The Overtom Chess Computer Museum

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TLDR

  • Online museum cataloguing 411 dedicated chess computers across 8 brand families, organized as a browsable index by manufacturer.

Key Takeaways

  • Largest category is Diversen (103 machines), a catch-all for miscellaneous brands, followed by Scisys/Saitek/enz. at 86.
  • Novag (53) and Mephisto (50) are the two biggest named-brand collections, reflecting their dominant market presence in the 1970s-90s dedicated chess computer era.
  • Fidelity (29) is smaller by count but historically significant as the brand that produced early tournament-winning dedicated hardware.
  • CXG/Sphinx (36), Excalibur (31), and Tandy/Radio Shack (23) round out the index, covering the mass-market and retail-chain segment of the hobby.
  • The index structure implies each entry links to individual machine pages, making it a reference database rather than a narrative history.

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