Okay, with the new CPU cooler, there's no way this overclocked 386SX can possibly lose!
We weren't
playing chess. The three of us were running the "live" streaming from the 1999 British Chess Championships in Scarborough. Sensory boards had yet to be introduced so we entered the moves manually from the top 4 boards. Runners conveyed them to us on scoresheets. This was pretty much the birth of "live" chess on the internet. Cutting edge stuff. All set up by Dez and the other chap, Dave Flynn, who I believe is still one of the admins at FICS (Free Internet Chess Server).
It's quite possible that YACFers may not recognise the very youthful Dez standing to my right.
Edit: around the same time, I had a 386 on my desk at work. I had loaded Fritz onto it, which was (and probably still is) the best chess-playing program around. I reckon I used to beat it 3 times out of 4. Then the bastards at HMCE upgraded me to a 486 and I only ever won 1 more game against exactly the same software.
Edit no 2: the matches started at 2.15BST every day, which is about the time that a lot of USAnians get to work. Initially we were putting the data on our own server, but after a couple of days so many people were trying to access it via our modem that it just ground to a halt. After that, Malcolm Pein, owner of Chess & Bridge, in London, invited us to store the data on his servers, which had much faster connections, and that cured the problem. A year or two later we were redundant as Malcolm had invested in some sensory boards so the moves were genuinely being broadcast live. The trouble was his tech types knew buggerall about chess and they mad some glaring errors with the presentation - like mixing up the names of the white & black players.
