Bobby Fischer in 1996

Yesterday in a post on my main blog, Bobby Fischer Day by Day (May 2022), I introduced 'a site that offers [Bobby Fischer] newspaper clippings in chronological order'. What can we learn from that site about the development of chess960?

Last year in a post on this blog, The Early Evolution of Fischerandom (February 2021), I listed other posts that had tracked developments in the first half of the 1990s. I wrote,

We see that Fischer's early [chess960] activities were bunched into two time periods. The first period took place in 1992-1993, when Fischer developed the rules of his emerging invention. The second period took place in 1995-1996, when Fischer revealed his invention to the world.

A key event in that period was the announcement of 'Fischerandom' in June 1996. The site that records Fischer newspaper clippings is in fact a family of blogs, where each blog covers a full calendar year. The blog covering 1996, Bobby Fischer 1996, currently consists of only two posts:-

• 1996-02-10: Where In The World Is Chess Master Bobby Fischer? (bobby-fischer-1996.blogspot.com)
• 1996-06-20: Bobby Fischer Presents New Chess Game (ditto)

The February 1996 post answered the 'Where Is' question with 'Budapest, Hungary'. It confirms another of my own posts from last year, tracking Fischer's movements from 1992 and afterwards: From Sveti Stefan to Budapest (March 2021).

All of the posts in the family of Fischer blogs include a link to the original clipping. The June 1996 post links to Bobby Fischer Presents New Chess Game (newspapers.com), and adds a transcript of the clipping:-

Buenos Aires, Argentina (AP) -- Former world chess champion Bobby Fischer wants to bring the fun back into chess. To do it, he has created "Fischerandom," a computerized shuffler that randomly distributes chess pieces on the back row of the chess board at the start of each game. That creates 960 possible variations of starting positions -- the first modification to the game in 500 years, the Argentine Chess Club said.

While that appears to be a great start to clippings about the history of chess960, it's the only mention that I could find on the Fischer blogs. I checked all years from 1992, the year of the second Fischer - Spassky match, through 2001, the year of Fischer's most infamous radio broadcasts, and came up empty handed.