The development of Internet chess servers as a tool for achieving the interests which many people hold in regard to playing games through a digital medium can be traced back by the student of chess games to the period of the early nineteen seventies, at which time the PLATO system provided for the creation of a program which was referred to by its creators as “chess3.” Only a small number of people involved in playing games had any form of access to this kind of technology, as of yet the technology for providing the availability of online services was only its early form. At this point, the “chess2″ program was only used by the people directly involved in creating it. The interest of people involved in developing games for the enjoyment of online users was revived by the expansion in the sophistication of the technology in the early nineteen nineties, at which point the capacity to be able to play chess games through a network of computers connected to each other came to seem newly practicable. Accordingly, in 1992 the Internet Chess Server was created and based in Carnegie Mellon University servers. Three years later, the growing popularity of commercially available games as were provided through the Internet led one of the creators of the initial form in which the Internet Chess Server had at first been offered on a non-profit basis to make it available through payment of a regular subscription. Today the Internet Chess Server provides for the chess games played by a wide range of users and has widespread user support.

The Federation Internationale des Eches was presaged in the course of the progress of the European enthusiasm for playing chess by other attempts to form some kind of overarching institutional framework for people who liked to play chess. Though such ideas had been in wide currency in chess circles, the widespread calamities and disruptions caused by the outbreak of the First World War in Europe meant that leisure activities like playing chess were sidelined in lieu of nationalistic and humanitarian concerns until later. The formation of the group was finally put into place through the initiative of a Russian who had attained widespread skill for his ability to play chess and put in a push for the Federation Internationale des Eches’ formation during the time when the Eighth Sports Olympics were being held. In this original form, however, the Federation Internationale des Eches was not a major player in the world of associations for games but was organized along the lines of a union for people who enjoyed playing chess. At this point it did not require or receive much in the way of funding or of attention from the press. Rather, it gradually attained importance among people who liked to play chess as more than just a casual activity, in part by becoming the deciding body in the process of giving out awards for the recognition of various people as the world’s best at playing chess, which was an organization which some celebrity chess players wanted to be in existence. Today, the attention which the Federation Internationale des Eches is accorded by the world’s games community has meant that it enjoys the official recognition of the International Olympics Committee. In this sense, the Federation Internationale des Eches is known for organizing the World Chess Championship and the Chess Olympiad, and setting rules for playing chess.

In regards to the question of why online chess holds such apparent appeal for the developers of sophisticated computer technology, it can be speculated in a general manner that perhaps the same qualities that are often exhibited by the accomplished programmer, such as high levels of pre-planning and an affinity for the strategies involved in problem-solving, are also those that can lead to high success when you play chess online or off. Like the basic concepts of computing and Internet capabilities themselves, the intellectual groundwork for online chess came long before the tools for actually implementing such proposals were at all available. The notable instance of this can be found occurring in 1950, through the efforts of the innovative and important electronics engineer and mathematician Claude Shannon, who had previously published a 1948 paper generally accorded credit for being the cornerstone of the field now known as information theory. In his 1950 paper, which he entitled “Programming a Computer for Playing Chess,” he predicted that two basic approaches would be taken in the world of software toward the question of how to enable the capacity to play chess online or against a computer. These two approaches he divided between “A” and “B,” giving his preference to “B.” “Type A” was founded on a “minimax” algorithm that considered every possible move that could be taken, whereas “B,” now indeed the dominant model for online chess, which cut back on the moves considered for each turn.

It has not been clearly agreed as to where chess can be reliably considered to have begun, but it is most common among historians concerned with the question to ascribe the earliest identifiable method for playing the game of chess in the sixth century CE. The geographical location for this emergence of chess into the world’s repertoire of games is ascribed to Northwestern India, which at that time was under the control of the authority of the Gupta people. The name given to the early game of chess is “caturanga,” in Sanskrit, which is closely related to the languages of Europe, which are classed together with it as “Indo-European” languages. By people who know how to speak Sanskrit, it is recognized that “caturanga” carries with it the meaning of “four units,” the units in question in this case being those of an army. This form of chess was thus directly inspired by the advanced and successful military tactics through which the Guptas had attained a dominant position in India at that time, and were accordingly played with pieces which represented infantry, cavalry, elephants with riders, and chariots, which find their equivalents in the modern-day form of chess in the figures of the pawn, knight, bishop and rook.

At this very early point in the history of chess, the game of chess was already displaying an atypically pronounced tendency to be transmitted to the cultures of other parts of the world and there find a place in their social practices and institutions. The earliest physical artifacts to survive of a game of chess survive in the area which at that point in time was identified as Sassanid Persia, and is close to the Northwestern India area ruled by the Gupta empire. Here the game of chess came to be known by the related name “chatrang,” which is described being played in romantic epic poems written in Pahlavi. This species of chess was renamed “shatranj” in the period when Persia was conquered by the rising Muslin faith, which spread it through its domain and to its rival of Christian Europe.