Dear bytes of the past millennium

Immediately make a reservation, this is my personal IT story, a story about how, after 25 years, I found what I considered hopelessly lost.

My acquaintance with computers began in the past millennium. I think, like many. The first computer - Pravets 8d, on Habré there is an article about him. Included with it was the Sadko TV with a hand-made block for connecting a computer that was soldered into it ...

A bit of history from my life: I was in the 7th grade in 1987-1988. At that time, my father worked at the Energetik market in the city of Samara, selling re-recorded tapes on the SHARP-800 home cassette recorder:
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Then came the era of video recorders and, thanks to my father's unearned income, we had one of the first in our yard to have a VM 12 video recorder, and then Barco, Panasonic. My father switched to rewriting video tapes and then selling them in the same market. In those days, video salons were already working, in which you could watch movies with nasal translations. All the boys in the yard wanted to be my "friend", because you could watch a couple of movies for free without paying a ruble.

So, the time has come and I asked my father to buy me a computer. The price at that time was considerable. Dad, having received the promise to “behave well” from me, bought me the first computer, as I wrote above - Pravets 8D.



Then there was no FDD and HDD, but there were tapes MK-60, on which the games were recorded. With the help of a tape recorder, they were loaded into memory and it was possible to play a few primitive games that come bundled out of the box, which are pretty much boring, and the computer model was not very common in our city. In general, then I started reading a book - the instruction that came with the kit, the BASIC language was quite clearly described there and after a while the first primitive game was written independently, it was inspiring.

But acquaintance with the "Pravets 8d" did not last long and Electronics BK10-01 was purchased:



For him, you could get a lot more games and programs. In Samara, then there was a firm "Bit" or "Byte" - sorry, I do not remember exactly. Lugov A.Yu. worked in it, who wrote “The Battle of the Boas” for Bk-Ashka. There you could buy games by recording them on tape.

Inspired by a successful start in programming, he enthusiastically began to study the VILNIUS BASIC, but was greatly disappointed with the BASIC performance on the BC and began to study the book that came with it. There was described mnemonics and how it looks in numbers - as I remember mov 100,r1 = 12701, 100 – r1 100. And after spending more than one sleepless night disassembling other people's programs and realizing what was happening, I wrote my first the game - it was quite advanced for the first experience - the essence of it is this: at the bottom of the screen there was a landing site for the helicopter, controlling the buttons needed to control the helicopter and catch balloons flying from different sides of the screen, while not overloading - no more than a few balloons must land os to unload the helicopter. In addition to the balls, rockets were flying from different sides, from which it was necessary to evade. Moreover, the game had music in midi format, written in some midi editor by notes and picked out and adapted for the game; in my opinion, played with the crash. I did not know how to use mnemonics, it turns out, I needed a compiler, and I wrote this game in a digit, octal code.

After that, I showed my creation to my father, and he, seeing what his son had done, decided to show me to a specialist doctor - at that time, the firm mentioned above in the person of Lugov. Dr. Lugov looked at my creation and asked, “What did you write about this game on?”, I described the mechanism, but what he said was that the work I did with a shovel can be done with an excavator. And he sold for 5 rubles Assembler, which allowed to write programs more conveniently. I literally mastered the mnemonic in a couple of days and issued a couple more games for the BC in the next few months. The games were simple - the names, apparently, I did not invent at that time, but took from the world around me: “DOLBY” - this was the inscription on the JVC radio tape recorder, which I used to write and read tapes. The game had a maze of 3 colors and a snake, which collected green segments and grew, the red segments of the maze were not passable, the enemy is a ball that bouncing off the walls of the maze was a threat to the snake. “ZEUS” is a simple tag, but it was already a more advanced game. It was possible to use the joystick, all fonts were drawn specifically for her, and in the screensaver there was an attempt to create white color - red, blue green changed with great frequency, and in the screensaver the program gave an unbearable sound until you start the gameplay or exit. I don’t remember any names or gameplay anymore ...

But the company took these games for sale, there was a jar of cola in which the money earned from the sale of my games was stored and sometimes there was some money in it, but this did not bring wealth then ...

And then there was the Spectrum with its huge number of games. The time of the BC has passed, rapidly approaching the PC, but that's another story ...

At the time of this writing, I am 41 years old. Not so long ago, I remembered that I wrote games in my youth and decided to search, would there be any game I wrote at the beginning? The first searches ended in failure. Well, what do you want, I thought. After all, there was no Internet in Samara then, and who cares about the clumsy games of a 14-year-old teenager? But while I was searching, I found many games, which I played at that time, and I was surprised that even now you can even play some, the benefit is full of emulators and images of games.

Honestly, I did not hope to find my creations, but once again I decided to look on the Internet and ... to my surprise I found it! Fifteen titled “ZEUS”, SIZE: 2.47 KB (DOWNLOADS: 0) - now there are two downloads, for PC and smartphone and both of mine, but how many experiences! How naively designed the interface, came up with a strange brand, apparently influenced by the fact that he was fond of playing the guitar. There is even a table of records, although only my records are in it. I didn’t think how it will be filled if the game has to be re-recorded on a tape recorder.

That evening I could not fall asleep for a long time, I pondered over the fact that about 25 years have passed since that time and that then the young brain could so quickly master unknown technologies through simple manuals, even in the absence of the Internet and teachers. It is amazing that creates enthusiasm.

Already going to bed, my wife woke up from my ward and told me that he had found a game that he had written 25 years ago. Cool, she said - and fell asleep. In the morning I started the game in the emulator and wanted to show it, but there was no time. I wanted to share my joy with people, but I need to be aware that I was hardly impressed by anyone, especially those who are not in the subject. I wondered if there were people who could understand me. I remembered Habré and decided to write this post. I read with pleasure the comments of almost all the posts that interested me. I am sure there are much more interesting stories. I would like to see your stories in the comments.

I want to say thanks to my father, even though he is no longer with us, for the fact that he then gave me the opportunity to get acquainted with computers and allowed me to develop. Thanks to him, this became for me the main occupation in life. Now all life is connected with computers and programming.

I also want to say thanks to the site where I found my creation.

Of course, this game, which I found, has no value for humanity, but for me personally - this is the story of IT in my life and the opportunity to literally touch what was 25 years ago. Something like a cave painting from childhood.

I wonder if what we are doing now will remain in 25 years?
Will we be able to look at the fruits of our labors after 25 years in some emulator?
Do we appreciate what we are creating now, and will it be valuable to us in 25 years?

I’ll start a new history story ...