Has anyone here ever programmed a Chess Game/Engine, or tried?

In the early days of computing this was a bit of a Holy Grail. When we got personal computers we had to program everything until Bill grabbed DOS and all the software. We used to do horse races on a small Mini in 7th grade. Had a teletype output and paper tape storage. The smart boys would run the tape all the way down the hall. They ended up as those genius programmers no one knows about.

I dabbled with the algoreithms in Chess. They were pretty complicated and I never studied enough programming to be really good at it. We ended up with everything canned and I learned every software program out there in the eighties. I worked for a shop that rented computer time and we had all, I mean all the software.

I've seen some folks talking about developing engines and I'm pretty sure I ran across the SCID folks here.