Enter IT: "I wrote games for the calculator"
We continue the rubric "Enter IT"! Today our guest is an honored industry veteran and just a great person Konstantin Khaustov, Delivery Manager DataArt. Kostya will take us 30 years into the past and talk about how the way to IT started for him.
My “entrance” to IT happened long before I heard the word “IT”. Even the word “computer” was rarely used then. Usually they said "computer" or just "car". This is quite in keeping with the appearance - a cabinet the size of a large refrigerator, in which are inserted some boards connected by cables, huge drives, power supplies and fans. All this flashing lights and rattled like a tractor.
')
In our school there were two such "cars", called "Electronics-60". As I later found out, it was the Soviet clone of the DEC PDP-11 computer, the one on which the Unix operating system once appeared. But then, in 1985, it didn't matter what kind of computers it was. Having at least some computers in the school was incredibly cool and unusual. So unusual that no one really understood what to do with them. Informatics as a school subject was not, even calculators at school just appeared. We kept everything on the director-enthusiast, who himself was fascinated by this hard and software and sent interested mathematics teachers to the courses. The teachers immediately opened circles to pass on knowledge to the children until they forgot. It was a spoiled telephone rather than training, but we were given the most important thing - access to computers.
Although there were only two computers, there were about fifteen workstations in the classroom: several terminals were connected to each computer and a Basic interpreter was launched that supports multi-user work. In general, it was possible to program only in BASIC, and only two hours a week. The rest of the time had to be content with a programmable calculator. If you compare with large computers, calculator programming is writing a program not even in assembler, but immediately in machine codes. The occupation is very laborious, but then a lot of people were keen on it, just like now every geek is programming a Raspberry. Programs for calculators were discussed and published in peri-popular magazines. There were even games for calculators, however, here it was necessary to rely heavily on your imagination.
The games on "Electronics-60" were also, even with a more humane interface than on calculators, drawn by symbols on an alphanumeric display. It was there that I played for the first time in Tetris, in 1986, just a year after it was invented. But playing was not as interesting as programming. At that time, the sensation of the magic of programming has not yet lost its novelty, and most of my peers, who have access to computers, have sat down first of all not on the games, but on this flexibility and flexibility of the computer world, on the illusion of omnipotence. We did some tests and training programs for the school and wrote games for “for ourselves”. Due to the limitations of iron, illustrations in tutorials and animation in games were made with the same standard characters, not even pseudographics. Of course, we dreamed of real graphics, and over time, in 1988, we got it. It was a whole class with computers "BK-0010", which had graphics, sound, local network - a lot of new features. We began to do everything the same as before - tutorials and games, but on a new level. From my projects of that time, I recall the utility for printing graphics on a matrix printer, a 3D maze that, although it was drawing correctly, but worked very slowly, and a virus that ascribes itself to the boot sector of a floppy disk.
Due to the activity of our director, various contests and competitions are constantly “stuck” to us. For example, one of my senior comrades went to the first All-Union Olympiad in Informatics from Voronezh without any selection. Then the invitation to an international competition from the Bulgarian town of Stara Zagora came to us in a magical way. We completed assignments for qualifying rounds, sent printouts of programs by mail (by usual, electronic then not), in the end, I and my older friend went there. It was very cool. We took part in the whole competition program, even in “computer linguistics”, about which we did not know anything, and entertained everything we were entertained with: we stood on the top of Mount Shipka, walked around the village of Gabrovo, went to Plovdiv together with a delegation from Krasnoyarsk, went to the Rose Museum and drank a bucket of Schweppes tonic, which we did not sell at that time. With linguistics, I did not really, with better programming, I even got a bronze medal. And a year later I met the same guys from Krasnoyarsk at their home, at the first Russian informatics Olympiad.
Then suddenly the school years ended, but I didn’t regret about it, including because now I could “get into IT” for real. After some throwing, I ended up at VSU at the department of the PMM in the same group with the same “entered”. Each had its own interesting history of entering IT, life in IT, and later some of them (Kostya Sulimina and Denis Tsyplakov) had their own story Enjoy IT.
