haha! nice find!
you can read more about the whole thing in the "Building Chess.com" series i write...
http://www.chess.com/news_/search.html?keyword=building
History of Chess.com....?
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yo erik, how did you get chess.com? I mean that's really the best possible URl for a chess site right? Congrats. and good luck.
You say you bought the domain in Jan 2006 - who owned it before and was there anything here? Just wondering...
GUYS! 
The answer is in my original post -- look at the first post of this thread, click on the underlined "Here", and click on a date before jan 2006, and it will show you what chess.com looked like.
The answer is in my original post -- look at the first post of this thread, click on the underlined "Here", and click on a date before jan 2006, and it will show you what chess.com looked like. 
I was playing around with the Wayback Machine the other day, and looked up Chess.com -- how neat to know that it once was the site for Chess Mentor software! Here is a list of all the snapshots of this site from 1996-2007. Of course, it would be great if Erik could give us the inside scoop on how he snagged such a great URL...any good stories on that you could share with us?
(as a side note, if you have never played with the Wayback Machine, it is so cool to see how sites looked long ago!)