I have seen quite a few of these questions floating around the forums, so I thought I will provide what I know, although I don't think its a long story:  before the chess.com we know and love and are so addicted to as of today, I believe chess.com was owned and used by the person/company to market chess mentor, the same chess mentor that is on here (and, as a side note, that would be so cool to know if acquiring the rights to chess.com meant implementing their software into the site -- was that one of the terms of negotiation?).  According to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (so very cool, especially if you have not heard of it), the very mention (not the site itself) of today's chess.com took place on July 28, 2005 and it was just a small banner at the top of the page - look here.  The day before, there was no mention of it at all.

TO ERIK: I know you have the "Building Chess.com" series going, but did you ever discuss *how* you acquired chess.com, or is that not a topic for full disclosure...maybe I did see that on Part 1 of that series...

Didn't know if anyone wanted to see this again, seeing that I posted it so long ago....

Well this is the first I have read about it.