Sargon (chess)

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Sargon (or SARGON) is a line of chess-playing software for personal computers. The initial version was written by Dan and Kathe Spracklen, and introduced at the 1978 West Coast Computer Faire, where it won the first computer chess tournament held strictly for microcomputers.

The original SARGON was written in Z-80 assembly language using the TDL Macro Assembler. In a move unusual for the time, complete source code was published in a book SARGON: A Computer Chess Program. SARGON was not widely available beyond the hacker community, but the Spracklens developed a version of the software for the Apple II computer called Sargon II, which was then ported to a variety of other personal computers popular in the early 1980s. It was ported to the 6809 variety of the FLEX operating system by Brian N. Baily and Charles B. Blish in August of 1981, and that port may still be found within this 6809 FLEX emulation. The game engine featured multiple levels of lookahead to make it more accessible to beginning chess players - even though chess programs of the time could not defeat a chess master, they were more than a match for most amateur players. Sargon II was released commercially through Hayden Software and followed by Sargon III in 1983.

After the demise of Hayden Software, later chess programs were also released under the name Sargon, including Sargon IV (Spinnaker Software), Sargon V (Activision) and a CD-i title simply named Sargon Chess.

The name "Sargon" was taken from either of the historical kings Sargon of Akkad or Sargon of Assyria. (Ironically, neither ruler would have been able to play chess since it was not invented until long after their reigns.) The name was originally written entirely in capitals since early computer operating systems such as CP/M did not support lower-case text (nor files with names more than six letters long, as with ADVENT).