History
of the Internet Chess Server – Part I
In the interests of historical accuracy, I have
been doing
some research and digging around. The
main source material for this work has been the old rec.games.chess
and alt.chess.ics postings from USENET
news between
Jan 1992 through mid 1995. I have taken
most of those articles and made them available on the following web
page:
Archival/Historical
FICS related postings in usenet news groups
Anyone may search through the raw source of these
postings
from this web link:
Google
Advanced_Group_Search - group:rec.games.chess
First, let me say that I must issue the following
retraction, which would also affect anyone who quoted this information,
I am
sorry to say:
The Colorado School of Mines has had no connection
whatsoever with ICS development at any time in any form that can be
detected
via documentation sources available to me.
I cannot explain why I have had it in my head all
these
years that it did. I have a recollection
of an email return address from games that were played on one of the
ICS
servers in the early days that I thought was associated with the
Colorado
School of Mines. Unfortunately, I no
longer have any of that very early email so I cannot retrace my steps
and
figure out how I came to that misconception.
I have obviously been wrong in this for many years.
(After talking to foxbat,
who also
seems to remember something about
mines.edu, we are speculating this may have been where the IRS
(Internet
Ratings Server) was located… but it seems unlikely that Rich Nash had a connection with mines.edu,
since visus.com, where he was working, was formed out of former faculty
and
staff from CMU in 1982, and I think based in Pittsburgh PA)
In all likelihood, as foxbat
tells
me, this is just an urban legend that I started at some point. J
In place of that misconception, I would like to
substitute a
more accurate history and chronology of the actual sites associated
with ICS in
all it’s forms in the early years leading up to the creation of
the ICC and the
corresponding explosion of FICS code based sites. I
offer this in two forms, a narrative, and a
chronology.
A narrative of the
early years of the ICS:
Michael
Moore, of the University of Utah, wrote the first incarnation of the
ICS and ran it on lark.utah.edu. This was
announced on Jan 15, 1992. He was
joined by Richard Nash who wrote and
maintained the Internet Ratings Server, and took on the role of
integrating improvements into the ICS code and distributing it in March
of 1992. Michael Moore could not devote
the time to stay actively involved in maintaining a server or
developing the code and in March 1992 the lark.utah.edu server moved to
parsifal.umkc.edu at the University of Missouri hosted by Chris
Mitchell. A second server was started by
Aaron Putnam of the University of Oregon at elof.iit.edu which was
located at the Illinois Institute of Technology. A
third ICS was created on eve.assumption.edu, located at Assumption
Collage in Worchester MA. All these
servers tied back to a central ratings server, and users could go from
one to another with their current ratings consistently reported.
In April
1992, parsifal.umkc.edu fades away, the first graphical interface for
ICS, XICS, was released, and a server was started at eaststar.utah.edu. In May 1992 GIICS,
an interface for MSDOS was released, and eaststar.utah.edu was shut
down. The eaststar
server was re-established as valkyries.andrew.cmu.edu at Carnegie
Mellon University in July of 1992 by John Anthony Chanak
and William Kish, both CS students of professor Daniel Sleator of CMU there. Daniel
Sleator takes an active interest in the
server and begins helping to maintain and improve the server soon
thereafter.
In
August 1992 eve.assumption.edu fades away, leaving just
valkyries.andrew.cmu.edu. In Sept 1992,
the ratings server was moved to valkyries
and soon was shut down as ratings calculation functionality was
integrated into the ICS itself. Tim Mann
announces xboard as an ICS interface in
Dec. 1992.
In May
1993, the first European server was started at bentley.daimi.aau.dk by
Ole Tange (AnteTempore)
and Dannie Kjeldgaard
(TheDane). In
July of 1993, the American ICS was forced to leave CMU,
and was moved to cuneus.med.jhu.edu at Johns Hopkins University
in Baltimore, MD. It was still under the
development and control of Daniel Sleator
and remained so as it then moved from site to site over the next year. It quickly moved to coot.lcs.mit.edu, then
briefly to testbed.panix.com, and back to coot.lcs.mit.edu after the
first proposal for a commercial ICS was withdrawn.
The American ICS was moved to ics.uoknor.edu around late October
1993 under the patronage of Chris Petroff at the University of
Oklahoma, and then to news.panix.com in late November 1993. The European server was moved to
anemone.daimi.aau.dk in Dec. 1993. In
December 1993, the American ICS moved to rafael.metiu.ucsb.edu.
