My almost 30 years of computer experience began September 1, 1988, when I was on the practice in the "mailbox" called NIITP. I had to look there for the theme of the diploma and begin to engage them. But the first thing I saw in his workplace, was a Soviet personal computer DVK-3, and instead engage in very different necessary things, I sat behind this DVK'shkoy entire practice.
By design, it was a candy bar: top black-and-white monitor, and behind him stood vertically processor boards, memory, controller, drives, text and graphic display adapters. Bottom - the power supply and drives. In the picture there is a hard drive, I was not there, and the face was not beautiful black, both here and ugly light brown.
DVK was built in the Soviet 16-bit microprocessor 1801VM2 and is compatible with the PDP-11. http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/1801BMx. Interestingly, in this case, our Americans have not stripped processor chip, and the architecture and instruction set - our chip is almost complete analog of the American cabinet cards. The processor runs at a frequency of 4 MHz, the memory was, if I'm not mistaken, 56 kilobytes, the hard drive was not, but there were two "broad" 40-track single-sided 5-inch disc. Volume floppy - 200 KB, but in kilobytes, then place no one thought the place was considered a diskette in blocks (512 bytes). was 398 blocks on the disk, and if it artfully format - 402. At DCK had two separate video controller - text KSM (80x25 characters) and graphic KGD (400x286 pixels). Software can be turned on or off the display of any images of the two video controllers, moreover if they are included at the same time, a picture is displayed on top of the other.
DCK keyboard is very similar to a modern, only the layout of Latin letters was made on compliance with the Russian, so then I had to relearn to pisishnuyu layout.
By the DVK was connected matrix printer Robotron CM6329, which allows to print not only text, but also graphics.
Here is what Wikipedia says about DCK: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Диалоговый_вычислительный_комплекс.
And here you can see the photos of the individual components and boards: http://andy.sumy.ua/old_computers/world_museum/dvk.htm.
DCK is running an operating system RT-11SJ. DCK can write or draw something on the screen and print it on the printer. Plus delve into the files, copy them back and forth from a floppy disk to a floppy disk, run the program and study than I worked for three months with great interest, almost without stopping. With DESS code editor (by the way at the top of the picture he is on screen CAAC) I Russified operating system, replacing the code files all the English texts into Russian. Long I tried to write in assembly its first program - she painted in a graphic vertical mode stripes, which do not disappear in a test mode and shows the boundary symbol 64go to in the documents were right field.
And, of course, in the CAAC were toys. And the great Tetris (by the way, the original Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov the author wrote in the predecessor DVK - Electronics-60, and he worked in text mode, the system figures out square skobochek http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Тетрис). And the first few graphics begalok-shooters. In the three months I have played enough for a lifetime. Now I run the toys every few months, and not for long.
It was so interesting that I started not what expected. That CAAC has changed my life. I did not write a diploma in NIITP, and big tricks, escaped to distribution.