Author: Alastair Scott
Date: 10:47:29 03/16/03
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On March 16, 2003 at 13:38:19, Mike Byrne wrote: >Sadly, I concur with your prognosis of the dedicated chess machine market. The >dedicated chess machine bubble ( if you can call this a "bubble") peaked in late >1992/1993 with the production of te TASC R30/40 models and the Genius 68030. No >dedicated unit has come close to these models since then. It will only be a >matter of time before we have a handheld (fully fuunctional unit that is not >dedicated to chess) machine that will be stronger than any dedicated unit ever >made. I think that day must be very close, if not already on us, with PocketPCs (for example, the top-of-the-range Dell Axim plus Pocket Grandmaster/Ruffian). It has already been passed when comparing like with like; even the feeblest non-dedicated handheld (Zire) plus Chess Tiger for PalmOS is arguably stronger than any dedicated handheld that has ever existed (Cosmos). Your cusp date of 1992-3 is interesting; that's when PCs started to get cheap enough for reasonably ordinary people to have one at home, and the big problem with dedicated chess computers (not being able to save and load games) started showing itself as the Internet started to appear at home and work and databases could be passed around easily. (Before, PCs were too expensive, and I remember swindles on top of that such as the 'business PC' costing about 3 times that of the 'home PC'). Alastair
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