From four to thirty two

Part 1: Four to Eight

I love to read the memories of people who found the first steps of computing technology in their country. They always have some kind of romance, and what kind of it is - it depends a lot on what computers people started with. This is usually determined by the circumstances - place of work, study, and sometimes completely - by chance.

I, like many of my friends and acquaintances, were lucky to catch the end of that romantic period when computer developers did not try to please the average man, but did what they themselves, for some reason, considered correct. It imposed on each development (both software and hardware) the printing of individuality, even if this thing turned out to be successful, the thing was sold in millions of copies (or vice versa - failed in commercial terms).
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Someone started with big, buzzing machines the size of a room, someone with desktop home computers, someone was assembling his first computer himself, according to articles in magazines. In each of these areas appeared their own unique traditions, common interests, subculture.

If you do not dig very deep into the history, people who connected their lives with computers at that time could be quite clearly divided into several groups.

First, these are those for whom computers are primarily a topic about networks and everything connected with them. Multi-user systems, mainframes, Unix (and, I note, different subcultures were formed around X.25 networks and early Internet), computer access via a black and white alphanumeric terminal.

The second group is home computers . This is about color graphics, sound, programming in assembler, the absence of any networks. Commodore 64 , Amiga , PC (period of competition with Amiga), Atari and many others

The third group, most prominently represented in our country - those who fully or partially assembled the computers themselves and created the entire subculture around them almost from scratch, with western borrowings. This applies to the BK-0010 , Spectrum , Radio-86RK , Orion , Specialist .

As for me, my first serious acquaintance with a computer took place in 1989, when I was in high school, in Leningrad.

Until that moment, my ideas about computing were very conditional. As a child, I tried to collect some simple circuits, but this was limited, mainly by simple combinations of registers, counters and logic (usually the 133rd, 134th episodes), for beautiful flashing LEDs. I remember the transfer books, where, for example, the NE555 timer and a lot of circuits based on it were mentioned - they delighted me (at that time, the Soviet analogue of the NE555 did not exist).

At that time, the electronics store was located on Gagarin Avenue, where my father took me as a child to my museum as a child. It was the central store of such a city and it was divided into two parts. In one, there was a retail sale of radio components and all kinds of devices — I was not particularly interested in this department, because at that time only the simplest and not very high-quality components were available to the public. But the other department was an exhibition hall. There were almost never visitors, since all the inviting diversity presented in the shop windows was available exclusively for ordering companies by wire transfer. But there was something to look at - microprocessors in ceramic cases with gold-plated leads, which were not even in reference books, a variety of fluorescent and LED indicators, fiber optics, and so on. This, one might say, a piece of ENEA.

Somewhere closer to the senior classes I had a programmable micro calculator “ Electronics MK-61 ”, into which I enthusiastically drove in programs from the magazine “Technique-Youth”, experimented with undocumented features (YYYYY, GGOGG, “Darkness”, etc. ), played in "Landing on the Moon" and other similar things. Although the father at the factory was a car " Iskra-226 " and, in principle, had the opportunity to go there sometimes, I did not do it consciously - I thought that sooner or later there would be more or less permanent access, but so far there is nothing to tease myself.

The school where I studied was the most common, and there were no computers (and there were no calculators either). However, closer to the upper classes (late 1980s) in the USSR they sharply attended to increasing the computer literacy of the population, and computer science lessons for us, as well as for students from other neighboring schools, were held in a sports special school on Bryantsev Street, where there were three whole classes with computers "Commodore 64" - with drives and good color monitors C1802 .

It must be said that in those years, the USSR Ministry of Education had adopted the Yamaha MSX-2 computer as the main standard for schools, but this was not a mandatory decision for everyone. There were not enough computers and, therefore, in reality, deviations from the standard were not uncommon. However, the situation with the three classes namely “Commodore 64”, nevertheless, was very unusual. Personally, I know only about two such cases - the second was a school in Moscow.

