A few seconds later another piece moved on the screen propelled by a signal from New York or Canada or somewhere

A few seconds later, another piece moved on the screen, propelled by a signal from New York, or Canada, or somewhere else in the ether.The only hiccup came when Lalic, who had been trying to win a position with an extra pawn, finally gave up and offered her opponent a draw “The draw offer is declined,” the screen announced. “Suddenly it just seemed to work.”Susan Lalic sat at a chessboard playing her moves as normal. Ali Mortazavi, who seems to be the gateway leading from British chess to the Internet, said things are always like that on the Internet and it will be fine, don’t worry.When the games did start, it all went rather smoothly “I don’t know what happened,” said Simon. They had not been able to contact the server yet, but hoped that things would start in about half an hour. The Canadians had thought it would be rather jolly to celebrate the summit by staging something that would allow a real-time computer link between members of all the G7 nations.

They added Russia to the list and, at a week’s notice, made a few telephone calls and announced an eight-nation international chess tournament. What could be simpler? But there’s many a slip …I had a cup of coffee, then went downstairs where Simon Brown, the international director of the British Chess Federation, explained that the Canadians had promised to call him the previous evening with the rules, and to fax them to him, and to e-mail them to Cyberia, but that nothing had happened. Simon’s doing his nut and Ali’s just smiling a lot and saying: ‘It’ll all be fine, don’t worry’.”
England were meant to be playing the United States in the first round of an international chess team tournament that was somehow linked to the G7 economic summit in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Arriving at the Cyberia cafe in central London, where the English players had arranged to log on for the match, I was told: “They’re downstairs But I wouldn’t go down if I were you.

The CBA is at Bowes Morrell House, 111 Walmgate, York YO1 2UA, tel 01904 671417.. In 1895 the US and Britain tried to hold a transatlantic chess match with teams of players relaying their moves over that new invention, the wireless telegraph. Unfortunately it was a flop – technical difficulties meant play had to be abandoned after 20 moves. But a century later, surely such an event could be achieved with consummate ease using the modern technology of the Internet?

Some hope. It will contain a built-in interface to all software used by the authors of articles, so readers will need no equipment (beyond a 486 PC and access to the Internet) to make full use of it.The writer is editor of ‘British Archaeology’. “They are also only read by about 20 people from cover to cover,” he says.

Typically, an annual subscription to such journals costs around pounds 36.The journal will not only contain more information than a printed report but will also be cheaper to distribute. The new journal is being set up with a pounds 185,000 grant from the UK Higher Education Funding Councils. When the first issue arrives, it may also solve a crisis in archaeological publishing, says Dr Julian Richards of York University, who chairs the project’s technical committee. Excavators are morally obliged to publish the results of their excavations, he says, but reports are expensive and have print runs of only a few hundred.

“The journal will allow the reader to apply a different filtering process and produce a different diagram. That would not be possible in print.”Internet Archaeology will be available through the World Wide Web, with some sections available free and others protected by a password which will be issued by the CBA on payment of a subscription. “A lot of presentations in print hide a prior manipulation of data which the reader doesn’t know about,” he says. “We will allow readers to strip that away.”One example of this is geophysical survey, which is produced by ground- penetrating equipment and gives an idea of what is below the surface without excavating it.