16 June 2015

Early Chess on the Web

In recent months I've twice used Archive.org as the source for posts related to historical web sites -- Soltis's Sites and Chesscafe.com 2015 -- i.e. 'ancient' chess on the web. Since I'm using the same resource for a series of posts on my World Championship blog -- where Zonal Qualifiers C17 (1997 Groningen) is the latest example -- this post is a summary of the technique I use for the basic research.

An Archive.org search starts with an early chess directory. One of the first was Chess-space.com, for which two domains were used:-

The given date is the earliest for which Archive.org currently has a record of the domain. An important general directory was Yahoo.com:-

The best early chess-specific directory was probably Chessopolis.com. Here is its list of other chess directories (which has links to the various Chessopolis categories on a sidebar) for research in new directions:-

Another comprehensive source was About.com, originally known as Miningco.com. Along with the other categories from the period 2002-2008, I maintained the last two links given here, which are lists of other chess directories:-

The directories help locate specific chess resources of a certain period which can be explored for info related to a research topic. It should be understood that the pre-2000 record is particularly incomplete and spotty, both for Archive.org and for the various chess directories. The rec.games.chess 'newsgroups' help fill in the blanks. Here is an example of a search related to 1997 Groningen.

These links taken together are just a starting point and provide uncountable useful directions for further exploration. Happy hunting!

Posted by Mark Weeks at 6/16/2015 05:04:00 PM

Labels: , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)