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[An About Chess guest article; December 2007.]

In the 1950's and 60's I was a very active chess player. I used to play at least 40 hours per week, was the captain of our strong college chess team and played in quite a few tournaments. Although I was not a particularly strong player, I sure spent a lot of my youth enjoying the game.

I am now older, and my interest in chess has subsided. However, I do want to claim my rightful place in chess history as the inventor and first commercial vendor of the digital chess clock.

In 1966 I retired from chess and committed my time to a professional career. However, in 1973 I was invited by a neighbor to play in a local tournament in the San Diego (California) area. At that tournament I noticed that every one of the players was still using a mechanical chess clock -- of a design patented in about the year 1900. Since I was at the time involved in electronics, I decided to investigate the possibility of commercializing a digital version of this device. More -- I decided to concurrently dramatically advance the method of time keeping in chess.

For the next eight years I focused nearly all my "free" time on this endeavor. In 1975 (together with my electrical engineer Jeff Ponsor, who has passed away about ten years ago) I filed for and received the first patent (Number 4,062,180) on a fully operational (microprocessor based) digital chess clock. An additional patent (USA & European) for a more advanced version with many additional features was awarded in 1981 (4,247,925).

My chess clock concept resulted from years of conceptualization and testing and thousands of hours of work. I even published my MBA thesis on this subject -- "Demand Analysis for a New Product (Digital Chess Clock)" -- at San Diego State University, 1978. For this thesis I interviewed and surveyed thousands of chess players from all over the world, and every chess association and identified chess club worldwide.

I actually designed and built two versions of the clock: the Micromate-80 (based on the original patent), and the Micromate-180, which incorporated the latest innovations. Only one unit of the Micromate-80 was ever built. This unit was extensively tested in tournament play for over a year and resulted in the development and commercialization of the Micromate-180. The Micromate-180 was truly revolutionary and clearly ahead of its time. It featured a rich repertoire of options for timing the game of chess including for example, the ability to set a fixed time per move, then add the unused time for each move to the player's total time remaining. This feature, which I called "Accumulation", became the linchpin of Bobby Fischer's chess clock that was patented almost ten years later.

Some of the innovations claimed for and incorporated in the Micromate were:

• Down counting clocks showing the time remaining to each player. Interestingly, Ed Edmondson who headed the USCF at the time, strongly objected to this concept on historic grounds. So much so that for more than a year he refused to allow me to advertise the Micromate in Chess Life. Eventually he relented, and the Micromate was promoted with full-page adverts. In 1980 I donated one of the Micromate-180 units and a copy of my thesis to the USCF's museum.
  
  
• Extremely accurate, the Micromate depicted time to the nearest second. The merit of this capability was first demonstrated at the Lone Pine tournament in 1979, where a grandmaster game was decide with just about one second left on the clock! This Lone Pine tournament was the first international event in which the Micromate-180 was used to time an officially sanctioned game (Formanek vs. Chandler), and was used by the contemporary challenger, Viktor Korchnoi (photos available).
  
  
• The clock was fully programmable by the user. A large variety of game types and time permutations were possible.
  
  
• Time lost to an illegal move was recoverable, even to several moves back, since the clock recorded the time for all moves.
  
  

From the Author: I wrote this letter in 1997 to clarify some historical facts about my role in the development of the digital chess clock. These facts have not changed. - Sincerely, Joseph Meshi