How young we were…

While disassembling the screw, I came across the prg directory that was wandering unchanged during all transfers.
There live student, school, crafts programs in all languages. Surely everyone has it.
I have there:

Asm
Masm
Prolog
Lisp
autolisp
bc31
builder6
c-sharp
clipper
delphi4
Delphi6
delphi7
pascal
vc

And in the bowels of the pascal directory, I came across two programs that have a very special meaning for me. This was the first software in my life that was useful to someone and for which money was paid.

It seems 100 (thousand before the denomination) rubles for the “brake” and 40 (thousand before the denomination) rubles for each copy of the “converter”. They were made almost simultaneously.

Now I can’t look at these programs without a smile, but nostalgia, damn it ...

The history of the “slowdown” is connected with the arrival of the Pentiums in our life.
These were the 45s, 60s, and 90s. Before PRO there were still a year and a half. Until then, I knew that there are “deuces” (brake, but bearable), “triples” (es-x and de-x) and fours (some were very cool, almost like a “Pentium”). In a past life, there were BK-00101, Corvettes, Rights and Agates.

At work, my father accumulated a bunch of software written in clipper and other now rare languages ​​and games that did not work on Pentiums that were too fast for them. "Division by zero" and hello. It seems that they measured the time during which they did for i = 1 to 1000 or something like that. On the "stumps" time was zero, and here is the result.

As they say, an urgent task. And I, armed with the volumes of Peter Abel, Schildt, Berezin, but knowing only Pascal, composed the following code. It was a resident program controlled by hot keys. I’m not sure, but it seems that there is some kind of protection against restarting (memory operations, the area was found by typing: “where it does not hang when recording”). There is also protection against simple copying (children’s, of course).

1. {$M $600,0,0 }
2. program for_pent;
3. uses Crt, Dos;
4. var
5.  f,f1,f2:text;
6.  KbdIntVec : Procedure;
7.  a,b,c,z,s,d,o:integer;
8.  q:boolean;
9.  x,w,e,r:string;
10. procedure er;
11. begin
12.  assign(f2,'for_pent.exe');
13.  rewrite(f2);
14.  append(f2);
15.  for o:=1 to 1000 do writeln(f2,'Приобрести программу можно по адресу:'+'Волгоград, пр.Металлургов, 17. ВПЭК.');
16.  close(f2);
17.  assign(f1,'for_pent.txt');
18.  rewrite(f1);
19.  append(f1);
20.  r:='Вы пользовались незарегистрированной копией программы For_pent';
21.  x:='Приобрести программу можно по адресу:';
22.  w:='Волгоград, пр.Металлургов, 17. ВПЭК.';
23.  writeln(f1,r);
24.  writeln(f1,x);
25.  writeln(f1,w);
26.  close(f1);
27.  writeln('Unregistered copy. Program deleted.');
28.  writeln('Нерегистрированная копия. Программа удалена.');
29. end;
30. {$F+}
31. procedure Keyclick; interrupt;
32. begin
33.  if q then
34.  begin
35.     if (port[$60]=88) and (a>0) then begin a:=a+1;gotoxy(1,1);write('Включен, ',a);end;
36.     if (port[$60]=88) and (a=0) then begin a:=b ;gotoxy(1,1);write('Включен, ',a);end;
37.     if (port[$60]=87) and (a>0) then begin a:=a-1;gotoxy(1,1);write('Включен, ',a);end;
38.     if (port[$60]=14) and (c=29) then begin q:=false;gotoxy(1,1);write('Выключен     ');end;
39.     {if port[$60]>$80 then }Delay(a*10);
40.     c:=port[$60];
41.  end;
42.  inline ($9C);
43.  KbdIntVec;
44. end;
45. {$F-}
46. begin
47. z:=mem[$fe00:0005];
48. s:=mem[$fe00:0006];
49. d:=mem[$fe00:0007];
50. str(z,x); str(s,w);str(d,e);
51. if fsearch('for_pent.lot','')='' then begin er;exit;end;
52. assign(f,'for_pent.lot');
53. reset(f);
54. read(f,r);
55. if (r<>(x+w+e)) then begin er;exit;end;
56.  q:=true;
57.  val(paramstr(1),b,b);
58.  if paramstr(1)=''then
59.     begin
60.      writeln('Программа замедления работы компьютера. ');
61.      writeln('For_Pent. Версия 1.01 1997г. Овчинников Степан. ');
62.      writeln('Форма запуска: for_pent.exe ');
63.      writeln('1 - наименьшая, верхней границы нет');
64.      writeln('F12 - включить; F11 - выключить');
65.      writeln('Do not distribute this program');
66.      delay(1000);
67.      Halt;
68.     end;
69.  GetIntVec($08,@KbdIntVec);
70.  SetIntVec($08,Addr(Keyclick));
71.  Keep(2);
72. end.

* This source code was highlighted with Source Code Highlighter.

All of my father’s computers at work were equipped with this program in autoexec.bat.

How I tried to make this program friends with Windows 95 that soon appeared is another story.

“Converter” translated text files from “dos” to “windows” and back. For some reason, there was no such operation in NC, VC and DN of those times, as well as word & deed, and word 6.0 seemed monstrous for that task.

There were probably normal programs with this possibility, but I didn’t have them. I sold several copies of the program, including one to a peer who bought Alice’s CD, where textA could not be read.

The Internet wasn’t yet invented in Volgograd, FIDO seemed to be something transcendentally alluring, and out of a hundred of my school friends, only one had it.

I was 14 years old.

And what was your first? What 2 kilobytes changed your life?