Good Old Days

Oh man. I remember playing on an old wooden Philips TV set (or was it Telefunken). I was playing VHS of course, not chess.

Might be of interest (click image for full size)

Feel free to digitize the games.

Well, everything is relative, of course.  Sargon II was better than my Atari 800 chess program which is why I played it, but the program was still bad, as you can imagine from the story about the human beating 7 engines 7-0 in a simul demonstration ...now I am sure Stockfish would go 7-0 against the top 7 GMs in the world.

That's why they were the Good Old Days.

I think the earlier ChessMaster days were good...not too insanely hard, not frustratingly bad/blundering...the Goldilocks era of chess engines for rank and file players.

"Those were the days my friends,,,,

I was born in 2003, though I did not have a computer (or any internet connecting device) until I was about 11. Before that, I had a Playstation 2, with a couple of disks that contained collections of old (sometimes very old) games. Atari Anthology was my go-to, as I used to love playing “Adventure” on level 2 and 3, as well as “Missile Command” with variously assorted settings. 

(Box art)

   Anyway, my first experience with computer chess was on the Atari Anthology “Video Chess” game. The computer had like 8 difficulty settings, and there was no option to play as Black. The pieces had color schemes that were very difficult to tell apart, though that became much easier when I enabled Black and White mode on the screen. Even on the easiest mode, the computer would tactically shred me to pieces, as it would see all 1-3 move tactics. As I played for a while, I figured out that the computer did not have any long-term planning, and I took this to my advantage. I would try to trade off pieces until I reached an endgame, where the computer would not know what to do next. Since it only planned a couple moves deep, it could not process the idea of advancing a pawn 5 times and promoting it to a queen, so it would aimlessly move its king around in random directions. While this happened, I would quickly promote two queens and checkmate him from behind. Oddly, the game would not end when I checkmated his King, and so I captured it, and fought against the remains of his pieces, which strangely enough, were still moving, and were extremely adamant on not being captured!

(Strangely, the color scheme looks pretty good here. It could’ve been porting issues with the PS2, or maybe my TV screen was rendering it in a weird way.)

(Black and White mode)

   There were other difficulty settings, but the computer already took like 20 seconds to make a move on easy mode, and there was a label stating that level 7 could take up to 10 hours to make just one move!! And who has time or electricity for that? I hear that the game also had 128 bytes (not kilobytes) of ram. 

   Level 6 liked to cheat sometimes, and sometimes moved multiple pieces at once, even though it was already beating me (which used to make me very mad). There were no undo buttons either, so if I made a bad mistake, I had to start all over again.

   Good times... though these are better times, at least in terms of chess. Back then, I couldn’t have even imagined playing chess online, nor finding such a dedicated and mostly friendly community! Modern chess engines can now move almost instantaneously, and are stronger than most GMs of the world. They help me learn from my mistakes, whereas before, they simply smashed me mercilessly. =D

"I was born in 2003, though I did not have a computer (or any internet connecting device) until I was about 11."

So, the "good old days" were 5 years ago?

I retired 3 years ago, so I guess these are my *good old days*

Think one of the stronger programs at that time for the PC was Zarkov 2.5 (1990) and Fritz 1 from Chessbase (1991). Fritz 1 was not cheap, about 120 Dutch Guldens, think that was about 60 US Dollars 30 years ago.

Was fritz1 already into trash talking?

No, Fritz 6 (2000) was de first edition the program could talk and indeed trash talking sometimes. Like when you lost a game and clicked on the rematch button you heard something like : " ah, you are back again.  Nothing better to do ? Ready for another humiliation ? "

Another oldie from 1993. " Kasparov's Gambit " for MS-DOS.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov%27s_Gambit

FICS, ICC, Yahoo Chess, USCL,  Kasparov University, owl24 was the best site of that time

I remember FICS and ICC also USCF have a chess server like ICC and FICS. This is the good old days of chess. But now chess.com and chess24 are cool but not so cool are not free