On
January 17, 1993, the Northridge earthquake struck and took down the American ICS at rafael.metiu.ucsb.edu. The server was brought up briefly on
news.panix.com using the last available backup of player information. What happened next is not clear, but the
American ICS appears to have moved to coot.lcs.mit.edu, and then
finally back to ics.uoknor.edu after some time.
In April
1994 Richard Nash announced the existence of the FICS project and the
first operational FICS server at chess.pitt.edu. In
July 1994 Douglas P. Barton announced the opening of the Australian ICS
at lux.latrobe.edu.au, and in September
1994 a Dutch ICS was started at dds.hacktic.nl.
In August of 1994 the American ICS was moved to ics.onenet.net,
where Chris Petroff was now working and had made arrangements to be
able to move the server with him. In
December of 1994 Daniel Sleator moved the
American ICS to chess.lm.com, and on March 1st the
announcement was made that it was renamed
the Internet Chess Club, a commercial
server, at icc.lm.com.
On the same day, a mailing list is formed for
programmers devoted to developing a new, free chess server.
There
was then a rush by several groups and individuals to implement FICS
code based servers. The European FICS was
announced as a test site on Match 3rd, 1995 at
helium.daimi.aau.dk in Denmark Fics.onenet.net
was started on March 5th by Chris Petroff.
The European FICS officially opened on Match 6th with relatively stable code thanks to the
programming team led by Henrik Gram. Code fixes from Europe are brought to the US
at fics.onenet.net, and the efforts are merged. A
list of US based FICS servers is published including:
arapaho.cse.ucsc.edu, ics.onenet.net, chess.pitt.edu (a.k.a lava.ac.cis.pitt.edu)(original FICS), and
ra.egr.uri.edu. By March 9th,
1995 only helium.daimi.aau.dk and fics.onenet.net remained. A new Dutch FICS was announced on May 25th
1995 at dds.dds.nl. and sometime around April 5th, 1995 the
European FICS began to use the address anemone.daimi.aau.dk, marking
the end of the old EICS there.
That is as far as I have researched things thus far.
Here is
a more detailed chronology of these events:
Jan 15, 1992: Michael D Moore of the University of Utah
announces the official opening of the first working Internet Chess
Server at lark.utah.edu 5000.
March 3, 1992: Richard V Nash announces
the creation of a ratings server to support multiple ICS sites, and
asks for volunteers to host them.
March 5,
1992: The ICS is moved from lark.utah.edu to the University of Missouri
at arsifal.umkc.edu 5000. This is the fist
reference to the new site being operational. The
server at lark.utah.edu is now closed. M.
Moore is unable to provide the time to keep a server running there.
March 11,
1993: Chris Mitchell of the University of Missouri makes his official
announcement that the server at parsifal.umkc.edu 5000 is up. Evolution of the server begins as Chris begins
to make some improvements.
March 23,
1992: A second ICS is announced by Aaron Putnam (Desmodus)
at elof.iit.edu (the Illinois Institute of Technology).
Aaron is at the University of Oregon and running this server
remotely. The local host contributor at
iit.edu is unnamed. Aaron appears to be
fighting to keep a server alive by moving it wherever someone is
willing to let him run one.
March
28, 1992: Many improvements made to the server at elof.iit.edu, and
incorporated back into parsifal.umkc.edu. Richard
Nash acts as the distributor and integrator of the ICS source. A new server opens at eve.assumption.edu,
located at Assumption Collage in Worchester MA. The
local host contributor is unknown.
April 7,
1992: An ICS server location listing indicated the parsifal.umkc.edu
has gone away. elof.iit.edu and
eve.assumption.edu remain, with the latter being considered faster by
many.
April 9,
1992: The first ICS GUI is announced – XICS, a Unix X-Windows
interface. One must use XICS for playing
games and xterm for most ICS commands. Announced by Kirk Gunsallus
(claims not to be the author).
April
21, 1992: Latest server list shows elof.iit.edu has gone away. eve.assumption.edu remains, and a new server
is reported at eaststar.utah.edu. Local
host contributor is unknown.
May 12,
1992: ICS source code is placed on a
public FTP site at ocf.Berkeley.EDU by E. Mark Ping.
Richard Nash continues to administer the IRS (Internet Ratings
Server).
May 26,
1992: GIICS, the first graphical interface for IBM PC MSDOS is
announced by Tony Acero (Llama)
May 27,
1992: Aaron Putnam (Desmodus) announces
that eaststar.utah.edu is dead.
