Happy Birthday, Opera!

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    Time is a relative thing. What is 15 years in a person’s life? This is childhood and adolescence, the very first stages of life, in general - the very beginning. But for a software company, a similar age is a whole era. How the computer world has changed over the years is hard to imagine. Remember what computers were only a decade and a half ago. Now even a medium-sized smartphone significantly exceeds the desktop model of 1995 in terms of its hardware characteristics. And what application software does on monitor screens today - in those days they did not think about it even in the future. What can I say - who at least held ordinary floppy disks in their hands? No, not neat plastic 3.5 inches, but 5.25 '' monsters packed in a black cardboard envelope with a sticker in the role of a write-protect ...

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    Yes, Opera Software was born exactly 15 years ago - a year after writing the first (then still inaccessible to the general public) version of the Opera browser. It began already traditionally for many software companies known today - two talented friends decided to change the world. Geir Ivarsoy, who unfortunately left this world 4 years ago, whose ideas became the development program for the Norwegian browser for many years, and Jon von Techner, who was 10 years younger than Geir, who has the talent to write excellent code in almost any language and capable of infecting his non-standard ideas of everyone around. What the first office of the company looked like can be imagined from this old photo (on the left is Yon, on the right is Geir). 8 square meters, two computers. The company started with a registered capital of NOK 50,000 (something around 6 '

    Jon once said that one of the most vivid memories of that time was the release of the first public version of the Opera browser. The joy of its authors knew no bounds when the number of downloads grew to numbers that were fantastic for them at that time - thirty copies a day! For 15 years, much has changed. Now the head office of Opera Software has almost completely occupied four of the five floors of the same office building.(except for the first floors - there are shops and services) and from our servers users download several million versions of Opera browsers daily. 15 offices of the company are open, including in Russia, and the number of employees already exceeds 750 people from 50 countries of the world. And personally, I am very glad that the last 7.5 years my life and work have been closely connected with this unusual and friendly company. Happy Birthday, Opera, still be an inexhaustible source of new ideas and solutions that can make the world even better.
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