Talking with friends today, they began to recall “how it was” in Runet - and not from the words of the politically biased “Ashmanovs and other close associates”, but how it was real.
Encouraged to write an article. There was nothing to do, I wrote a sketch about what to do next ©
In fact - a number of unknown stories from the period of the formation of IT in the Russian Federation, funny and not very funny, plus a description of a typical career at that time.
If it's interesting - there are many photos and stories - all old fashion, not yet filmed with digital cameras. Back when there were black and white monitors 🙂
Description of how life brought to the most interesting places related to global IT.
My career in IT began with the fact that I “blew up” the principal of the school a little in his own personal toilet.
Yes, just like in comedies today 😉
The Russian work book begins at the age of 14 - they officially made a network in the whole school (and did it for other schools), connected to the great-grandfather of the Internet ( — a minute of communication from Norilsk with a call to the USA cost ~$100, so we hacked it directly from the director's phone)
In one school, they put squibs in the director's toilet, and a year later I went to another school (I was expelled from the first one) and met the same director there.
He recognized me, but did not remember where. Therefore accepted.
At that time, I didn’t know how to say “spoon” in English (on which I flunked the entrance exams to school), which really seems funny - because I UK citizen today.
The director accepted me "out of exams", because he came himself agree (do you know how this skill later helped in life?) without parents.
It was the program "Elite Education of Russia" - "ELIOR"("under the ELIOR program (elite education in Russia)".
Yes, in the history of the Russian Federation there was a short moment when the wife of another oligarch (then they didn’t even know such words) decided to invest in the children of Russia - but then she suddenly died in a plane crash and everything was blown away.
Very few people knowthat (for example) essentially Russian Internet technologies the coffin of life is due to the same George Soros - in 1998 now it’s completely different, much more money) in order to provide all leading institutions and students with communication, that at that time many Internet providers literally started with “they stole a couple of wagons of oil” and continued to exist on the money of the same “damned Westerners" 🙂
I was lucky to catch the times when everything was just getting started - which made it possible, if not to become a “star”, then it’s quite good to feel myself, including in “California” and be called top “»🙂
So let's rewind back to 1995.
We graduated from college in Norilsk, where (on the one hand) we managed to find (and even solder) computers with punched cards and uniquely reliable Dec Vax (did you know that MS Windows NT is a team from Alpha / Dec Vax, which Bill Gates personally poached? ), and on the other hand, they have already even work on Intel Pentium, used as Novell Netware servers (which I personally broke in assembler in the first week of my acquaintance with it - NLM modules and others, who remembers 😉).
Yes, Norilsk is where it often happens -50C and much lower.
As a result, there are many strong IT specialists, because there is nothing else to do.
Next we were waiting .
I am sure that my alma mater is just a storehouse:
1) We were the only ones who were preparing to control the nuclear reactors of Russian submarines.
The training included flooding with ice water in a sealed chamber, screaming imbeciles in uniform, and more. Therefore, my military department ended on the very first day, when, in response to the yelling of the monkey, I got up, sent it three letters (literally) and asked - "who is with me, let's solder computers."
This, unfortunately, did not get rid of the "furs" on the automated process control system - we assembled stands (emulation of torpedoes aimed at US aircraft carriers, for example), where thousands of wires were connected. It was a hemorrhoid 🙂
2) Anticipating what we did there, for example, when we needed to hand over the project for the 4th year, we did speech recognition.
A friend and I wrote applications (1998, btw) running on top of IPX/Netbios that relayed speech from the 8th floor to the 2nd floor and allowed for feedback. We hosted professors who deal with satellites in the USSR. For example landing on Venus.
As a result, in 1998, the professor talked to the computer and the computer answered him (!) and correctly solved the tasks given by voice (!!!).
The fact that at this time hundreds of people in the entire hostel were rolling with colic from laughter on the floor is another story 😉
By the way, sometimes I read this on anekdot.ru and others, but as always, there are a lot of distortions.
Eventually - built and controlled the entire network of the university and hostels (more than 1000? people, the entire institute, etc.).
We have become untouchable.
Linux kernel patched (especially QOS), freebsd, netware.
A lot of interesting technologies “how to divide 10 megabits per 1000 people”, including participation in the development (then it was a proxy server developed in the Russian Federation and seriously competing with Squid).
In fact, the knowledge gained during this period allowed then to raise huge projects on a planetary scale - including a complete understanding of the protocols and all the “tricks” that can be done on the Linux / BSD kernel.
ordered room door booking because drunken students were constantly trying to break down the door, defended gay teachers who slept on the Internet, fought back with bats from senior students and other nuances of the life of IT professionals in the Russian Federation.
We ran around the rooms with a soldering iron (two buildings with 9 floors each) - the network was token-ring on coax 😉
3) In the third year, we already started working (I remember the first meeting at McDonald's on Kievskaya) with the Israelis on a (legal) pron business - there were already millions of users, servers under Solaris X86, Zeus Web Server (which, like nginx, was eventually acquired by one one of the most successful IT companies in the world , whose office in Russia I helped open), ultra-high workloads and a lot of interesting things
Western journalists came to me to take interviews - how and why "Russians can keep this market"?
4) The FBI and the FSB (jointly) visited us several times, because the hostel was (1998+) connected to the Internet by an unlimited channel, and the hostel not only learned how to generate credit cards for free, but also “enough” the brains to send viruses to the government USA.
What's funny - when the "Russian services" arrived - they said that everyone was doing great, they were working to undermine the enemy's economy (c) and left.
The dormitory received tons of goods bought by students with the generated cards.
At this time, the provider sent messages to pager "The FSB is coming to you."
5) When SUN Microsystems (now killed by Oracle) donated servers to IATE (our institute), there was not a single professor who could set up the equipment.
The rector called me (then I was already passing for an unrecognized, but "exceptional" - in the sense tried to exclude every course) and offered an exchange: I set up servers at the institute, they will give us permission (but not money and equipment) to connect to the Sorovsky Internet for free.
The approach was clear - at that time the radio link on 1 megabit cost about 50 thousand dollars, and everyone at the institute proceeded from the fact that even theoretically this is impossible for students.
As a result, I not only set up all the equipment, but also agreed with the institute for a couple of hundred shovels and several kilometers of "military" coaxial cable.
We (hundreds of students) laid RG75 cable with military Russian network cards in one day I (whose drivers I rewrote for Novell Netware 3) and launched a tcp/ip link to the institute in two days.
It was a show — hundreds of students dug trenches with shovels, climbed trees and poles, lifted concrete slabs weighing hundreds of kilograms. Many of "those students" are now very respected people in the Russian Federation (business owners) and abroad.
6) How we did the technical part all leading online projects in Russia (Andrey Andreev, spylog.ru, begun.ru, mamba.ru, badoo.com and many others) - why they joked hard at mail.ru and yandex.ru at that time (there was a complete technical kindergarten), why badoo for a long time. com was much cooler than facebook, etc.
7) Why in the end almost everyone dumped - stories about London, Prague, Miami, Hong Kong and other Californias (c).
For example, I was hospitalized in the UK for 5 days with a suspected microstroke, while I was transferring Badoo from Cisco to F5 🙂
In fact, I'm really not sure that this is all interesting to someone other than a narrow cabal.
Source: habr.com