July 27,
1992: Aaron Putnam (Desmodus) announces
that the server formerly at eaststar.utah.edu has moved to
valkyries.andrew.cmu.edu. John Anthony Chanak (MataPato)
and William Kish (router) are the local contributors at Carnegie Mellon
University, as revealed later. Daniel Sleator (Darooha), a
Professor of Computer Science at CMU begins to make improvements to the
server.
August
14, 1992: The server at eve.assumption.edu appears to be gone at this
time.
September
15, 1992: The ratings server moves to valkyries.andrew.cmu.edu. This is the beginning of the end of the
ratings server.
December
7, 1992: Tim Mann announces xboard V2.1 as
an ICS interface.
February
22, 1993: valkyries.andrew.cmu.edu is
taken down for about a week due to a security breach at CMU.
Apr 9,
1993: M. Moore posts his thoughts on implementing timestamp.
Apr 22,
1993: valkyries machine is taken away for
a conference, server moves to aragorn.andrew.cmu.edu
Apr 25,
1993: Daniel Slater announces the server is now at manon.mse.cs.cmu.edu. This appears to be a very temporary move due
to some unstated difficulty.
Apr 26,
1993: John Chanak posts to describe the
history of ICS at CMU, the recent difficulties, and the fact he and
Bill Kish will be graduating soon. Plans
are announced outlining a long term future of ICS at CMU.
Daniel Sleator begins to take
public ownership of the server.
May 14,
1993: Server has moved to cirrus.gp.cs.cmu.edu.
May 16,
1993: Daniel Sleator announces the
bentley.daimi.aau.dk server in Denmark is up.
May 17, 1993: Ole Tange
(AnteTempore) and Dannie
Kjeldgaard
(TheDane) make the official announcement
that the European ICS is operational at bentley.daimi.aau.dk in Denmark.
July 8,
1993: Announcement is posted that the
American ICS is being forced to leave CMU and is looking for a new home.
July 10,
1993: American ICS server at cirrus.gp.cs.cmu.edu is moved to
128.220.55.21. This server is named
cuneus.med.jhu.edu although many could not reach it by name. It resides at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore, MD. CMU servers close. Local host contributor unknown.
July 20,
1993: American ICS moves from cuneus.med.jhu.edu moves to
coot.lcs.mit.edu. FTP server now resides
at chess.uoknor.edu.
September
1, 1993: Daniel Sleator
(Darooha) posts explaining new Wild
variants supported on ICS.
October
1, 1993: Efforts begin at University of
Pittsburgh to develop a Free ICS from the very early distributed ICS
prior to CMU efforts. Daniel Sleator has refused to release code, or help
establish a server sponsored by the U of Pitt Chess Club.
Darrin Bond, president of the U of Pitt chess club announces and
organizes this initial effort.
October
11, 1993: First mention of ICS being moved
to testbed.panix.com. Daniel Sleator (Darooha)
posts his “Proposal” to take ICS commercial, charging
registered (rated) users $10/month, promising access to simuls, GM exhibitions, “well run”
tournaments, etc.
October
17, 1993: D. Sleator
withdraws his proposal. Announces plan to
move server back to coot.lcs.mit.edu.
November
6, 1993: First mention of the American ICS
running at ics.uoknor.edu (University of Oklahoma). Hosted
by Chris Petroff. The server was probably
at this location about 2 weeks prior to this posting.
November
20, 1993: American ICS is moved to
news.panix.com by Darooha.
No reason given, but this appears to be the beginning of a
“shell game” of moving the server back and forth between
news.panix.com/chess.panix.com, coot.lcs.mit.edu,
ics.uoknor.edu/chess.uoknor.edu, and rafael.metiu.ucsb.edu. The current location is available via
‘finger’ during this time, so new location information was
not often posted in the rec.games.chess
newsgroup.
December
12, 1993: American ICS moves to
rafael.metiu.ucsb.edu.
December
25, 1993: European (in Denmark) ICS moves
from bentley.daimi.aau.dk to anemone.daimi.aau.dk.
January
17, 1993: Earthquake in Northridge CA
causes widespread telecommunications outages on the U.S. West coast,
causing UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara) to be
unreachable. The server now seems to move
to news.panix.com and then either coot.lcs.mit.edu or ics.onenet.net,
but eventually settles at ics.uoknor.edu.
February
8, 1994: First mention that American
server is back at ics.uoknor.edu
April,
11 1994: Richard Nash announces the FICS
project and first operational FICS server at chess.pitt.edu.
