https://tluif.home.xs4all.nl/chescom/EngExcPhanF.html

It’s a “robotic” board that moves the pieces by itself.

You can sometimes find “untested” (i.e., broken) ones on eBay for a reasonable price, and if you’re lucky they’re an easy fix. Mine was stuck because the lock slider had wedged something and the repair took all of 10 minutes.

Very clean engineering: a few screws gets you in, there’s a remarkably small PCB, few wires and mechanical pieces: the main mechanism consists of two orthogonally mounted sliders with a stepper motor and belt each.

I don’t even play chess, but it’s amazing to watch it play both sides.

They also use a clever algorithm to route pieces around other piece since (obviously) the pieces can’t jump over other pieces given that they are moved by a magnet under the board.

[1]. https://www.chessprogramming.org/El_Ajedrecista

[2]. https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/stl-430b9bbe92716/

[3]. https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.030.005?qu...

[4]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%AFssa

Technically, these electro mechanical machines may not qualify as computers, but still, what a scoop it would be to get them!

I was a horrible chess player but painstakingly worked out a way to win as white, keeping a detailed log of my experiments in a notebook. The first couple moves were wildly out of book (because I didn't know book), and the computer with its limited Z80 processor always computed the same moves after that. Some googling [1] shows the board's Elo is 1300ish.

To illustrate the state of the art in 1979, the manual [2] explicitly calls out that it understands en passant and castling.

[1] https://www.spacious-mind.com/html/chess_challenger_7.html

[2] https://ia902902.us.archive.org/20/items/mame0.211manualsful...

I'm also surprised that I never bothered checking the make of my own chess computer from the 80s.

So I now have. It turns out I own a Novag! https://tluif.home.xs4all.nl/chescom/EngCCmk2.html

https://www.benlo.com/microchess/index.html