The CHESSmate was demonstrated at the January 1978 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as a prototype in order to assess customer interest in the product. It was available for order at the June 1978 CES in Chicago and the first units, manufactured in Hong Kong, shipped later that year. It was a big seller in Germany from the beginning.
↫ Peter R. Jennings
There’s no way I can summarise this story.
That is one hell of a ride, from the who’s-who of the very beginnings of the microcomputer industry, to the difficulty of getting paid by Commodore, to the quite in-depth one-on-one with Bobby Fischer. Remarkable.
And in all that, he doesn’t bother to mention that ChessMate was _the first ever commercial computer game_ and possibly the _first ever commercial bit of retail microcomputer software._
He doesn’t bother to mention that it was revenues from ChessMate that paid for the development of VisiCalc, the first ever spreadsheet.
It was a keystone.
VisiCalc made the money to develop VisiOn, the first ever PC GUI, from _before the Mac_.
It was also the app that caused and inspired Lotus 1-2-3, which was in turn the app that made the IBM PC a success.
Wow.
A real long and fascinating read.
The Bobby Fischer section was a real eye opener for me personally. I have a complex neurodiverse 13yo girl and this was like looking into the future. The good news is seeing what this subset of humans are capable of!