FICS 11th Anniversary Celebrations
In collaboration with
ChessLecture.com
FICS will celebrate its 11th Anniversary with the presentation of a free
video on the Ivanchuk-Svidler (Linares 2006) game, by IM Bill Paschall.
Bill will also be available for a "Question and Answers" session on FICS
on Sunday March 9th at 4:00pm EST (9:00pm GMT).
Download ChessLectureCom_FICS_Chessvideo.wmv
The Sponsor
History
Michael Moore, of the University of Utah, and Richard Nash recognized
the potential of an Internet Chess Server and programmed its first
version at the Colorado School of Mines. The official opening date of
the ICS was January 15, 1992. John Chanak, William Kish, and Aaron
Putnam moved the server to a host machine at Carnegie Mellon
University in the fall of 1992, and took over its operation.
FICS, the Free Internet Chess Server was born from the original
AICS, the American Internet Chess Server. When it was announced that
AICS would become ICC and begin to charge a yearly fee for registered
players, a small group of dedicated programmers banded together to
create their own server and to continue to promote free chess on the
internet. Taking some ratty server code from the original server
(before Daniel Sleator began to maintain AICS at CMU), Sparky resigned
his admin position and began the creation of FICS. At this same time,
TheDane and Hawk had created their own test server at EICS, the European
Internet Chess Server hosted by Aarhus
University. Another effort was being made by foxbat, who had
the code up and running, and making improvements, on his MUD server at
Ohio State University. Sparky, foxbat, TheDane and Hawk brought their
efforts together and founded fics.onenet.net. With the notable
contributions from Shane, loon, mann, grimm, hersco, DAV,
vek, and too many others to mention, FICS slowly came alive.
The present
FICS is now home to over 275,000 total players and growing daily!
FICS has an active staff of volunteers dedicated to free chess for all,
consisting of 33 admins (*), 34 non-admin Service Representatives (SR),
and 21 non-admin Tournament Managers (TM).