares. Ditto for visualization away from the board.
I’m with you on the clocks though. I’ve never played a game where the 5-second delay affected the result.
As a tournament director, I’ve often seen games where the result would have been different if 5 second delay wasn’t being used, or, conversely, if 5 second delay was being used. Generally, with 5 second delay, the position on the board becomes more important than the times on the clocks.
Was the delay in effect in your draw with Robert Hess? If not, it might have helped. Both of you.
Then there are the rare birds who only play slow, classical time controls…
In the early days of delay, when I was directing small tournaments on Lunt Avenue, one of the tournament regulars (with a BHB clock) was a 1900 player who would always get into time pressure. On two occasions, in easily won positions against players rated below 1200, he had to claim ILC in order to avoid losing on time.
After the second such occasion, he showed up the next time with a shiny new Chronos, and was always the first to arrive at his table so he could be sure to use it.
Bill Smythe
Hmm. I’m trying to think of a case where LAN would not be reversible.
As long as captures are written as Bg5xNf6 (specifying both pieces), and non-captures are written with hyphens, I would think that all LAN move notations would be reversible.
Promotions would be no problem, e.g. e7xRf8=Q. En passant should be fine, too, as long as “e.p.” is specified.
Okay, that’s a good point, for playing over manually written scoresheets from a tournament. Wouldn’t serve much purpose for game scores in books and magazines, though. And just try to get any tournament player to specify the piece color on every move. 
If publishers find it impossible to provide bold and light versions of their figurines, maybe they could at least use a smaller font size for the figurines in the analysis moves.
Bill Smythe
Do you mean like 40/2, 20/1, repeating the last time period with no sudden death? I don’t think I’ve ever directed a tournament which didn’t have a sudden death time control, so I don’t know how much effect time delay would have on games like that. At 40/2, SD/1, on the other hand, a five second delay certainly does make a difference, especially at the end of sudden death.
Really dumb Q? During blindfold chess are the moves called out in DN or AN?
Dan
Really dumb Q? During blindfold chess are the moves called out in DN or AN?
Dan
I once played in a simul where the blindfolded GM was asked that question at the start. He replied that it didn’t matter one way or the other.
Bill Smythe
Kolty used DN. He explained that he envisioned the piece first and thus described it first.
Dan