I remember well that in the first lesson we were left to ourselves. They put us behind computers and offered to try to drive the cursor with the keys and press the buttons, sometimes answering emerging questions - how to change the color of the cursor, for example.
It was very unusual - almost none of us had ever encountered anything like this.
Practical classes were held 1-2 times a week and from the next lesson it became obvious who was interested in all this from the class. Soon, we (three or four, not surprisingly, guys) began to skip lessons, just to spend the extra few hours in the “Computing Center” (short for “Computing Center”), as we began to call this place.
Most of the teachers showed understanding - if there were free computers, we were always allowed to take classes, gave out disk drives (there were few of them and they often broke). The secretary in the staff room often even let us go to her computer, sometimes even chasing her son out (who went exclusively to play).

Since there were no global networks in the USSR at that time (and in the West, they were still quite a sad, by modern standards, spectacle), it was practically impossible to get any software or even get an answer to the simplest question. Teachers could not help us with this - after a couple of months we knew about these computers much more than they did. There were a dozen disks in the staff room - mostly with games, but there was also a “ monitor ” (a primitive assembler-disassembler-debugger). From the documentation at the initial stage, there were a couple of books - one in BASIC, in German (none of us knew German) and one assembler guide, in English (by the way, for those half a year, my English grade in the quarter changed from two to two five). Of course, these valuable books did not give us home.

For two years of our “life” in the EC (and on successful days we stuck there from morning till evening), there were several visits from “outside” people - in my opinion, from some Moscow school. As I remember, they came with a 3.5 " C1581 drive - a rarity for the C64.
We exchanged software and piece of knowledge with them. Each new book, even if it was received for an hour, was an invaluable treasure for us - we literally took it apart in lines, if not by letter. And together they reflected on the meaning of a specific German word, which was not meaningfully translated by any dictionaries.

Of course, the teachers also tried to benefit from our fanaticism — mainly by requiring us to write educational programs. Since BASIC was built into the Commodore 64, everyone inevitably began their journey with it. And we were no exception. However, it soon became apparent that almost all games were clearly written on something else. And the experience gained in the course of writing the mentioned tutorials suggested that nothing serious could be written in BASIC, if only because of its slowness.
It was here that the next stage came, which (as we learned much later) is called “ hacking ” - we began to study how certain things were done, sorting programs into pieces in pieces - changing something and observing what these changes will affect.

The overwhelming majority of games (and not only games) were preceded by a small beautiful screensaver with music and special effects - a creeping line, colored iridescent stripes, animation, and so on. These screensavers, called " intro ", made and inserted pirates. They removed the protection from the software, modified the games for "endless lives" and then distributed the hacked game or utility - mainly on floppy 5.25 "disks, via regular mail ( BBS on the Commodore 64 then were rare even in the West, and typical the modem speed was only 160 ... 300 baud).

We were fascinated by these screensavers - many of them, without exaggeration, were works of art. Firstly, the group thus declared itself - intro was her calling card, according to which people made the first impression. Secondly, intro technical requirements were extremely stringent - many games already occupied all the available computer memory. That is, before adding a screensaver, the pirates had to somehow pack or otherwise optimize this game. A typical screensaver with music took about 2-3 kilobytes, with the size of the game itself 30-50 kb.

As you know, in the USSR, access to Western culture was extremely difficult - suffice it to say that for a very long time I did not understand the meaning of the word “Beatles”, which was sometimes written on the walls.
Under these conditions, the “intro” (of which later the large self-sufficient “demo” grew), like the games, were the source of information “from abroad”. Not in the political sense and not in the form of protest (as was often the case then, for example, with music), but from the point of view of initiation into some particular elements of style and culture - in a rather, it should be noted, concentrated form.
Without being familiar with American culture and films, we almost understood nothing (let's say there were no ideas why in the game called “Back to the Future” a guy skates or why pirate groups have such strange names - like Beastie Boys). But the spirit itself was inevitably absorbed - through the manner of pirates to exchange messages, through a specific style of drawings, fonts, music, declared values, of which the main, of course, was the freedom to exchange information (however, even among pirates it has its own framework - in the form of, for example, condemnation the use of someone else's code in the works) and the value of original ideas and solutions.
Probably, everything that happened then in this little world, or, as they say, “ on the stage, ” is still waiting for its serious researchers.

