The original Sargon from 1978 was written in assembly language by Dan and Kathleen "Kathe" Spracklen for the Z80-based Wavemate Jupiter II.

Since magnetic media were not widely available at the time, the authors placed an advert in Byte magazine selling for $15 photocopied listings that would work in any Z80-based microcomputer.

[5] When magnetic media publishing became widely available, a US Navy petty officer, Paul Lohnes, ported Sargon to the TRS-80, altering the graphics, input, and housekeeping routines but leaving the Spracklens' chess-playing algorithm intact.

Paul was not involved in further refinements to the TRS-80 version due to his reassignment to sea duty shortly after signing the deal with Hayden Software.

In the early 1980s, SARGON CHESS was ported to the Nascom (by Bits & PCs, 1981), Exidy Sorcerer, and Sharp MZ 80K.

[1] J. Mishcon reviewed Sargon II in the October 1980 issue of The Space Gamer magazine, stating that the program beat him regularly on level 5, which took 40 minutes per move.

Apple contacted the Spracklens and, after a port for 68000 assembly, Sargon III was the first third-party executable software for the Macintosh.