For latest (updated Mar. 13 2007!) IOCCC news and my remarks about some of the past contests, please see my IOCCC page.
This is what I looked like (age progression courtesy Ministry of Internal Affairs, U.S.S.R and Russian Federation; Academy of Science, U.S.S.R; Department of Motor Vehicles, California, U.S.A; and my friends) in | |||||
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1983 | 1990 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1997 |
I doubt you want to see what I look like these days... :-)
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Or, you can visit (in no particular order of appearance, relevance, or interest):
Locally:
There was a Soviet desktop microcomputer line somewhat reminiscent of Terak 8510/a, called Elektronika BK, sold from around 1985 (1984?) to mid-1990's. They also had an LSI-11 (on a single chip) for a processor, a hardware-scrollable frame buffer (alas, without the character generator), but, as they were intended primarily for high schools and home entertainment their primary data storage was cassette tape (the school model had a current loop connection). Floppy disk controllers came later.
There were two major models: BK-0010 and BK-0011 with different RAM sizes. In both of them, as there was no hardware character generator and the floppy controller was not included in standard configuration, a significant portion of the address space was devoted to the BIOS that handled text output to the screen and some drawing operations, the bitmapped font, and Basic (in very early versions of BK-0010 - Focal), leaving only 32Kb of RAM on BK-0010, including the frame buffer. Like on Terak, it was possible to turn off refreshing of a part of RAM to give more memory to an application. BK-0011, as well as its more successful modification BK-0011M, had 128 Kb of RAM (but no MMU) and, in a configuration with a floppy drive, was able to run an OS resembling RT-11.
I own a few of those computers (still working), and I have written an emulator for them. The instruction set emulaton is loosely based on the source of a very old PDP-11 emulator by Eric Edwards. I plan to adapt the emulator for Terak as soon as anyone can give me the boot ROM dump.
I have contributed to:
My favorite quote of the period:
...one is not to have the exercise of his liberty of
expression in appropriate places abridged on the plea that it may be exercised in some other place.
This page has had its 2,266th call.