The first non trivial chess programs were 'playing' in the late 40s(with pen and paper CPUs). Some of these include features you'll still see today.
https://www.chessprogramming.org/Claude_Shannon proposed two types of chess programs, brutes and selective. Alpha-beta is an optimization for brutes, but many search chess programs were selective with heavyweight eval, or with delayed eval.
Champernowne(Turing's partner), mentions this about turochamp, "We were particularly keen on the idea that whereas certain moves would be scorned as pointless and pursued no further others would be followed quite a long way down certain paths."