If we compare modern methods of research programs - powerful debuggers, disassemblers, emulators, etc. - with what was then available on the Commodore 64, the difference is not just quantitative, but fundamental.
The typical actions were the following actions: load the program (1-2 minutes), load the monitor (half a minute), look for the interesting part of the memory in the monitor, and if the code is packed or encrypted, look for the unpacker code. Insert the BRK instruction at the end, run the program. Most often, everything hangs tightly. There could be a lot of reasons - for example, the monitor was partially loaded on top of the program. Or changed some service variable values ​​that were important for the program. Anyway - “your song is good, start over” - turn off / turn on the computer and drive, and everything is new. Dozens of times. If it does not go at all, we take another program and begin to torture it in the same way.
All this required a lot of time and patience. The more joyful were the moments when it was possible to isolate some piece of code (for example, playing music), burn it to disk and run it separately, as an independent program. Especially magic was for us the code that allows you to display the image on the frame - i.e. outside the working area of ​​the screen. This has long been real magic for us.

In general, the presence of 64 specialized complex chips responsible for graphics ( VIC-II ) and sound ( SID ) in Commodore gave special features to work with this computer that were not found on the Spectrum or on the PC. From our rather naive point of view, we seemed to be communicating with something mysterious that lives inside a computer. We recorded some values ​​in the memory cells (with POKE commands), in many ways at random, and watched what would happen. In some cases, squares appeared in the middle of the screen, in others the entire screen shifted several points to the side or, say, all letters were distorted. We tried to find patterns, comparing the results of experiments with scanty and not always clear (due to a foreign, also very specific language) documentation.
One of the unusual things was sprites . Then, this word was always understood only as hardware sprites - simple pictures of 24 x 21 pixels, which the video controller displayed on the screen according to data from certain memory addresses. Being included, they seemed to be glued to the screen and hung there completely independently, not only from the main image, but even from the current video mode.

As I already mentioned, the built-in language in Commodore 64 was BASIC. Moreover, it is very primitive - for example, with all the richness of the graphic and sound capabilities of this computer, there were no operators in the language associated with graphics and sound. Yes, even just deleting a file from the disk without using third-party programs was a very nontrivial history by modern standards. A program that draws, say, an inclined line, took about two or three screens on BASIC, with a single line drawn by such a program of a second.

If you have a drive, you can download an extended BASIC or anything else. But often the drive did not turn out to be - some were busy in the educational process, some were faulty, etc. All this led to the fact that we remembered a huge number of different addresses, values, and their combinations, which made it possible through POKE / PEEK commands to directly control computer chips — enable and move sprites, change fonts, make sounds, etc. The degrees of two in the decimal system (at least up to 216) any of us could accurately enumerate, even in the middle of the night, and we typed some sequences of commands not that despite the keyboard, but without thinking at all.

I remember once we went to the EC and found that there is one free computer, but all the drives are occupied. We didn’t want to leave, and in half an hour we wrote a game on the built-in BASIC - something like an oncoming maze above, through which it was necessary to move the cursor. The idea was that it could be entered in a reasonable time directly from the keyboard, without a drive. The text took about the screen (40x25 characters).

