FICS - Free Internet Chess Server
FICS
8708 31ST Ave N
New Hope
Mn 55427
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
Download ChessLectureCom_FICS_Chessvideo.wmv

The video is in wmv format and it requires Windows Media Player.

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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).

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Last modified: Fri Mar 03 11:34:17 GMT Standard Time 2006