RIP Geocities

[tmokonen]

Many engine pages have disappeared, now that GeoCities has shut down. The following engines no longer have a home page:

Ajedrez Tactico
Asterisk
Averno
Ax (still available at WBEC)
Ayito (still available at WBEC)
Beaches
Bestia
Cecir
Chaturanga
DChess
Diablo
DrunkenMaster
Freyr
Geko
Golem
Heavychess
Jupiter
Marquis
Mystery
Naum (free versions)
Neurosis
Numpty
Popeye
Rooster (yeah, a clone, I know)
Stan's Chess (still available at WBEC)
Thinker (I think the downloads are still available somewhere, but the home page is gone)
Thor's Hammer (JA compile still available)
Twisted Logic
Xadecro

Of course, many of these engines will be available at web.archive.org, and some of these engines are still being actively developed and will have a new home page soon, but this is still a great loss for fans of free engines.

Oddly, the Lime site still seems to be up, although it's a Geocities site.

[F. Bluemers]

Also gone is Wilhelm,the one that checked the tablebases

edit:as well as Alex winboard manager page/winman site

[Eelco de Groot]

Did not know about geocities, did it suddenly collapse because of the economic crisis? As it seems that many programmers have not yet moved to a new site they did not have much time to move?

Popeye is I believe still to be found on newer site of Franz Huber, see the link I got from Norbert Raimund Leisner on the Computer Chess Wiki to a compilation of chess problem related software and with links to sites dedicated to chess problem solving in general:

http://computer-chess.org/doku.php?id=c ... s_problems

Commercial version of Naum has moved from geocities to http://naumchess.brinkster.net/ with a link to Naum 2.0 still available on Superchessengine.com, see the page with free stuff on the Naum site.

But I don't know links to any of the other programs myself.

Eelco

[tmokonen]

Yahoo! has shut down a number of other services aside from GeoCities, so I would imagine the economy has played a part. Here is an article about the situation:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technol ... osing.html

The Thinker downloads are available here:

http://cid-2991af457de54bf0.skydrive.li ... spx/Public

[Eelco de Groot]

Yahoo! has shut down a number of other services aside from GeoCities, so I would imagine the economy has played a part. Here is an article about the situation:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technol ... osing.html

The Thinker downloads are available here:

http://cid-2991af457de54bf0.skydrive.li ... spx/Public

Thanks Tony! Still, for a giant like Yahoo, I can't imagine it would cost them more than a percent or so of their budget to keep all this open? Maybe they are more afraid of any illegal material ending up on their sites? But in that case they are in the wrong business, if they do not want to take risks.

I read some of your article link in the L.A. Times, sad all this may be lost, terabytes of history and Yahoo does not even seem to know how much material there was on their servers. They just hoped to profit from the Internet boom. Okay, to their credit, they did provide an opportunity to get free webspace for a lot of people in the early days. It seems Yahoo really is in trouble if they had to close down 20 services last year. Still the closing sentence of the article sums up:

"Yahoo never knew the value of GeoCities," Rezner said.

I found Wilhelm by Rafael B. Andrist still preserved on Archive.org here:
http://web.archive.org/web/200711130631 ... nglish.htm

Eelco

[Ron Murawski]

Many engine pages have disappeared, now that GeoCities has shut down. The following engines no longer have a home page:

Ajedrez Tactico
Asterisk
Averno
Ax (still available at WBEC)
Ayito (still available at WBEC)
Beaches
Bestia
Cecir
Chaturanga
DChess
Diablo
DrunkenMaster
Freyr
Geko
Golem
Heavychess
Jupiter
Marquis
Mystery
Naum (free versions)
Neurosis
Numpty
Popeye
Rooster (yeah, a clone, I know)
Stan's Chess (still available at WBEC)
Thinker (I think the downloads are still available somewhere, but the home page is gone)
Thor's Hammer (JA compile still available)
Twisted Logic
Xadecro

Of course, many of these engines will be available at web.archive.org, and some of these engines are still being actively developed and will have a new home page soon, but this is still a great loss for fans of free engines.

Oddly, the Lime site still seems to be up, although it's a Geocities site.

My update List has different engines listed. In some cases you have not updated your links for engines that have moved (Numpty, Xadreco, etc.). For other engines maybe I missed some webpage moves. I think that between the two of us we've got Geocities covered.

My list:
- Lyapko utilities
- WinMan
- Ajedrez Táctico
- Asterisk
- Averno
- Ax
- Beaches
- Bestia
- Cecir
- Chaturanga
- Chispa
- DanChess
- Dchess
- Diablo
- Freyr
- Golem
- HeavyChess
- Jupiter
- Marquis
- Mystery
- Naum 4
- Neurosis
- Thinker
- Thor'sHammer

Here is today's Update List including the geocities casualties
http://computer-chess.org/forum/index.php?id=465

Ron

[Dann Corbit]

Which are the programs that are not available anywhere?

[tano-urayoan]

Also gone is Wilhelm,the one that checked the tablebases

edit:as well as Alex winboard manager page/winman site

Is there a chance to retrieve the information of this 2 pages?

[tmokonen]

Hi Tano-Urayoan, Eelco provided an archived link for Wilhelm. I also stumbled across what seems to be a new home page for Wilhelm:

http://home.datacomm.ch/kruandr/index_english.htm

The old Alex Winboard Tournament manager page is here:
http://usuarios.lycos.es/alexwbtm/English/Home.htm

but unfortunately, the new page (http://es.geocities.com/winboard_chess) does not seem to have been archived, and the download links in the google cache of this page seem to be dead.

[Ron Murawski]

Which are the programs that are not available anywhere?

Here is a partial list, but I have not started adding the GeoCities casualties yet.
http://computer-chess.org/doku.php?id=c ... ngine_list

I'm about to start updating the list right now. I hope to be finished by late tonight (in 6 hours or so) when today's daily updates list will be posted.

Daily Updates List:
http://computer-chess.org/forum/

Ron