In terms of working with drives also existed its own specifics. The standard Commodore 1541 drive is very different from that of most other computers. Starting from a specific method of recording information, in which about 144 kb (one could turn over and write on the other) to one side of the disk, and ending with a very strange device.
The main feature was the presence inside the drive its own processor (almost the same as in the computer itself - 6502 ), its memory and serial I / O port. In principle, the drive itself was a full-fledged computer and behaved, sometimes, respectively.
This feature was used by some serious games and many utilities. For example, for some of them it was completely normal to set up their own protocol for exchanging a computer and a drive with the goal, for example, to speed up the download (normally, a program of 50 kB in size was loaded for as few minutes). Other programs managed to control the brightness of the drive light, turning it on and off with a certain frequency, using the code executed by the drive.
Disk copy protection systems were full of sophistication, writing data between tracks or to non-existent standard “extra” tracks. There were a huge number of copiers who tried to copy such discs. Drive failures after using such programs were not uncommon, which led the EC to teachers in a rage. At the EC there was a laboratory where these drives were worn to be regularly repaired. Already at the end of our “training”, it turned out that most of the “breakdowns” were caused by the head leaving the working area and “repaired” by some simple LOAD command: * ", 8, which forces the drive to recalibrate the head (I remember terribly proud of this discovery, because I came to him not by chance, but by thinking).

Despite all these little joys, we could not deny ourselves in the games, although this strained the teachers and, of course, they did not allow to play during the lessons. There were a lot of high-quality games on Commodore 64 (when confronted with other computers, I understood it most clearly), but perhaps the most popular were Cauldron II , Ghost'n'Goblins , Arkanoid , Driller . In the case of Driller and Cauldron II, we even drew full maps of their worlds, from a pile of glued together paper sheets.Many games required a joystick, which was a problem. Firstly, with training classes, the joysticks were set predictably low. Secondly, they broke down very quickly. I had to do the joysticks themselves, including, including, their connectors. Partly saved that due to the peculiarities of addressing ports in the C64, in terms of games, the movements of the joystick were duplicated by pressing buttons (in rather strange places). As far as I remember, for one of the joystick ports, these were buttons C, B, M, F1, Z (left, right, fire, up, down). At the same time, the space had to be constantly pressed, for which a piece of paper was used, folded in the required number of layers.

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Part 2. From sixteen to thirty-two

No network yet

The completion of my epic with 8-bit computers coincided with the peak of perestroika in the USSR (1990-1991). IBM PC compatible computers began to be imported into the country, and no one really understood for what purpose. By luck, a family friend started some kind of adventure, a joint venture with the Americans, and, for this matter, the PC AT 286 20 MHz 1MB arrived with a CGA monitor and a 9-needle dot-matrix printer Star. Since the person had no idea what to do with this computer and (again, for the owners of the computers at that time it was completely normal), the PC turned out to be at my complete disposal for several months. The configuration of the PC AT 286 20 MHz was inconceivable at that time (in principle, then the PC XT was quite impressive). Only here the CGA video, with its graphics of four horrible colors of 320x200, severely limited the flight of fancy. However, it was then interesting to me even to just dig into pure DOS without any graphics.

Soon, after exams at the Polytechnic University were twice failed (he was lucky, because otherwise it would still have flown out from there with a bang), I got a job as a laboratory assistant at the Department of Computer Engineering at LITMO . Then LITMO didn’t have such a status as it does now and there wasn’t really any computing equipment there (something like SM-4, Iskra-226, PC in single quantities, DVK).

In the auditorium on the third floor, where I worked, there were about five MERA CM 7209 terminals . The craftsmen at the department converted them into more or less full-fledged independent computers - a z80 processor, 128 kb of RAM, a Bulgarian drive. True, students worked on them rarely and, mainly, their laboratory work consisted of driving the program in machine codes and debugging it in the simplest debugger monitor. Terminal computers were very unstable. I remember that there were constant problems with the regeneration of memory, which is why the probability of suddenly losing the program being recruited for half an hour was rather high. Students exchanged experience with each other - in which of the computers, which address ranges of RAM are the most reliable.

My duties as a laboratory technician included soldering loose wires from the stands and making sure that in the absence of a teacher the audience did not cause irreparable damage. I spent the excess of free time behind the Spark-1030 - a rather unfortunate domestic analogue of PC XT 4.7MHz 512KB with CGA. In the next audience, except for the Spark-1030 , there were several more Spark-226 - burly metal boxes (similar to Wang-2200 ), with BASIC. When working on them, my hands were very cold, because two or three powerful fans blew directly onto the keyboard. However, I looked at these computers quite a bit, purely out of curiosity.

