Interview with Yuri Starikov - the first Soviet programmer at Microsoft
In Russian, Channel 9 appeared an interview with Yuri Starikov, who began working at Microsoft in Soviet times, a few years later left the company, but later returned to it and is currently involved in a project to develop Windows Media Center.
Yuri talks about how he got to work at Microsoft and the projects he worked on in his early years. The projects were quite interesting, because literally Yuri and his colleagues made history, because they were the very first to localize Microsoft products for the USSR. In fact, then, in the early 1990s, they defined terminology and laid the foundation for those things that we do not hesitate to use today. For example, Yuri says that they decided to leave the word “file” without translation, although there were controversies about this; for the word "icon" they used the translation "icon" in order not to cause possible problems with church representatives. When creating encodings and keyboard layouts, many decisions were made at your own risk. For example, the Russian and Ukrainian keyboard layouts were copied from typewriters, but the Belarusian Yuri did it himself, because even in the Belarusian SSR office in Moscow they could not find a typewriter or suggest a layout for it. In addition, Yuri reveals the secret why in the Russian layout you can enter a full stop with one click, and to enter a comma, which is more common in regular text, you must press Shift.
Yuri also told an interesting story about how Bill Gates was deceived in Moscow and he left Russia with resentment.
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Additional information about the localization of MS-DOS 4.01 and not only can be read on the site created by Yuri: http://rdos401.org - very, by the way, an interesting story with fun details. For example, from here you can find out why there is no Ukrainian letter “ґ” in code page 866, or whose copyright was found in the Soviet Alpha DOS, the development of which was never completed.
Links
Link to interview description
Link to interview file (WMV, 131,52 Mb)
via Developers.Org.Ua
Yuri talks about how he got to work at Microsoft and the projects he worked on in his early years. The projects were quite interesting, because literally Yuri and his colleagues made history, because they were the very first to localize Microsoft products for the USSR. In fact, then, in the early 1990s, they defined terminology and laid the foundation for those things that we do not hesitate to use today. For example, Yuri says that they decided to leave the word “file” without translation, although there were controversies about this; for the word "icon" they used the translation "icon" in order not to cause possible problems with church representatives. When creating encodings and keyboard layouts, many decisions were made at your own risk. For example, the Russian and Ukrainian keyboard layouts were copied from typewriters, but the Belarusian Yuri did it himself, because even in the Belarusian SSR office in Moscow they could not find a typewriter or suggest a layout for it. In addition, Yuri reveals the secret why in the Russian layout you can enter a full stop with one click, and to enter a comma, which is more common in regular text, you must press Shift.
Yuri also told an interesting story about how Bill Gates was deceived in Moscow and he left Russia with resentment.
')
Additional information about the localization of MS-DOS 4.01 and not only can be read on the site created by Yuri: http://rdos401.org - very, by the way, an interesting story with fun details. For example, from here you can find out why there is no Ukrainian letter “ґ” in code page 866, or whose copyright was found in the Soviet Alpha DOS, the development of which was never completed.
Links
Link to interview description
Link to interview file (WMV, 131,52 Mb)
via Developers.Org.Ua
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/14181/
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