When the original Internet Chess Server (ICS) was commercialized and rebranded as the Internet Chess Club (ICC) in 1995, a group of users and developers came together to fork the code and host an alternative committed to free access, and a rivalry between the two servers persisted for years.

FICS users download one of several graphical client programs, connect to the server via telnet, and can play chess or variants at a range of time controls.

Games played on FICS are stored in a database, which has been used to train chess engines and to support academic studies.

Daniel Sleator, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, took over operation in July 1992 and improved the code.

He announced plans to commercialize the service, copyrighted the code in 1994, and rebranded it as the Internet Chess Club (ICC) in 1995, charging membership fees.

[4][3] Several former ICS programmers saw the move as exploiting their work and, on the day its rebranding was announced, they created a mailing list focused on developing an alternative.

For example, very fast games in which each player only has one or two minutes to make all their moves are called "lightning" on FICS but "bullet" on ICC.

The earliest were XICS and XBoard, with subsequent programs including WinBoard, BabasChess, Jin, Thief, Raptor, eboard, PyChess, and JavaBoard.

A bot takes the moves in ongoing games and relays them to special demo accounts bearing the names of players in the event.

The relay has covered several World Chess Championships as well as Wijk aan Zee, Morelia-Linares and Amber Melody.