In addition to me, there was another laboratory technician at the Department of Computer Engineering - the audience accountable to him was on the same floor, but at the other end of the building - in the old building. He was a musician in a rock band playing heavy metal and, despite good relations, our interests intersected only about once a month, when we solemnly took out from the audience a large crowded tank with garbage. The rest of the time, he locked his audience either from the inside or outside, and indulged in all sorts of specific activities that could be judged only by circumstantial evidence (for example, he once hid in a toilet from the crocodiles pursuing him).

In short, the Spark-1030 was in my, almost complete, order, and a little later the Pravets-16 appeared (also an analogue of the PC XT 4.7MHz 640KB CGA, but Bulgarian - significantly better quality than Spark). Both cars were with HDD 10 or 20MB, under DOS 3.30. The software was then almost only under DOS. Windows existed in version 2.0 maximum, loaded from DOS, they were scary and nobody could even imagine that they would be used very soon.

Work under DOS (although there wasn’t much choice for PCs of those years) had its pros and cons. On the one hand, “bare” DOS from the user's point of view simply looked like a very inconvenient way to launch programs and some equally uncomfortable services, such as deleting files or formatting a disk.
On the other hand, gradually more and more various utilities appeared, making it possible to make work more comfortable. Norton Commander existed for launching programs and working with files; its blue panels became the symbol of that era (mainly in Russia). The DOS single-tasking problem was solved by a popular package called DesqView , which allowed even on XT to switch between several running programs. Many small "resident" programs allowed at any time to call a calculator, notebook, etc. In a word, skilfully it was possible to create a quite comfortable working environment.
Viruses, for all their diversity, were not a particular problem, since they could only spread through floppy disks, were easily detected and treated (then, by the extremely popular Aidstest program).

The fact that somewhere in scientific research institutes and in other special single places there are networks - I already knew, but this was still a pure theory - I met the modem alive on the strength a couple of times. Nevertheless, the situation with the software was much better than in the past with Commodore 64. PCs gradually appeared in an increasing number of people and we enthusiastically exchanged programs. Then, for piracy, it wasn’t that they didn’t pursue, but they didn’t even really understand what it was and what the problem was just to copy the necessary programs (my friends and I understood, but only because we had time to join the western scene).

One of the major centers (and perhaps the largest) of software exchange in St. Petersburg was SPTU-38, in a new way - the Lyceum of Radio Electronics. It was a cult place and, I believe, it is worthy of at least a memorial plaque on the wall of a building.
In this vocational school there was a large training class, a couple of dozen Yamaha MSX-IIs stood. But the Yamaha, by that time, was not very interested. The main thing - at the other end of the class were three or four pretty decent PCs (286, and maybe even 386). Several people worked behind them - someone wrote on Turbo C and Watcom C (without any advantages), someone wrote on the Prologue . About one of the cars was a pair of boxes, tightly filled with batches of floppy disks 5.25 "and 3.5". So then the file storage of scale, I think, of a modern small data center looked.
We approached and greeted timidly. Sitting at the computer turned and casually threw: "What do you have?". We modestly pulled a pack of discs, which he quickly inserted into the drive and, without visible interest, looked through, very rarely copying some archive (during these moments our self-esteem increased significantly). After the completion of the process, he gave up his place and casually waved his hand in the direction of the box - “See what you need.”
From each such visit, we dragged off some kind of software - often the first one, since no one would let us dig in this box for hours. Despite the fact that all disks were neatly signed, some compiler with libraries occupied 3-10 disks, and copying was not fast). However, even with the stolen one visit we were then taken weeks apart, besides exchanging software for other valuables for other values.

One of my friends at home had his own Tandy-1000. This is a clone of IBM PCjr - PC XT with 320x200x16 mode and not bad sound at that time (if compared to standard single-bit PC Speaker). The problem, however, was a monochrome monitor - black and green. But many games that required 16 colors, at least, worked. Then especially in the fashion were Sierra 's Ovsk quests - Space Quest, Hero Quest, Larry.

