By Finn Arildsen

I developed the first version of CONDES in 1985 as a program to print control descriptions – hence the name.

It was program based on the DOS operating system, written in Turbo Pascal. Condes took part in the 1986
IOF Software Competition and won a second prize.

Further development improved Condes over the years and it became quite popular in many countries.

Based on experience from Condes, I then developed an event administration software package, called LOEB,
for the Danish Orienteering Federation. The work with LOEB soon took over all my spare time, as it was used largely for all events in Denmark
for almost 10 years.

During the 1990, as Windows gained popularity, new possibilities arose, and a Windows version of Condes was a natural step.  “Condes for Windows” was published in 1997.

The work with developing and maintaining Condes as a Windows graphics program turned out to be an enormous task, so any hope of also creating an event administration package for Windows would be unrealistic.

Instead I went ahead with improving map support in Condes. Condes support for OCAD files was introduced in 2001.

Ever since, Condes has seen a continuous flow of new features. I receive more ideas for new features than I can ever realistically implement.

By 2007, it was time for a major overhaul of Condes. The work on Condes 8 meant changing more or less all the program code in Condes, and adding a lot of new code. It took between 2 and 3 years spare time to implement Condes 8.

Although there was still a lot of features that I would like to have included in Condes 8, in order to ever get it published, I had to set a line. But this didn’t mean that Condes was frozen.  New features were added continuosly to maintenance releases after version 8 was published.

And in 2013, the story repeated itself.  Condes 9 was released in the Summer of 2013.  Somehow, I have a feeling the that wheel will continue turning.

Condes has been used at several World Championships, countless major events and local events over the years. More than 100.000 maps are printed with Condes every year.