We Learnt from the Best!
My wife and I were lucky—we learnt from the best!
Recently, my wife and I once again walked past the Yandex Museum and its shop on Timura Frunze Street. Apparently still impressed by my visit to the Yandex office, I persuaded her that this time we should actually go in rather than walk past as we usually did.
I will say nothing about the shop, because it was the museum section that made by far the strongest impression on us.
The museum has everything: all kinds of calculators, keyboards and mice, different sorts of computers and much more besides. What struck the deepest chord with me was a fully functioning Volkov Commander, booted from a five-inch floppy disk (five, not three). The sound of that floppy drive is lodged somewhere deep in my mind: whenever I hear it, something in me comes alive. It is like the line from the famous cartoon about the Kolobki: “He loses all will at the sound of a flute.” That sound fills me with a nostalgia beyond words.
On the one hand, I was pleasantly surprised to see two tour groups, each with four or five schoolchildren. The guides enthusiastically told them about the history of computers, while the children stared open-mouthed in amazement at these monsters—by today’s standards. On the other hand, I was caught off guard when my wife remarked that, somehow, without us noticing, schoolchildren had started studying these computers in a museum, even though we had studied and worked on them ourselves!
What impressed me most—I might even say filled me with a certain awe—was a display of books. Pride of place belonged to two books from the series “Pages from the History of Russian IT”. Looking out at my wife and me from their covers were people who had taught us at MSU’s Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics!
I have already written here about one of them, Alexander Nikolayevich Tomilin. But to my shame, I have yet to write a single word about Victor Petrovich Ivannikov, the head of my own Department of System Programming.
I will make sure to put that right soon.