Soon, instead of Pravitz, my PC AT 286 with EGA and Amstrad PC1640 (PC XT with EGA mono) appeared at my workplace at LITMO. By that time, I had already programmed in x86 assembler and turbo pascal, I was pretty well versed in hardware. At the same time, in terms of neglecting their duties as a laboratory assistant, I completely caught up with my colleague from the old building (with the only difference that, I suppose, the substances still harmed his health more than mine - computers).
The best assessment of our professional activity was the fact that when, after a year of work, we quit, the position of laboratory assistant at the Department of Computer Science was immediately abolished, and, as far as I heard, no one had any objections.

From next year I began to enter LITMO and, without passing on points to the Department of Computer Engineering, in 1991 I went (along with others who did not qualify) to the then new department of Mechatronics. And again (as in the case of Polytech) - fortunately. This made it difficult for me, but not to fly out in my second year.
About once a month we had laboratory work on, it seems, applied mathematics - on SM-4 . I remember seeing this roaring miracle with a lot of flashing lights, for some reason, I did not experience any positive emotions. A miracle stood behind a glass wall, and students sat behind terminals. The meaning was in writing a simple program in Fortran for some mathematical calculations. To edit the source used TED. To compile it, you had to go out and run two other programs, which took minutes. Everything was terribly slow, SM-4 resources for some reason were clearly not enough for a dozen terminals, in addition, from time to time something happened and the text had to be typed almost anew. One class was enough for me to understand that I no longer want to appear here. However, to get results and demonstrate to the teacher that I mastered Fortran was necessary. After some thought and scrolling (it never came to reading) books on the first Fortran, I took an ordinary Turbo Pascal on the PC and did the required calculations on it, then, replacing the operators with Fortran, printed the resulting “program” along with the results and suffered to pass. I must say, the teacher was very puzzled. For the knowledgeable Fortran, it was absolutely obvious that this program should not work, although, of course, I did not hide that everything was written on the PC. However, the program was accompanied by the correct results, clearly printed on the same printer. It seems that the teacher was not very confident in his knowledge of Fortran, as I rather quickly managed to convince him that it was some Arity Fortran (the first word that came to my mind - it seems then that Arity Prolog was just released) and get my credit.

By that time, computers became much simpler. First, the first PC compatible machine appeared in my home - the SM-1810.13 Nyvka. It was a PC XT 4.7MHz 640KB CGA, in the impressive full tower package, on a domestic (except for the processor and video) element base. The tire was its own, so no import expansion cards could not be inserted. All this economy was cooled by 4 powerful 220v fans each, so when turned on, the sound strongly resembled the launch of an airplane’s turbines.
Pretty quickly, I overclocked the processor to 10 MHz. True, for some reason, I began to jump out of the crib of the disk drive controller chip - I had to wind it up with threads. A PC AT 286 EGA appeared after the house, and then VGA (then it was the norm to gradually upgrade the computer, replacing some boards with others).
In parallel, I, as before, spent a lot of time in LITMO at the Department of Computer Engineering, both after and instead of classes. There appeared two IBM PS / 2 Model 30 (this is a PC 286 with MCGA video and a microchannel bus), a couple of PC AT 286 and even one PC AT 386SX 16 MHz VGA (at that moment the fastest I saw) which for some reason they tried to install OS / 2 version 1.0 (then co-produced by Microsoft and IBM).

And here, somewhere in the beginning of 1992, I learned from someone about FidoNet .

FidoNet and BBS

In principle, my modem has been lying around for quite some time. But its application was prevented by two important circumstances. First, it was not clear who with whom to contact and why. Secondly, it was an acoustic modem. Those. it was assumed that a handset was placed on top of it (there were special rubberised speakers and a microphone) and, by manipulating the telephone and the buttons, a connection was established. Looking ahead, I note that I have never been able to contact someone using this modem.
So, the first real modem of mine was a 1200 baud modem without MNP (i.e., no error correction), which was a full-size ISA 8 bit board, and for stable operation it had to be constantly cooled by a room fan.

