Excerpt from the book
“Whoever complains about a low standard of living while drinking smoothies in trendy cafes and coworking and expressing their dissatisfaction in social networks with the latest iPhone model didn’t live in Russia in the early 90's.
I clearly remember how soon after returning home I sat in the hallway and in despair, clutching my head, thinking where to get money for groceries to feed my family, and did not know what to do. I also remember how valuable American humanitarian aid seemed to be, which was once given to 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 a smoking room that the president of the bank is so well-fed, because he has enough money to buy sneakers every day - this chocolate bar seemed so expensive to us.
While working at the bank, I wrote a system in the scripting language Quattro Pro, a popular spreadsheet program in those years, which analyzed the distribution of bank finances, built beautiful graphs and made recommendations for optimization. The advice was relatively simple - for example, making deposits not for 90, but for 91 days: then the reservation rate at the Central Bank was reduced, which allowed the bank to release decent enough funds.
But this happened in the early 90s, when everywhere, including in the finances of banks, reigned chaos only of nascent capitalism, and even a simple streamlining system was relevant for bankers. Realizing what demand my system can use, I, as a private consultant, began selling my services to other banks in Yakutsk, since at that time there were almost thirty of them in a city with a population of 300,000 people.
It looked so. The president’s reception room, where the bored secretary was sitting, included an intelligent-looking young man with glasses, dressed in a bright green jacket in the latest business fashion. 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 a little, said: “I’m talking to Pavel Pavlovich about optimizing bank finances using the latest mathematical and computer algorithms.” The secretary, accustomed to uneducated, easy-to-follow shopkeepers who wanted to get a loan to import another batch of “boiled” jeans, was thrilled and, as a rule, passed this message on to her boss without any problems. Intrigued president of the bank let in a daring young man and for several minutes listened to a stream of words, consisting of familiar financial and unfamiliar computer terms. A laptop was turned on (which not all bankers had seen before), rows of numbers, multi-colored graphs and reports were demonstrated. The conversation ended with a promise to free up additional resources for lending to customers, improve finances in general, and charge only for a positive result. After that, in half the cases, the young man stood out of the doorway, and in the other half of the cases, the banker decided that he had a computer prodigy in front of him - and why not try.
I programmed not only for business, I undertook everything that I considered interesting. I could sit literally days and nights, write code, eating whatever I got (Doshiraka, a brilliant invention for programmers, wasn’t there then!). Programming was an activity 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, on the basis of a database of residents of Yakutsk, generated various reports and graphs, like the top of the most popular names in the city. Pointless, but cool. I still remember that No. 1 was the last name of Petrov. There were more meaningful projects, such as the GAMETEST utility, which, like the then famous antivirus AIDSTEST, scanned computers, found and deleted 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 I only bought it from my classmate in the form of a gesture of friendly support. And the fact that after many years I created and headed the Federation of Computer Sports of Yakutia, which popularized computer games.
A year after graduation, when I was 22 years old, I created my first official company. Based on the DBMS and the Clarion language, I programmed a system called ASKIB - “an automated budget execution control system”. When the Ministry of Finance of Yakutia sent money to its regional units for certain purposes, the unit had to enter in ASKIB data on the actual use of funds and transmit a modem communication report to the Ministry in order to control the targeted use of taxpayer money.
Thus, my system allowed me to see that the allocated, for example, budgetary subsidy for the repair of the school was instead spent in some village on buying an SUV for the head of the administration. The idea was supported by the leadership of the Ministry of Finance, then the City Hall, and my company signed agreements with them on the development and implementation of the system. Already thoroughly familiar with the subject area, for several months I wrote a complex and well-functioning control system.
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 thousands of kilometers from Yakutsk on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. And this is before the era of the Internet. Data was transmitted via Zyxel modems via a direct telephone connection at a speed of 2400 bits per second, which was quite enough to transmit textual information about financial transactions.
There were many interesting and funny occasions on these trips. I’ll tell you about one that happened in a tiny village called Suldyukar. This is a remote place where mainly reindeer herders live, located in the diamond province of Yakutia. In winter, there often the temperature drops 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 this is not a computer. Then they found and delivered the monitor. Then at last 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 from 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 asked to give access to the telephone line, they brought me a walkie-talkie-sized walkie-talkie 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, illustrates well the difficult conditions 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 get only text information at work without images, especially without sound or video, I could not believe that we were in real time chatting with a person on the other side of the world. It was absolutely unbelievable! Opening prospects and opportunities were breathtaking. It was clear that gradually over the Internet it would be possible to receive the latest news, communicate, sell and buy goods, study and do much more.
On an ongoing basis, we connected to the Internet at work only after a year, a year later I bought a dial-up access home. We were one of the first in Yakutia who was 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 romantic Internet with such popular sites 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 left, until mobile applications - decades. ”