Evolution of computer-chess

Already in 1949 Claude Shannon has written a paper about computerchess,

many of the concepts he proposed are still valid today in modern chess-programs.

The first chessprogram competed in a human tournament was "Mac Hawk VI",

running on a PDP-computer in 1969 and performed quite well against weaker players.

But not before the 70's chessprograms were available having acceptable playing-strength for more skilled players, even though most of them

were still not usable for the public and typical of academic type ( eg Chess 4.5 from David Slate and Larry Atkin ).

This has changed in 1977 with the Chess Challenger from Fidelity,

the first chesscomputer for the public, even though the playing-strength

still was far from what was expected by many people at this time.

This has changed in the beginning of the 80's, the great era of commercial

chesscomputer having a playing-strength now to be able to fight head-on with more skilled chess-players.

In this decade some machines have reached the critical 2000 ELO in playing-strength already, what is comparable with a class-A chess-player,

but were still below 2300 ELO, what is comparable to master-strength.

This again has changed in the 90's, typical with usage of 32-bit-processors,

resulting in commercial sold computers having a playing-strength of around 2300 ELO.

After around 2000 the era of real chess-computer came to an end,

caused by increasing utilisation of PCs, Notebooks and Smartphones.

But until today there is a small community of fans always looking for older chessmachines.