FidoNet had almost nothing to do with the modern Internet, either technically or organizationally. It was a non-profit amateur network - people (called “ sysops ”, from the “system operator”) in different cities and countries simply agreed on some mechanisms for sending each other mail (in the form of archives with text files), rules for receiving new people and on the principles of conflicts. Connection and mail exchange were free - large network nodes were usually located in any organizations that paid for long-distance and international calls. Commercial activities in the network were strictly pursued, with the exception of specially designated “enclaves” for the sale and purchase of glands.

The central idea of ​​FidoNet was ehoconference (ekhi) - something similar to global forums on various topics. Unlike online forums, the echs did not belong to one person, but were spread throughout the network. The order in ehah was watched by moderators - those who created them or received credentials from the creators. Coordinated the circulation of mail, and also turned off the violating nodes nodes - network and regional coordinators and echo coordinators.
Technically, the station FidoNet was a computer with a modem connected to a telephone line and a special software. For network nodes, it was obligatory to answer calls from other nodes at least one hour a day (early in the morning) - for the exchange of personal mail. As a rule, the nodes worked either all night (while the sysop’s relatives were sleeping), or (in organizations) 24 hours a day.

During its heyday on the territory of the former USSR, the FidoNet network consisted of hundreds of nodes and countless points (the points through which they accessed mail access were responsible). It was a unique phenomenon - in Europe and the USA FidoNet never reached such a scale and organization.
Unlike the Internet, that FidoNet was not just a transport for mail and files, but, first of all, a community of people, moreover, organized according to very democratic principles - with its own laws and mechanisms ensuring their implementation. Mainly, these mechanisms were aimed at ensuring sustainable mail traffic and order in echo-conferencing. Changes to the documents were widely discussed by the sysop and then put to the vote. The same was true of the election of coordinators at various levels.

To gain access to FidoNet, nothing was needed except the presence of a computer, a modem (although some managed to receive mail on floppy disks , which was jokingly called “floppynet”) and the ability to configure the software needed to work on the network. The latter, however, played the role of a powerful filter, filtering out random people - most of the participants were somehow connected with IT, although, of course, there were enough people with technology not connected, but who wished to understand. Such a natural closeness of the community allowed to some extent trust each other.
Looking ahead, I’ll say that in parallel with the flourishing of FidoNet, in Russian organizations and institutions the early offline Internet was quite common, which was then often called “ Relcom ” - after the name of the largest provider. There also existed some kind of echo conferencing (called newsgroups ), however, the principles of network organization affected the content of these newsgroups extremely negatively. The already mentioned natural filter did not function here, there was no FidoNet regulatory structure of echo coordinators. All this was replaced by a purely commercial relationship provider and customer. In this regard, the content of newsgroups is often a mixture of spam and flame, which no one had the authority or mechanisms to stop. On this basis, FidoNet regularly debated whether it was necessary to exchange traffic with newsgroups (the individual FidoNet nodes simultaneously acted as gates).

What happened in FidoNet was also reflected in real life. Belonging to this network was a kind of recommendation when applying for a job (at the same time she went, having some reason, a joke that if the number of employees related to FidoNet in this company exceeds a certain one, it falls apart).
In many stores selling computers and components, it was enough to declare that you have an address in FidoNet (at one time even special badges were issued) in order to get a discount or some special relation.
The people elected by the coordinators were very famous. I recall a case in point:
At the Moscow exhibition "Comtek" in the late 1990s, an informal meeting of sysops from all over Russia and neighboring countries was traditionally held. The whole square in front of the pavilions was filled with them - I suppose there were several thousand people there. At some point, straight through the square, I tried to drive a car with someone “important” (although she could freely drive along the edge).
Signaling, the car gradually reached the very center of the crowd, where the regional coordinator stood with his back to it. I talked with him about something and, accordingly, saw the approaching car, which, finally, rested in his back. Understanding, in my opinion, the situation, he did not move, but on the contrary - sat on the hood. Guards got out of the car and began to threaten.Hearing the conversation on high voices, the crowd began to gather more closely and listen. The guards had the good sense not to insist, because in that situation they would hardly have been helped by a weapon. The car passed back.

