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For me it all started in 1997. At that time I was a secondary school pupil in the 8th grade with advanced studies in mathematics and physics. Suddenly
our mathematics teacher got a brilliant idea of sending the whole our class to extracurricular activities in computing. Her original thought was probably to inspire
us in our studies and also to show how important (and useful) mathematics could be in our future lives. Fortunately for me, the place that was chosen for our class
was a local youth center that was remaining since the Soviet era. It had
a couple of dosens computers and was just five minutes' walk from my
home. The choice couldn't be any better! The equipment was
quite old and worn out but still fully functional. Today it is hard to believe but admittance used to be completely free of charge back then. Perhaps, it is one of
the reasons why it was not valued by most of my classmates. They just felt that those activities were extremely boring. But for me it was fun, just not challenging
enough. However, one month later I heard from two of my classmates that they were learning more technical things with another teacher. That piece of information soon
became my call to action – I decided to join their group. Today it would most probably be called "fear of missing out" (FOMO). Changing my group also
meant change in equipment from Japanese Yamaha YIS-503IIIR (ΠΠ£ΠΠ’2) to its
Soviet competitor Corvette. Remarkably, one year later only three of
us were still participating in those computing activities. Out of twenty-five or so in our class. Nearly all the time that we had was dedicated to programming in
BASIC. Two years later the youth center received two newer computers with Windows 95,
which finally allowed us to try some programming in Visual Basic and Delphi.
Meanwhile, thanks to my parents, I also had access to a computer at home. Starting from i386, followed by i486, replaced later by a much newer model
Pentium and then Pentium III. Finally, a couple of laptops. Most likely, I have also forgotten a few. I guess, keeping up to date was not that
cheap. Perhaps, my parents saw it as an investment. But for me it was more of a toy – I played a lot of computer games at the beginning. But over time, I got
quite fed up with only games and wanted to do something else instead. I became more curious about operating systems with their settings and started looking around
MS-DOS and Windows. Afterwards, I noticed a few nice graphics editors, which also became interesting toys for me. At some point I even found several BASIC
interpreters on the home computer – as if activities at the youth center were not enough.
During the three last years at the secondary school I also got a new subject – informatics. In many English-speaking countries it would probably
be called "computer science". After learning some foundations we received a few exercises. In BASIC. Suddenly three of us who were previously at the youth
center became an unusual problem for our teacher – tasks that were meant to take a whole lesson for others were solved by us in just a few minutes. Challenging
us three became a challenge in itself. But soon enough we got more advanced exercises.
It was quite common with competitions in different subjects for secondary school pupils. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, informatics – just to
name a few. There was a small group of pupils that was sent to represent our school at olympiads on the city district level. Usually, I was part of that group being
ready to participate in several subjects. In 1999 it resulted in my 3rd place in physics and my 3rd place in chemistry. But in 2001 (the last secondary school year)
I won the 1st place at the city district olympiad in informatics and got to represent our school (and the city district) at the next stage of the competition –
the federal subject level. So, while all my classmates focused on their
studies, I was far away in the middle of snowy winter at a cozy
Young Pioneer camp. The competition group in informatics consisted of
five people during that year. Other participants chose Pascal as their programming language, one was even considering using C. But I only knew BASIC, nothing else.
The organizer could not stop laughing. Nevertheless, I returned from the federal subject olympiad in informatics with the 3rd place. At the end, when the organizer
was giving the certificate of honour to me, he could not resist and said: "Learn something else except just BASIC". So, I spent the remaining part
of my last year at secondary school learning some grounds in Pascal and Fortran. All by myself.
Back to my story
Copyright 2026 by Alexander. All Rights Reserved.
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