Good Old Days

This is mainly for "old timers" (in Internet years).   Hopefully some people will have some fond memories of their experiences in the early days of online chess.

Here are some of my own thoughts.

I started playing online in the mid 1990s. ICS had just solved its timestamp issues and graphical interfaces that meshed with the telnet server programs had been instituted making blitz chess possible and reliable for most players. This also made online chess potentially profitable. ICS, a free server, became ICC, a membership server. ICC still allowed "guests" who could play for free but anonymously and with no additional benefits (they later did away with free guests). Many former ICS members were up in arms about the new pay site - a prevailing idea at the time was the the internet should be totally free - and FICS, mimicking the original ICS, was created (with many servers all over the world). That's where I came in. Telnet servers required players, if they wanted a GUI, to download a third party program such as XBoard or WinBoard. These are command driven interfaces that have a learning curve. Later, even telnet servers could be accessed using the more user-friendly web-based interfaces.  Gaining the ability to play chess online back then took considerably more effort than today. 

I've mentioned before that I played as a place called Chessmaster. It was operated (I think) by The Software Tool Works and the graphics were exactly like those used in the Chessmaster software of that time. This site was 20 years ahead of its time, limited mainly by one's cpu and the slow internet connections at the time. Besides the lovely graphics, one could select which windows or panes were open on your screen, you could resize them and move each one simply by dragging it. It took about 5 minutes to load, but once loaded, it worked beautifully. I don't think it had a chatting feature though. It wasn't around for long.  I do remember that Chessmaster 5 or 6 came out with online capabilities and when it was released, the playing site was eliminated.  It arose from the ashes a bit later as part of a multigame site, but it was garbage. 

The most popular site, by far I think, was Yahoo! Chess.  Yahoo served up many games, chess being just one.  It was set up with "rooms," maybe a dozen, though I think the number increased over time. Each room had a limit- 100 or so - to how many people could be in each one. Once a room was full you'd have to wait until someone left in order to get in.  For some reason, some rooms were popular and others not so much. Once in a room you could chat; it was all unmoderated and therefore sometimes rather unpleasant. But you could make a table with the option of having it public or invitation only. I used to use Y! Chess to play with my close friends because it was private and the graphics were very nice and worked smoothly. Yahoo also had dedicated chess forums. Although I developed some long-lasting friendships there, to be honest, the forums were unmoderated and extremely horrid at times. Like chess.com clubs, Yahoo also had clubs and I took advantage of that. I picture Yahoo as a precursor to chess.com but lacking the dedication and integrity to really take off.

Chessbase brought out PlayChess.com. I don't know what year but it was prior to chess.com. Although I have an account there, I can't recall ever having played there. There were a couple hit-and-run sites (you just play with no frills) such as Instant Chess and UChess. I also remember the World Chess Network, Kasparov Chess, Pogo, Kung-Fu Chess....I'm sure there have been others

Your turn.

I have happy memories of WinBoard and a few friends, a 6-pack, and a lot of free time. Those were simpler times and, I think, it was harder to cheat. Now I get whupped by 1100 rated players on FICS who play like GMs and cheating is ubiquitous. Either that or I'm a really crappy player. lol.

WinBoard was good as it could be re-sized to fill the screen and all that. I hated that Yahoo interface and lost clumsy games because I couldn't figure it out. Call me old school.

I still, in my heart, prefer the simple DOS interface, or maybe the terminal in Linux, and I ain't ashamed to admit it. Garbage in, garbage out, as we used to say, and there's a lot of garbage these days.

Old school memories. Started on ICC in 1997 and i believe at that time ICC was a free place. Same for FICS and i remember there was also Chess.net owner was John Fanning. Me remember Kasparov.com with his playingzone, think it was from 2001-2003 or 2004. Yahoo Chess was terrible. Cheaters all over the place with bots and ratings like 8400 or 12.500 and no admins around. World Chess Network (WCN) was a great place with a very fast interface and as far i remember Irina Krush and also Nakamura  and Mio and many others played on WCN. Chessbase was born begin 90's and they started their playingzone in 2000 or 2001 (Playchess.com) with the one and only Holger Lieske who was a fine admin. Me still have the original Fritz 7 in box who was the first chessbase chess program for playing on Playchess.com and  at that time it was for free.  There was also USCL (ChessLive) a site who died like WCN in 2006 or 2007.  FICS was very poulair 20 years ago because it was free but there was even a Dutch ICS version, and the website is after 20 years still online. www.freechess.nl/dics.htm 

15 years ago, ICC was the place to be. Nakamura (Smallville) and many others like Benefactor, Depressynak and others ....Times have changed.

