Happy birthday ChessBase

For the ChessBase founders it is not easy to determine the exact date when their company was born, but in the end they decided that it was on May 19th, 1986. In other words: exactly 25 years ago. We congratulate the Hamburg based company with reaching this wonderful milestone.

Today, for a period of 24 hours, ChessBase offers a 25% discount to all products in their shop. The reason? They somehow decided it's their 25th birthday. 'Decided', because it's not that clear when the company started, and apparently the German founders didn't want to pick the date on which the company was officially filed in the Hamburg Chamber of Commerce.

Today in an article on their website it is described how the idea of a database of chess games emerged for the first time in the minds of Frederic Friedel, Matthias Wüllenweber and... Garry Kasparov. Friedel is one of the founders of the company, and in the eighties a 'philosopher turned science journalist'. He still writes most of the articles on the English ChessBase website.

Wüllenweber was a physics student 'who had single-handedly programmed a chess database on the Atari ST, showed it to Kasparov and, at his urging, founded the company ChessBase together with Frederic'.

What follows is a nice story, with even better pictures in black and white, about Kasparov getting excited about the idea of browsing through the opponent's games using a computer, thereby winning lots of time. (No doubt it wouldn't take long for the World Champion to conclude that it was possible to study their openings more effficiently as well!)

Having worked with ChessBase 4 on Windows 3.1, and having purchased the latest version (11) of ChessBase's database product only a few days ago, we can confirm that a lot has changed over the years. And although we might be competitors, to some extent, in the field of online news reporting, we've never kept it a secret that we're big fans of their software products.

We take the opportunity to humbly congratulate ChessBase with their 25th anniversary. It's a wonderful milestone to reach, and in that respect we've got a long way to go!