In parallel with FidoNet, there was also such a phenomenon as the BBS (Bulletin Board System). In our country, as a rule, the stations FidoNet and BBS worked on the same computers, so these concepts were often confused.
Unlike the FidoNet node, through which one could only pick up and send mail, BBS provided online access to a computer (the closest modern analogy is telnet). Anyone could call the phone number from the list and, having connected and registered, download files, read mail or chat with a sysop. Depending on the status of the caller (which was assigned by the sysop according to the amount of valuable software downloaded by the user, or the degree of familiarity with it), limits were set for the connection time. Since the telephone line was, as a rule, one, the rest of those willing could dial until the caller would release the line or fly off of it due to poor communication.
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The second craftsman was located in one of the premises of the Medical Institute on Karpovka - there in the middle of a large room was an empty case from the ancient EU, inside which lay a mattress on which the owner slept. A fireproof cabinet with a working computer and a modem - node 2: 5030/131 - stood half-open (by day) by the wall.

With the growth of the data exchange rate and the number of network participants, the volumes of software that needed to be stored somewhere grew. Hard drives were very expensive and not very reliable, and there were no drives on the CD yet. I remember that in 1996 I first saw a video player on Korabelka on an optical disc with a diameter of 8 inches. And even then, the method of recording video there was analog.
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Hackers and Demoscene

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After that, in a special program under DOS, you could use the services of CompuServe. The time was very expensive and in fact the main thing I did there was downloading the latest issues of Dr.Dobbs magazine and watching Usenet groups.
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Around 1997 in Russia, after the West, came the fashion for mobile devices. Popularization began, of course, with simple mobile phones such as Nokia 2110 , 3110, 6210, Siemens me45. However, they were too specialized - at best, except for the call function, which only had an inconvenient notebook with a calendar. Yes, and a lot of text from the numeric keypad can not type. Few existing mobile computers such as Apple Newton were very expensive and difficult to access. The case moved when a well-known modem maker US Robotics released a device called PalmPilot (handheld, inexpensive, allowing you to take notes with a stylus).

Among my acquaintances, several people acquired such devices at once — I did not escape it either. Since there were a lot of questions related to software, hardware for it and development capabilities, we soon organized an informal " Club of mobile devices fans " and once a week began to meet at the Kronverk premises near the Metro Technological Institute. Kronverk was known for the fact that a large FidoNet node was located there for a long time - 2: 5030/2, whose sysop was twice elected as a network coordinator.

Rumors about our meetings began to crawl quickly, and since there were no other similar places, various people began to come to us, with a variety of mobile devices (PocketPC, WinCE, Palm, Newton, Psion, etc.), including very exotic ones. We held these weekly meetings for several years, later moving to the premises of the Institute of Art History, but over time, information and software for anything became publicly available and the meaning of such meetings was lost (although for quite a long time people came to discuss other IT-related Questions. And even just to talk).

With the widespread proliferation of computers, the Internet, mobile devices - almost all the communities built around these technologies, either in one form or another, have come under the wing of commercial organizations, or have gradually disappeared.
The work of people who once became famous against the background of the events described above was given a material assessment, so that, having no choice in the past, now they increasingly preferred to work for money. Low-level programming remained only in very narrow niches, and the rest is increasingly moving from the category of art, into something close to the craft, or industrial production. Computers (at least, in the form of a telephone) are now available to everyone, Internet access is open to anyone who wants it and does not require knowledge and means, and the behavior of people in it is limited, perhaps, by the laws of the country. This is all, of course, quite natural, but it makes the new computer-related reality much more trivial - it robs it of romance.

Interestingly, what and when will be the next technological innovation, comparable in scale and novelty to computers and global networks?

Petr Sobolev
March 2017