GameKnot is turning 10 years old this year! We did not have a specific date designated as the official launch day back in 2000, so unfortunately it is not possible to pinpoint the exact date for GameKnot's birthday. To the best of our recollection, it happened some time in June 2000. We are very happy to provide you with a great chess experience, that hopefully you have been enjoying all these years. We are very grateful to have such a loyal group of smart chess players that made GameKnot into one of the most visited chess websites out there and here is to the next glorious 10 years of even better chess!

We've been asked many times before about the history of GameKnot, how it was created, who is behind it all, etc. etc.. Frankly, there is not much to tell, but a 10-year anniversary seems like an important enough occasion to look back and do our best describing it. Here it is:

How was GameKnot created? GameKnot was started as a game portal. "Web portals" were all the rage back in 2000, but we quickly realized that chasing the next Internet fad or trying to do many different things at the same time was not our thing, and we would much rather concentrate on doing one thing — chess — and being absolutely the best at it. And that's been our philosophy ever since — doing one thing and one thing only, but better than anyone. If you are curious, you can still get a glimpse of the early days on our more games page (Lines game and Reversi/Othello).

Who is behind GameKnot? Initially, GameKnot was a one-man project, but now we have a small but extremely dedicated team of developers and support staff working on GameKnot. We take great pride in what we have created and it gives us tremendous pleasure to know that a lot of smart people are enjoying our work every day. While we do like to remain anonymous, please know that there is always someone working behind the scenes 24/7, making sure everything is running smoothly or adding new features and improvements.

Does GameKnot staff play chess? Yes, we love chess, and most of us maintain an unofficial account on GameKnot and play chess here every day. No, you may not know our user names — unfortunately most of us are not Grandmasters, so we'd just feel embarrassed! :)

Who are the earliest GameKnot members? Unfortunately we did not start tracking the account creation date until about a year after GameKnot was started. We tried to approximate it for the earlier accounts based on other data (such as the game history, etc.), but it wasn't always possible or accurate. Which is the reason it says "Registered: before XXX-2000" for some profiles. Here are the 100 earliest created accounts, for players that are still active (i.e. have games in progress):

fingetower (1345) tanman (2284) 8888 (1654) eddy (1302) tassiac (1718) doncan (1578) ecologicwall (1296) knightrunner (1482) gudmi (1277) oscarwills (1566) ottobre-rosso (1911) grandpatzer (1860) f1shashi (1363) cpocf (1268) tym_ (1528) redrook4 (1808) idefix (2172) tonyh (1605) harzer (954) wedgeantr2 (1592) tonlesu (2108) kingpin00 (1385) lchppll (1265) speedy (1531) elel (1494)

agmac (2210) kevinn (1506) godevils (1809) petern (1369) hrryd (1774) jmarsweet (1321) chessguy16 (1338) fabio84 (1202) theparrothead (1593) danh (1268) hvacman (2407) catmane (1442) high (2546) cartier24 (1729) djclem (1010) kinger (1173) shallowthought (1341) jfa22 (1483) jgkagaoan (1872) dorkusmcdick (1382) guerino (1486) swoko (1699) jabart (1392) sylvestermagic (1564) lata (1532)

ragnar (1746) cairo (2511) richardwyles (1540) carlosmart (2474) thomasj (1302) oldfossil (1152) marcocapezza (2452) vesa (1630) alex31 (1426) liverpool (1497) b123 (1701) krejci (1939) floydtooth (1284) tamulder (1673) pennsylvaniadan (1538) jeffreylee (1652) israeljr (1284) aodrhino (1280) scipio (1496) macario_alm (1305) petery (1623) capanera (1560) macheide (2118) episode (1858) oldronruns (1491)

oliver5 (1405) jetmakay (1268) durbat (1021) vova105 (1822) clueftenegger2 (1827) onyx (1549) 1unknown (1413) badbadboy (1235) anotherbadmove (1571) naveed (1265) presburger (1989) duchess (2339) nobody (1380) mormel12 (1407) karatekid (1550) antero (1018) bishop4u2 (1127) theheat (1448) ramsey52 (1633) fourkingsacehigh (1513) nordlicht (2001) newwave (1577) xateu (1830) teri (1178) scottiabhoy (1225)

What about the technical side of GameKnot? When we just started, GameKnot was using a shared web hosting account, but we quickly outgrew it and had to move to a dedicated server (Cobalt RaQ 3). Within about a year we had to upgrade again, and ever since we have been upgrading our hardware every year to keep up with our players, and with the ever increasing amount of features available on our website. The rule of thumb is that our server load can never cross 50% threshold even during peak hours. Right now GameKnot is running on 1 very beefy database server (dual quad-core CPUs with 16Gb of memory and RAID10 on 8 SAS HDDs), 2 web servers (dual quad-core CPUs with 12Gb of memory) and 1 mail/backup/etc server. On the software side, we are using Apache/Lighttpd with mod_perl and custom packages written in C, and MySQL database as the backend.