They hit on writing an article. There was nothing to do, I wrote a sketch about what further you can Š
In fact - a series of unknown stories of the period of the formation of IT in the Russian Federation, funny and not very, plus a description of a typical career at that time.
If it will be interesting - that is, a lot of photos and stories - all the old fashion, was not yet filmed on digital cameras. When there were still black and white monitors :)
Description of how life brought to the most interesting places related to world IT.
My career in IT began with the fact that I âblew upâ the school principal in his personal toilet.
Yes, just like in comedies today;)
The Russian work book begins at the age of 14 - officially made a network throughout the school (and did it at other schools), connected to the great-grandfather of the Internet ( Sprint - a minute of communication from Norilsk with a call to the United States cost about $ 100 , so we hacked it directly from the principal phone)
In one school, the squibs were put into the director's toilet bowl, and a year later I went to another school (they drove out of the first one) and met the same director there.
He recognized me, but did not remember where. Therefore accepted.
At that time, I didnât know how to say âspoonâ in English (on which I filled up the entrance exams to school), which really seems funny - because I am a UK citizen today .
The director accepted me âout of examsâ, in view of the fact that he came to negotiate himself (do you know how this ability later helped in life?) Without parents.
It was the program "Elite Education of Russia" - " ELIOR " ("according to the mimic program ELIOR (elite education in Russia)."
Yes, in the history of the Russian Federation there was a short moment when the wife of the next oligarch (then they didnât 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 know that (for example) essentially Russian Internet technologies for the coffin of life owe the same to George Soros - in 1998 that George poured into the Russian Federation more than $ 100 million ( now itâs completely different, much more money) in order to to provide all leading institutes and students with the connection that at that time many Internet providers literally began with âhow they stole a couple of oil wagonsâ and then existed with the money of the same âdamned zapadentsâ :)
I was lucky to find the times when everything was just becoming - which made it possible, if not to become a "star", then itâs quite nice to feel like in California and being named top " IT specialists who left the Russian Federation forever " :)
So, rewind back to 1995.
We graduated from a college in Norilsk, where (on the one hand) we managed to catch (and even solder) punch-card computers and uniquely reliable Dec Vax (did you know that MS Windows NT is a team from Alpha / Dec Vax that Bill Gates personally lured? ), and on the other - they even managed to work on Intel Pentium, used as Novell Netware servers (which I personally broke in assembler in the first week of getting to know it - NLM modules and stuff, 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 more to do.
Next, we were waiting for the Obninsk Institute of Atomic Energy .
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 an airtight chamber, screaming imbeciles in uniform and so on. Therefore, my military department ended on the very first day when, in response to the yelling of monkeys, I got up, sent him three letters (literally) and asked, "who is with me, send computers to solder."
This, unfortunately, did not eliminate the âfluffyâ on the automated process control system - we collected stands (emulation of pointing torpedoes on US aircraft carriers for example), where thousands of wires were connected. It was a crap :)
2) Anticipating - what we did there, for example, when we needed to pass the project for the 4th year, we did speech recognition .
My friend and I wrote applications (1998, by the way) that work on top of IPX / Netbios, which transmit speech from the 8th floor to the 2nd floor and allow you to give feedback. We were received by professors involved in 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 laughing on the floor is another story;)
By the way, sometimes I read it on anekdot.ru and others, but as always - a lot of distortion.
As a result, they built and controlled the entire network of the university and hostels (more than 1000 people, the whole institute, etc.).
We have become untouchable.
Linux kernel patches (especially QOS), freebsd, netware.
A lot of interesting technologies âhow to divide 10 megabits per 1000 peopleâ, including participation in the development of oops (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 us to raise huge planetary-scale projects - including a full understanding of the work of protocols and all the âtricksâ that can be uploaded to the Linux / BSD kernel.
They ordered the door to the room to be booked because drunk students constantly tried to break the door, defended non-traditional teachers burnt on the Internet , beat off bits from undergraduate 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 of 9 floors) - the network was a token-ring on the coaxial;)
3) In the third year, we already started working (I remember the first meeting at McDonaldâs in Kiev) with the Israelis on a (legal) pron business - there were already millions of users, a server under Solaris X86, Zeus Web Server (which, like nginx, was eventually acquired by one of the most successful IT companies in the world of F5Networks , whose office in Russia I helped to open), ultra-high loads and a lot of interesting things
Western journalists came to me to interview - how and why "Russians can keep this market"?
4) The FBI and the FSB came to us several times (jointly), 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 âhad enoughâ brains to send viruses to the government USA.
What is funny - when the "Russian services" arrived - they said that all fellows, we are working to undermine the enemyâs economy (s) and left.
The hostel received tons of goods purchased by students on the generated cards.
At this time, the provider sent messages to the pager "the FSB is coming to you."
5) When SUN Microsystems (now killed by Oracle) donated a server to the IATE (our institute), there was not a single professor who could configure the equipment.
The rector called me (at that time I already passed for an unrecognized, but "exceptional" one - in the sense of trying to exclude every course ) and offered an exchange: I set up the server at the institute, we would be given permission (but not money and equipment) to connect to the Sorovsk Internet for free.
The approach was understandable - at that time a 1 megabit radio link cost about 50 thousand dollars , and everyone at the institute proceeded from the fact that even theoretically it was impossible for students.
As a result, I did not just set up all the equipment, but also agreed with the institute on a couple of hundred shovels and several kilometers of a âmilitaryâ coaxial cable.
We (hundreds of students) in one day laid an RG75 cable with Russian military network cards I ola Lan (whose drivers I rewrote under Novell Netware 3) and in two days launched the tcp / ip link to the institute.
It was a show - hundreds of students with shovels dug trenches , climbed trees and poles, lifted concrete slabs weighing hundreds of kilograms. Many of those âstudentsâ are now very respected people in the Russian Federation (business owners) and abroad.
6) How did we do the technical part of all the leading online projects in the Russian Federation (Andrey Andreev, spylog.ru, begun.ru, mamba.ru, badoo.com and many others) - why did you harshly joke on mail.ru and yandex.ru at that time (there was a full technical kindergarten), why for a long time badoo.com was much cooler than facebook, etc.
7) Why, in the end, almost everyone dumped - stories about London, Prague, Mayaimi, Hong Kong and other California (s).
For example, I went to a hospital in the UK for 5 days with a suspicion of a microstroke, while I transferred Badoo from Cisco to F5 :)
In fact, I'm really not sure if this is all interesting to anyone other than a narrow inter-party.