Published by Alpina the founder of the inDriver service, Arsen Tomsky, about how an ordinary guy from Yakutia created a global technology business. In it, in particular, the author tells what it was like to do IT business in the 90s in the coldest part of the Earth.
Excerpt from a book
“Those who now complain about the low standard of living, drinking smoothies in trendy cafes and co-working spaces and expressing their dissatisfaction on social networks using the latest iPhone model, they did not live in Russia in the early 90s.
I clearly remember how, shortly after returning home, I sat in the hallway and, in despair, clutching my head, thought about where to get money for food to feed my family, and did not know what to do. I still remember how valuable American humanitarian aid seemed, which was once given out for my grandmother. There were pink canned ham, biscuits, some other dry rations. And when I got a job as a programmer in a bank, we joked in the smoking room that the president of the bank is so plump because he has enough money to buy Snickers every day - this chocolate bar seemed so expensive to us.
While working in a bank, I wrote a system in the Quattro Pro scripting language, in a spreadsheet program popular in those years, which analyzed the distribution of the bank's finances, built beautiful graphs and gave recommendations for optimization. The advice was relatively simple - for example, to make deposits not for 90, but for 91 days: then the reserve rate at the Central Bank was reduced, which allowed the bank to release quite decent funds.
But this happened in the early 90s, when everywhere, including in the finances of banks, the chaos of only emerging capitalism reigned, and even a simple ordering system was relevant for bankers. Realizing the demand for my system, I, as a private consultant, began to sell my services to other banks in Yakutsk, since at that time there were almost thirty of them for a city with a population of 300 people.
It looked like this. An intelligent-looking young man, wearing glasses, dressed in the latest business fashion in a bright green jacket, entered the reception room of the president of the bank, where a bored secretary was sitting. He casually held in his hands an incredible mobile phone for that time (the size of a decent brick!) And the coolest Toshiba laptop and, stuttering slightly, said: “I’m to Pavel Pavlovich on the issue of optimizing the bank’s finances using the latest mathematical and computer algorithms.” The secretary, accustomed to uneducated, simple-minded salesmen who dream of getting a loan to import the next batch of “boiled” jeans, became excited and, as a rule, passed this message on to her boss without any problems. The intrigued bank president let the cheeky young man in and listened for several minutes to a stream of words, consisting of familiar financial and unfamiliar computer terms. The laptop was turned on (which not all bankers had seen before), rows of numbers, multi-colored graphs and reports were shown. The conversation ended with a promise to free up additional resources for lending to clients, to improve finances in general, and to charge only for a positive result. After that, in half the cases the young man was put out of the door, and in the other half of the cases the banker decided that he was in front of a computer prodigy - and why not try.
I programmed not only for business, I took on everything that I considered interesting. He could literally sit for days and nights, write code, eating whatever he could (“Doshirak”, a brilliant invention for programmers, didn’t exist then!). Programming was an occupation that gave me great pleasure. Tens, hundreds of thousands of lines of code. For example, a program was written that predicted the results of football matches and entire tournaments, and often quite accurately. Or a program that, based on a database of Yakutsk residents, generated various reports and graphs, like a top of the most popular surnames in the city. Pointless, but cool. I still remember that number 1 was the name Petrov. There were more meaningful projects, such as the GAMETEST utility, which, like the then-famous AIDSTEST antivirus, scanned computers, found and removed computer games from them. The idea was that the program would inevitably be of interest to educational institutions and commercial organizations. The irony is that only my classmate bought it from me as a gesture of friendly support. And the fact that many years later I created and headed the Computer Sports Federation of Yakutia, which popularized computer games.
A year after graduation, when I was 22, I created my first official company. Based on the DBMS and the Clarion language, I programmed a system that I called ASKIB - “automated budget execution control system”. When the Ministry of Finance of Yakutia sent money to its regional divisions for certain purposes, the division had to enter data on the actual use of funds into ASKIB and transmit a report via modem connection to the ministry in order to control the intended use of taxpayers' money.
Thus, my system made it possible to see that, for example, a budget subsidy allocated for the repair of a school was instead spent in some village on the purchase of an SUV for the head of administration. The idea was supported by the leadership of the Ministry of Finance, then the City Hall, and my company signed contracts with them for the development and implementation of the system. Already thoroughly familiar with the subject area, I wrote a complex and well-functioning control system in a few months.
On experimental tests, the very next day after sending the budget subsidy, we received data on its spending in the northernmost point of Yakutia - the village of Tiksi, located a thousand kilometers from Yakutsk on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. And that was before the internet. The data was transmitted via Zyxel modems over a direct telephone connection at a speed of 2400 bits per second, which was quite enough to transmit textual information about financial transactions.
During these trips there were many interesting and funny cases. I'll tell you about one that happened in a tiny village called Suldyukar. This remote place, where mainly reindeer herders live, is located in the diamond province of Yakutia. In winter, temperatures often drop below -60°C. When I arrived, I asked local specialists to bring me a computer to install the program. After a long search, they brought me a regular keyboard! I explained that it was not a computer. Then they found and delivered the monitor. Then finally they brought me the system unit of the ancient Zema computer. But this was normal, since ASKIB was written taking into account the realities of Yakutia and could work on any PC, starting with the 286th series and with the MS DOS operating system. After installing and configuring the program, it was decided to conduct a trial communication session with the city through a modem that I brought with me. When I asked for access to a telephone line, they brought me a walkie-talkie the size of a stool and said that communication happens a couple of times a day, when a satellite is visible above the horizon. The radio was simple, simplex, and, of course, it was impossible to transmit data through it. This story, in my opinion, well illustrates the difficult conditions in which people live in Yakutia and how new technologies are gradually making their way even in these places.
I first saw the Internet a couple of years before this incident, in 1994. And just like when I first met computers, it was a real shock for me. Despite the fact that the speed of the channel allowed me to receive only text information at work without images, especially without sound or video, I could not believe that we were in the mode chat in real time with a person on the other side of the world. It was absolutely incredible! The prospects and opportunities that opened up captured the imagination. It was clear that gradually through the Internet it would be possible to receive the latest news, communicate, sell and buy goods, study and do much more.
On a regular basis, we connected to the Internet at work only a year later, a year later I bought dial-up access to my home. We were among the first in Yakutia who were familiar with the Internet and started using it. For the remaining 99,9% of the population, this was a completely unfamiliar word and phenomenon. The Internet quickly became my favorite hobby, I spent a lot of time online every day. It was the first generation of the romantic Internet, with popular sites such as AltaVista, Yahoo in the world, anekdot.ru in Russia, IRC chats forgotten today, and the FTP protocol that allows you to store and transfer files. It’s hard to imagine, but then before the advent of Google, YouTube and the first social networks there were years, before mobile applications - decades.
Source: habr.com