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million against Nevil personally and collected more than $5 million from one of his codefendants.

At Cambridge Automation, Fanning, Martin, and Nevil weren't able to keep things going for long. Key supplier Unisys ultimately sued the company, winning a still-unpaid $700,000 judgment. The company dissolved without paying off the purchase loan, according to Walter. Yet even as the business was sinking, Fanning carried himself like a successful sales executive, dressing in good suits and driving expensive cars. "He took over a tiny company, and it continued to fail," said Duncan Audette, a Cambridge employee. "I didn't think he had much ability as a manager, but he liked to appear wealthy and flashy." Fanning also remembered his allies, even Nevil.

FANNING'S NEXT TRY AT BUSINESS success began with his love of chess, a game that drew him and many others into computers. Just like math and music, chess reaches some intuitively analytical part of the brain. All three areas have turned out child prodigies for generations. As access to computers spread, prodigies began showing up in that field as well. With such deep ties between chess and computers, chess players became rapid adopters of the Internet as a means for matching wits remotely.

Chess enthusiasts designed a computer server for those seeking fellow players. The free server moved from university to university until it arrived at Carnegie Mellon in the early 1990s with about fifty people logged in at any one time, enough to find a partner of roughly equal strength. One regular player was a CMU computer-science professor named Danny Sleator. Sleator enjoyed the system, but a number of bugs in it bothered him. And he didn't like the time clock, which turned some late-developing games into mad rushes at the end. He preferred a mechanism that gave each player a bit more time based on the number of moves they had made already. Sleator asked the people running the system if he could tinker with the system, and they agreed. In 1995, as the Web's popularity was increasing, Sleator decided to try to make some money back from his improvements. With his wife and two other online chess players, he formed Sleator Games Inc.

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