Chess on the internet

Historical knowledge and information regarding our great game.
Matt Fletcher
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Chess on the internet

Post by Matt Fletcher » Sun May 04, 2014 11:46 pm

I captained my school chess team for a few years in the Times competition - we did pretty well (winning it one year) mostly thanks to having the Pert twins on boards 1 and 2...

Anyway, I was spring-cleaning today and found a press cutting from about 1995 showing me playing chess against St Columbs in Northern Ireland "using [a] computer link". Clearly it was quite a novelty back then (even here 3 of the games were played by telephone instead) - how times change!

I guess universities may have played modem matches around the same time and I know that ICC and FICS were set up somewhat before then - did anyone play regular (real-time) internet chess much earlier than this?
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Roger de Coverly
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Re: Chess on the internet

Post by Roger de Coverly » Mon May 05, 2014 8:54 am

Matt Fletcher wrote:did anyone play regular (real-time) internet chess much earlier than this?
ICC started out as ICS and there was a major row when it became commercial. To play real time chess, particularly before websites had been invented, you needed peer to peer communication via a server.

Purchasing a modem was an add on accessory if you had a PC in the early 1990s. It started as expert only, instruction manuals would assume a familiarity with "Hayes AT commands". But once you had a modem, you had the choice of a number of dial up services to use with your new gadget. One was the internet proper which you got with an account with what were later named ISPs. That could give you access to ICS and email of course. The other was services such as Compuserve and AOL. These services provided content (at a price). Compuserve certainly had well established discussion areas and turn based chess and was well established by 1994. Another option was bulletin boards where you connected, again at a price, with a dedicated server.

Dialling up a remote computer had been around since the 1970s in the commercial world. Every so often, someone got a remote chess match set up borrowing Company facilities as Ipswich School did with BT. Reliability of the connection, was, as you would expect, an issue the reports would comment on.

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Jon Mahony
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Re: Chess on the internet

Post by Jon Mahony » Wed May 28, 2014 12:45 pm

My parents got a modem around 1997, which I used solely to play Death Match Doom with my school friends (now that is addictive, but the connection was bloody ropy!) I wish I’d have been using it to play Chess, I’d more than likely have been a much better player now.

Those were the days when you thought it was super hi-tech to buy one of those new-fangled computers with an inbuilt modem and that fancy new Windows 95! :lol:
"When you see a good move, look for a better one!" - Lasker

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MJMcCready
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Re: Chess on the internet

Post by MJMcCready » Wed May 28, 2014 7:05 pm

A problem is that the early web pages cannot be indexed by modern search engines, meaning that much of the content cannot be retrieved easily even though its still out there. I think they call that the really early stuff the deep web, though could be wrong there.

Roger de Coverly
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Re: Chess on the internet

Post by Roger de Coverly » Wed May 28, 2014 8:16 pm

MJMcCready wrote:A problem is that the early web pages cannot be indexed by modern search engines, meaning that much of the content cannot be retrieved easily even though its still out there.
Pages are continuously updated, so old content is only retained if something or someone keeps an archive.

Here's a website that does this.
http://archive.org/web/

and an example, the BCF's very first web page
http://web.archive.org/web/199812030532 ... ect.co.uk/

You have to be able to remember what the website used to be called if it has changed.