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Confession of one IT specialist

The "dark side" of private networks that paved the way for the Internet, squeezed by "evil corporations"




Today I work as a tester in a large IT company and in a dialogue with my colleagues, unexpectedly, I had to remember childhood, then adolescence and youth. It was these memories that I decided to describe in a post. I want to say right away that everything described is purely personal observations and experience, there will be no dry technical official data here, I do not pretend to be a scientific publication, but this can be called a retrospective. Any comments and additions will be useful, but please do not judge strictly, I am not proud of many of the things that I did in my life.

So, it was a junction of millennia, any networks were a luxury for the average person, mobile push-button phones have not yet entered every home, even simple PCs have not enjoyed such popularity in the post-Soviet space. Thoughts on smartphones never crossed anyone's mind. But I was lucky to be one of the “chosen ones”, because when I arrived in 1991, my father left the geological exploration university and was seriously carried away by system administration, which for many years not only fed our family, but also brought computer education.



Dad often brought all written-off iron from work, reanimated it and set up experiments. For my sister and I, our parents got a console like a dandy, which we connected to TV and went through all sorts of crazy things like Mario, Batman and Flash and cut ourselves into Tanks. There were not so many cartridges, but collections began to appear, which became our joy and allowed us to gather crowds of friends.

Mom didn’t like that we spend too much free time on video games, sometimes even scoring on school lessons. It’s not that I did not study well, just the opposite, therefore I could afford such tricks. But once I seriously grabbed for the first bad mark in a combo with a call to school for bullying a classmate. And no, I was not a “bully” in a typical representation, but if I thought that I had been treated unfairly, I would come off the offender to the fullest, even if he wasn’t on purpose. The boy did not appreciate the friendly trolling, but was my neighbor, we often played together, so the relationship soon got better, you just had to break the nose of another classmate for his persecution (only I can spread rot for my friends). The console was the finish line, selected as a punishment for being “out of hand”. Of course,the child will take revenge on aggression and my revenge was a rather short-sighted action - I urinated on the TV, because I could no longer connect the prefix to it and decided that I no longer needed it. This, by the way, is a real cyberpunk protest, learn how to reconstruct the famous song of the band “Pull”. Since then (and I was 8 years old) I have not had a box and still do not.



This incident was later forgotten, but there was nowhere to connect the console, and my father gathered enough iron and skills to fuck up 2 full-fledged computers, where I learned “Road Rash” - motorcycle racing without rules, where you can heat your opponent right in the face . By the way, it was this game that led me in my life to motorcyclism of the brain, winter mototoxicosis, trips to dalnyaks, jimkhan, drag racing and miserable attempts of stunt riding. Then “DOOM”, “Quake”, “Unreal” ... And now, we were already chopping from 2 computers with dad and friends in a network game against bots - “CS”, “Quake 3 Arena”, “Unreal Tournament” ...



When it wasn’t very possible to play at home, I walked around the computer club across the road from the FSB hostel, where you could stick with friends, meet new people, play Diablo and Starcraft. In parallel with the emergence of such clubs, those few of our housemates who had a PC began to get networked with small cards and switches, gradually scrambled between the porches, then between neighboring houses, and began to grow game and file servers on the mezzanines. So a fairly large number of peer-to-peer LANs were organized, where things like FTP servers and Direct Connect pulled in. Very quickly, the most active Paucans suddenly became small Internet providers, of which Hausnet, Netorn, Degunino and Maryino.net stood out in my memory in Moscow.For home servers, our family also enjoyed the privilege of free internet for a long time.



But computers, and even more so the Internet, were still far from all. Having quickly orientated to whom and what is interesting (and during puberty, most, for example, my peers, was interested in porn), especially entrepreneurial guys began to wield, downloading any media content on file hosting, recording them on blanks, and selling it wherever possible - among classmates, on radio markets, in transitions, stalls near many Moscow metro stations. The pirate boom affected me too - for rubles and even sometimes dollars, I easily wrote down to my classmates everything that they would ask. Most often, of course, it was a porno, in second place toys without multiplayer (for those without a network), and in the third movie.



Shops began to hide behind when major telephony operators became interested in the prospects for the development of the Internet. These stalls simply did not need the overwhelming majority, since rather aggressive marketing with calls to the landline phone (they say they still exist) pushed the Internet into every home, even if it was not really needed. As if rabid, they began to buy up all the possible LANs that they could find. Some in order to develop and expensively sell high-quality fiber, and others to shove your Galilean DSL into each house and send monthly invoices to your inbox. By the way, in some houses of the Ostankino district, still one such large operator has barricaded itself from others and to this day (2020) has forcibly kept everyone on DSL,5 years in a row promising to give PON and putting wireless plugs on the house itself, so that there is no choice at all.



I think many of the Muscovites know this intrusive operator, and some of the Habrovsk citizens could even work with him. Somehow in my youth I got a “service man” to their contractors, and the work was as follows - the engineer had to redeem connection requests, come in, plug the splitter and modem into the telephone line, and then make sure that they urgently need your services as a computer masters, so that you can at least beat off the applications you bought in the morning, or maybe raise some money. The services are funny to the commonplace - paid installation of a free antivirus, password change from a router and other game. In general, what is enough for fantasy. For those especially stupid, there was even a price list with services and the percentage that you will receive for your work on them.



Frankly speaking, I wasn’t particularly satisfied with piracy, and I immediately ran away from such a job at the “internship” stage for one reason - to sell something like an honest huckster and even just sell is not mine. From time to time, “conscience” or fear of the stars showed itself. But the final realization of this came much later, when I fell into the boom of opening endless workshops for the repair of mobile and computer equipment. Having enough skills for a “quick fix” a couple of years after a full-fledged start of a career in it as a technical tehnik / enikey, I decided to open my workshop, which was burnt out by the same unscrupulous landlords working under the scheme “collected grandmas in advance - sold the building - dumped ". There, of course, the experience of sales and the imposition of services (or in Russian “divorce suckers”) soared to incredible heights,it was possible to take fabulous money for the user’s phone just lying in a drawer, and sometimes even de-energized and disassembled for a day under the fan. Otherwise, it is simply impossible to survive in this “business”, you simply will not meet conscientious workshops and service centers, no matter how much they hit with your fist on the chest, any hope of honesty will drown you.



The personal advantages of this experience are that I improved my knowledge of the hardware, including any apple technology, communication with users became easy and easy, there appeared basic skills in bookkeeping, mastery of conflict resolution and personnel management. All this allowed me, after the collapse of the business, to get into a large advertising holding as a second system administrator, where I already grabbed the right stack of corporate network and server technologies, which subsequently sent me to the QA area, which saved me from the user and constant lies. It was great to touch the origins of creating a global network that brought together people from all over the world almost enthusiastically. And it is a pity that the monopolists who came to control this great miracle came to provide complete control over any information that needs freedom.

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