Playing chess online is a favorite Internet activity for many computer users, one that has allowed people to bring their love for and fascination with the game into the online age. A wide variety of Internet sites allow people to play chess online, some for free and some for paid subscriptions. The chess online technology that has been presented to users also allows people access to a wide array of other chess players of varying skill levels, giving them the opportunity to find chess online opponents of equal skill level and experience with the game. Such sites have been a prominent feature of the Internet since it was first made available to consumer users. Even prototype versions of the technology that would later be provided to a wide array of users as the Internet allowed people to play chess. The capability to play chess online comes from a feature of
Internet technology that was developed known as Internet chess servers.
Internet chess servers allow people to play and perform other functions associated with chess through online connections. They function as external servers that allow connections to be formed through an array of graphics programs installed on the computers of each online player. As the demand for the ability to play chess online has grown over the years in which the Internet has been in common use, the variety of Internet chess servers that are available for use by the public have been increased, and several can now be employed by Internet users interested in chess. The largest Internet chess server belongs to the Internet Chess Club, a longstanding site for playing chess online that has been in existence since 1992, in the process attracting an extensive and loyal membership of Internet based chess players. Another notable chess server in terms of use and popularity is the function created for use on the site of Yahoo!Games, while yet another notable company that operates an important Internet chess server is the well-known Playchess.
The history of the development of this technology for playing chess online extends back to the nineteen seventies, which saw the successful development and implementation of a program created under the PLATO System rubric that went by the name of “chess3.” It was not however connected to any prototype versions of the Internet, and as a platform for delivering the capacity to play chess online was well known and used regularly only by a small number of users involved in developing the technology. With the development of Internet technology in the early nineteen nineties, developers saw the promise of technology that would allow users of the new capacity to play Internet chess online. The start-up of the Internet Chess Server occurred in 1992, with the developers soon moving the technology to servers located at Carnegie Mellon University. Three years later, one of the developers of the service decided to offer it commercially and placed access to the Internet chess server on the basis of a paid subscription.


