School computer science: the recycle bin, dot folders and the sixteenth computer

Our computer science teacher, Vladimir Trasko, didn’t like me much: he had older favourites, and his son was in the parallel class.

Once he made a mistake in a program on the blackboard. I noticed it but kept quiet so as not to embarrass him. The program was run, it didn’t work: “Ah, needs fixing.”

We had an exam “on Windows”. By then I was already writing programs in Delphi and working with interrupts. I restored a deleted file with Undo Delete and lost a point: “you have to use the recycle bin.” Even though I knew more serious ways, all the way up to Norton UnErase.

The kids hid games, Carmageddon for example, in folders whose names started with a dot. On the shared computers nobody could get into such a folder or delete it.

And in 2001 we, Fyodor Dronov, Alexander Chernyadev and I, went to a team olympiad in maths and computer science in Ugāle, one computer per team. We came fourth in Latvia. The prize was a computer, but one school took two prize places at once, so we got the diploma for third place and the computer. That is how the school got the sixteenth computer in its classroom.

Ugāle, 2001. From left: Fyodor Dronov, our maths teacher, our computer science teacher Vladimir Trasko, Alexander Chernyadev and me. On the desk: the computer we won and the diploma for third place.