by Ikaros Marks

Created on: May 11, 2009

Internet chess began with the advent of email. With this innovation, players could email their moves to each other, and on receiving the replied email, they could translate the move onto a physical board, deliberate for however much time they wanted then reply their move to their opponent. Alas, towards the end of the 1980's, email chess had become outdated. Michael Moore and Richard Nash, both students of the University of Utah, recognised the possibility of creating an internet chess server (ICS) and the first ICS was born on January 15th, 1992. In July 1992, the server was physically moved to Carnegie Mellon University and John Chanak, William Kish, and Aaron Putnam took over operation of the new server. The original incarnation of the Internet Chess Server suffered from latency problems and some bugs, but was popular among the chess enthusiasts of the university. Over years, however, the server software had improved and a rating system had been added as well as support for Graphical Clients.

In late 1992, Daniel Sleator, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University took over operation of the server and sought to address problems, one of the most popular was the complaint of lag in blitz games. In a blitz game, time is of the essence and latency problems ended the game for some players by removing two seconds from the clock before they even had a chance to play a single move. In 1994, Sleator copyrighted the fixed code for the ICS. Some authorities claim it was wrong of Sleator to copyright the entire code for the ICS since the original project was not his (even though the majority of the stable code was attributed to him).

In 1995, the ICS changed its name to the Internet Chess Club (ICC) and started charging an annual US$49 yearly fee for use of the service. Students of Carnegie Mellon University complained about the high subscription fee and the ICC offered the service at half price to students of the University. Some programmers who had worked on the original ICS saw the commercialization of their work as wrong and opened the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) in order to allow everyone the use of their work for free.

The ICS is still in operation today (Much to the ire of former ICS gurus who prophesied the downfall of the ICC within a year) and has over 35,000 subscribing members with over 2,500 users logged on at any given time. The FICS has over 310,000 registered accounts making it more populous than the ICC almost ten times over.

The Internet chess phenomenon began with Telnet play in the ICS and progressed to the use of graphical clients (as can be seen today with the FICS and ICC software). Other sites such as Yahoo.com and MSN.com offer head-to-head chess games for their members for free as well as a rating system. Over the years it has progressed to the point where players can now play over Instant Messenger. The days of Play-By-e-Mail chess are a distant cry to the games of today. Sophisticated chess engines such as the Chessmaster Engine developed by Ubisoft allow for multiplayer games among strangers or even friends by getting their IP and connecting directly to their PC's.

As connections get faster and latency gets lower, chess in this day and age is almost the same as playing over a table, the only thing is you can't see your opponent's face.

Learn more about this author, Ikaros Marks.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.