Mine was Video Chess for the Atari 2600, which was really pathetic. It didn't recognize en passant, and the computer AI was really weak and easily fooled. My first REAL chess program, though, was Sargon III for the Atari home computers. So what was yours? Given the international mix of the playerbase here, this should elicit some interesting responses.
My first portable chess computer was a Saitek,got it as a birthday present.Not sure about the name,I believe it was junior.It had only 8 levels,and I could allready beat it at level 8,at the time.I then bought the Saitek simultano,which,even today,I cannot beat.Somewhere in a closet,there's also a novag saphire,from a friend who left it here so it wouldn't gather dust and take up space at his house.
I only got a pc 2 years back,and bought a copy of fritz7,and recently fritz8 too.I hardly ever play the damn thing,mostly use it to try out openinglines and improve the lines I allready play.
I got the first Win32 version of Fritz when it first came out. That was a long time ago. I also had a chess machine called Ivan by Excalibur. I also had Battlechess for the Atari ST, which I found more amusing than challenging. Chessmaster 2000, also for the Atari XL computer, I played GNUchess for a while. Also had another chess program for the Atari XL that was part of a set that came with Checkers and Reversi. I wish I could remember the name, because it was pretty strong. Maybe someone else does. I also have Chessmaster 5500 for Windows. I'm sure there's been others, I just don't rememebr them all right now.
I can't remember the name but I got a chess program on a floppy when i was about 8 or 10 years old. It was a cheap program, but it always beated me badly 🙁 (once i wasn's mated for 56 whole moves! 😉 )
When i found it a while ago and put it in my pc to try to beat it it didn't work anymore so now I'm using ruffian 1.05 with arena 1.08 as gui and I still haven't won 😉
A regular chess machine by Fidelity Electronics years ago. The thing that infuriated me was its refusal to castle. My machine opponent's king just sat in the middle of the board for the whole game. Maybe the programmers didn't know about castling. It's amazing the progress programms have made. Now I'm lucky if Fritz gives me time to castle.
Dragon Chess for the Dragon32. If I remember correctly it always beat me (as do all programmes as I can't be arsed to play properly against them). However for Christmas one year my parents bought me a Novag Solo and a few years later a Novag Mephisto. I still have the mephisto but the solo is long gone - however, having read this thread I just found one on ebay and hopefully in 3 days and 4 hours i'll be the proud owner of a Solo with missing pieces!