My “entrance” to IT happened long before I heard the word “IT”. Even the word “computer” was rarely used then. Usually they said "computer" or just "car". This is quite in keeping with the appearance - a cabinet the size of a large refrigerator, in which are inserted some boards connected by cables, huge drives, power supplies and fans. All this flashing lights and rattled like a tractor.
')
In our school there were two such "cars", called "Electronics-60". As I later found out, it was the Soviet clone of the DEC PDP-11 computer, the one on which the Unix operating system once appeared. But then, in 1985, it didn't matter what kind of computers it was. Having at least some computers in the school was incredibly cool and unusual. So unusual that no one really understood what to do with them. Informatics as a school subject was not, even calculators at school just appeared. We kept everything on the director-enthusiast, who himself was fascinated by this hard and software and sent interested mathematics teachers to the courses. The teachers immediately opened circles to pass on knowledge to the children until they forgot. It was a spoiled telephone rather than training, but we were given the most important thing - access to computers.
Although there were only two computers, there were about fifteen workstations in the classroom: several terminals were connected to each computer and a Basic interpreter was launched that supports multi-user work. In general, it was possible to program only in BASIC, and only two hours a week. The rest of the time had to be content with a programmable calculator. If you compare with large computers, calculator programming is writing a program not even in assembler, but immediately in machine codes. The occupation is very laborious, but then a lot of people were keen on it, just like now every geek is programming a Raspberry. Programs for calculators were discussed and published in peri-popular magazines. There were even games for calculators, however, here it was necessary to rely heavily on your imagination.
The games on "Electronics-60" were also, even with a more humane interface than on calculators, drawn by symbols on an alphanumeric display. It was there that I played for the first time in Tetris, in 1986, just a year after it was invented. But playing was not as interesting as programming. At that time, the sensation of the magic of programming has not yet lost its novelty, and most of my peers, who have access to computers, have sat down first of all not on the games, but on this flexibility and flexibility of the computer world, on the illusion of omnipotence. We did some tests and training programs for the school and wrote games for “for ourselves”. Due to the limitations of iron, illustrations in tutorials and animation in games were made with the same standard characters, not even pseudographics. Of course, we dreamed of real graphics, and over time, in 1988, we got it. It was a whole class with computers "BK-0010", which had graphics, sound, local network - a lot of new features. We began to do everything the same as before - tutorials and games, but on a new level. From my projects of that time, I recall the utility for printing graphics on a matrix printer, a 3D maze that, although it was drawing correctly, but worked very slowly, and a virus that ascribes itself to the boot sector of a floppy disk.
Due to the activity of our director, various contests and competitions are constantly “stuck” to us. For example, one of my senior comrades went to the first All-Union Olympiad in Informatics from Voronezh without any selection. Then the invitation to an international competition from the Bulgarian town of Stara Zagora came to us in a magical way. We completed assignments for qualifying rounds, sent printouts of programs by mail (by usual, electronic then not), in the end, I and my older friend went there. It was very cool. We took part in the whole competition program, even in “computer linguistics”, about which we did not know anything, and entertained everything we were entertained with: we stood on the top of Mount Shipka, walked around the village of Gabrovo, went to Plovdiv together with a delegation from Krasnoyarsk, went to the Rose Museum and drank a bucket of Schweppes tonic, which we did not sell at that time. With linguistics, I did not really, with better programming, I even got a bronze medal. And a year later I met the same guys from Krasnoyarsk at their home, at the first Russian informatics Olympiad.
Then suddenly the school years ended, but I didn’t regret about it, including because now I could “get into IT” for real. After some throwing, I ended up at VSU at the department of the PMM in the same group with the same “entered”. Each had its own interesting history of entering IT, life in IT, and later some of them (Kostya Sulimina and Denis Tsyplakov) had their own story Enjoy IT.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/292588/
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