AThe Morning Call Allentown, Pennsylvania Sunday, October 26, 1980 - Page 111
Chess: The Machine and Fischer
“…illustrates Fischer's well known fondness for electronic gadgetry. The former world champion was, in fact, one of the first chess players in the Los Angeles area to buy a chess computer, when they were initially marketed there in the fall of 1976.
A few months later, in a letter published in “Computer Chess Newsletter,” he complained bitterly about that purchase.
“It (the computer) is ridiculously weak — they really shouldn't have come out with it. They also made a botch of the keyboard so it's hard to follow the moves. Somehow they reversed the algebraic notation so that the files are numbered and the ranks lettered, if you can believed that! I know I can give it a queen and a rook, because I gave them away in the opening and won. But I can probably give it much more. In the endgame it's almost impossible to lose to it.”
Of course, today's commercially available chess computers are amazingly effective devices, bearing little resemblance to the crude prototypes rushed to the market, four years ago.
…
Here is a game played by Fischer in 1977 against a pioneer computer chess program, designed for scientific research purposes by Richard Greenblatt of the Massachusetts Institution of Technology.