I was born in 2011 so don't mind me

I was born in  2009 but i don't mind me nothing

be happy 

all is well

don't worry

I was born in 1972 but didn't tried the internet (nothing) until 2013. Yet, my first chess site closed at least 5 years ago.

i was born in 2010

Early 90's FICS - those were the good old days. I didn't even understand how to download a GUI so I just had to play using my keyboard and it gave a new text based board after every single move. It was fun trying to play blitz like that - probably helped my board vision a bit though

To clarify, ICC was a membership site from its inception (that was Sleator's entire reason for creating it). It cost $50/year. I think there might have been student discounts and, of course, free memberships for titled players. However the did allow people to play for free as guests with no benefits other than being able to play. They did away with the guest thing early on --I'm guessing around the year 2000.

There were ICS servers all over the world. I used to play a lot on the German and Danish server, but I also played on the Italian, Dutch and Greek servers. Compared to the USA's FICS, all the other servers were always nearly unpopulated. I remember going to the Danish server and chatting with the main guy there -his handle was TheDane -- until someone else showed up to play. 

I see some folks have posted when they were born . . . I was born in 1954. (Waits for gasps to stop.) I only started playing online chess in 2018. I joined Chess.com in September 2017, but didn't play my first human opponents until 2018.

So, I guess you might say these are my "good old days". But in fact, I think they are all of our good old days. When you look back 20 years from now (and trust me, that will be sooner than you want to believe), you will be looking back to these good old days. So, enjoy them now while you are in the moment and can!

I remember playing on a USCF site that charged .25/Hour to play.  My wife was not happy with some of our phone bills.

I never belonged to the USCF and never used their site.

When I first tried to join FICS the only connection, as you know, was telnet. FICS was quite busy back then and when the telnet window opens, everybody's chatter as well as the system information are all displayed, causing a constant scrolling on the screen.  This, in turn, made it almost impossible to figure out how to access things. It took me almost a week, dealing with this hours each day after work to figure put how to stop the scrolling, then it was another week before I understood how to actually join and use the commands.  The GUI was the least of my issues at that time.  For people who never used telnet, I connected to FICS and took a screenshot (this is the last game I played there, a few years ago):

If I had to type in my moves in blitz, I'd lose on time before move 3.

Oh man, I remember my Siemens A51.

ICC started as a free chess site. When a senior programmer started charging a fee to play, some of the original people left and started FICS (Free Internet Chess) . Both still here but smaller.

I joined ICC in 1989 and it became pretty much a nightly haunt for me.

I sometimes played longer time controls on ICC on a Novag wooden sensor chessboard using WinBoard. It was a right old faff to set up but worked well enough.

Since ICC didn't exist until 1995, can I assume you meant to type 1998 0r 1999?

I used to play every morning after work...sometimes at ICC as a guest but mostly at FICS.

Here's a 1990 ad for the Novag board with the auto-sensory feature:

Largely the same story. Yahoo!, FICS, and the chessmaster program.

For years, when I was still very new to the game, my routine was get off work, eat a big greasy hamburger, play some Y! chess games and then go to bed heh.

One day I bought, I think it was Fritz8. At the time it was the latest and greatest engine. In those days "Fritz" was synonymous with engines the way "Coke" can be a stand-in for any soda. Anyway, it came with a free month (or 3) trial to the Playchess site, which was a pay only site. Well I'd been playing on Yahoo! for a while, and I thought I was pretty good, so I went ahead and tried a few games. I lost so badly I didn't go back

Oh, this is a really old story. One time I was playing my chessmaster program. You know, they had all these personalities. I was playing one of the lowest rated ones as usual, and I was losing (as usual) but I came up with a really "brilliant" way to stop my opponent from queening. It took me maybe 5 minutes, but here was my genius idea.

You see, when black queened, I could win the queen. (I didn't know what a skewer was, so I thought this was a really amazing idea). When the engine immediately played Kc7 it broke my heart lol. I thought it wasn't fair, because the idea had been so clever it should have worked.