July 7,
1994: Douglas P. Barton announces opening
of the Australian ICS at lux.latrobe.edu.au.
July 2,
1994: First mention of a Dutch ICS at
dds.hacktic.nl. iris4.metiu.ucsb.edu is
listed as a backup US server.
December,
17 1994: American ICS moves to
chess.lm.com.
March 1,
1995: chess.lm.com becomes icc.lm.com. The server is now fully commercial. All other servers in Europe and elsewhere
based on Daniel Sleator’s version of
ICS are now to be shut down and are no longer accepting registrations. This change has been planned by Daniel Sleator and his partners for several months. Membership is $49/year. Existing
users will have a 6 month grace period before they must begin to pay. Many server admins
knew it was coming 3 months in advance internally.
Reactions vary, with highly polarized views on both sides of the
resulting discussions. On the same day,
Paul Cornelison (MorphyP)
creates the F-ICS mailing list to promote the development of a new free
chess server under the Free Software Foundations GNU General Public
License (GNU GPL). Fred Garcia (Cuban) is
the announced project leader. Michael Gradman (betelgeuse) creates the PACC (People
Against Commercial Chess) mailing list, a general discussion list.
March
3, 1995 PACC and F-ICS lists merge. Notable
members of this list now include Henrik
Gram (Hawk), David Flynn (Dav), Shane
Hudson (Shane), Don Fong (dfong), John Beck
(glob and later grimm), David Tukey (Friar), and Chris Petroff (Sparky). Efforts center around improving Richard
Nash’s FICS software, most notably the group being organized by Henrik Gram (Hawk – lead progranner), Dannie Kjeldgaard, David Flynn (Dav),
and Lars Nielsen (Rosenberg), on the new Denmark FICS located at helium.daimi.aau.dk. Stability problems are immediately apparent
(crashes with more than 10 users). Code
development begins in earnest.
March 4,
1995: Richard Nash re-announces his FICS
project, which he started over a year prior to this during the first
commercial ICS proposal from Daniel Sleator. Richard makes the code freely available, but
cannot help in further development. FICS
has been running at chess.pitt.edu for almost a year sponsored by
Darrin Bond and the University of Pittsburgh Chess Club.
March 5,
1995: FICS code is downloaded,
compiled, and started at fics.onenet.net
(ics.onenet.net/chess.onenet.net) by Chris Petroff.
It is immediately popular because it is reusing an old ICS name
and IP address that is very well known to former American ICS members
from having been a primary ICS site for nearly 4 months.
Many players connect not realizing that AICS had moved. This server is very unstable and survives
mainly due to automatic restarts after server crashes via a shell
script.
March 6,
1995: The European FICS is publicly
announced in rec.games.chess at it’s
helium.daimi.aau.dk location. This
server will be moved to the anemone.daimi.aau.dk address once the Sleater based ICS there is brought down. GNU_ICS-L mailing
list started by Chris Petroff at onenet.net. A
list of US based FICS servers is published including:
arapaho.cse.ucsc.edu, ics.onenet.net, chess.pitt.edu (a.k.a lava.ac.cis.pitt.edu and the original
FICS), rogue.coe.ohio-state.edu and ra.egr.uri.edu.
Efforts are joined between helium.daimi.aau.dk and
fics.onenet.net servers with code fixes from Denmark implemented on the
onenet server. David
Tukey (Friar) rewrites and updates the FICS
help files and donates them to the project. He
continues to maintain the FICS help files over the next 3 years as an
admin (and later Head Admin) on the American FICS.
March 8,
1995: FICS mailing lists created by David Pecora at MIT. List
of active FICS servers drops to: chess.onenet.net, helium.daimi.aau.dk,
rogue.coe.ohio-state.edu 5000, and chess.pitt.edu.
March 9,
1995: Aviv Freedman joins the FICS effort,
and begins to serve as admin and chess personality.
helium.daimi.aau.dk and ics.onenet.net appear to be most active
servers.
May 25,
1995: A new Dutch FICS is announced at
dds.dds.nl.
April 5,
1995: This is the first reference to the
European FICS running at the old EICS address of anemone.daimi.aau.dk,
marking the removal of the Sleator based
ICS there.
This is a work in progress.
A special thanks to those who have contributed corrections and suggestions:
David Flynn
Henrik Gram
Tim Mann
David Tukey
Written and maintained by Chris Petroff
Sparky on FICS.
Revised: 3/9/2005 (formatting)