Funny, I too was a freshman student there in 1993, and I used the ED011 room to get my first taste of internet. I didn't know about web pages or there were very few back then but I used Gopher, and I would simply try to reach as far as I could around the world. I learned shell commands by looking over the shoulder to the guys next to me and copying what they were doing. I didn't get to use the 286 stations, just the DEC terminals. 4MB RAM seemed like a supercomputer to me, after first learning programming with a Romanian Sinclair Spectrum clone which had 16KB ROM and 48KB RAM.
Those were the days, when you had to load software from cassette tapes and even the slightest movement could make the computer reboot (but that was 4 years earlier, when I was getting into 9th grade).
I think I caught the dying days of ED011. I was an Automatica freshman in 1999, when the lab and the die-hards populating it still looked like magic for outsiders like myself, but by 2000 or early 2001 all the text-only terminals had been replaced by 486 computers (I think), and the magic was gone.
The spirit of it still lived for a short while in the faculty's dorms, which had freshly been fitted with Internet connections, and it was cool to see all those network cables hanging outside of the dorm buildings while knowing that because of those cables we had access to Audiogalaxy and to playing AtomicBomberman with our colleagues from two floors bellow us. Lots of the students that helped install and set-up those cables and the dorms' network-systems ended up as key people at various ISPs.
I remember in the 00's a company I was working for was trying to recruit talent to Romania.. they were SO good! I remember that a DBA in Romania would cost the same as in the UK, and they would work miracles. I also remember they had 2x optic fiber networks, one underground and one from the telephone/uitility poles.
I am not surprised for this. At some point Romania was the DataCenter for many large companies in Europe.
If only the corruption had gone away, Romania could have been a 'mini European silicon valley'.
On average the smartest developers I've worked with from Europe have all come from that neck of the woods, I'm in the UK and our best are the equal of their best but their average is better.
They often write better English than English developers as well.
I say that as an average developer myself.
I think it's a cultural thing combined with rigorous universities and a strong work ethic.
I’ve always found Europeans seem more inclined to generalize by country at the minute level than people in North America. Of course in an endearing sort of way, not to be mean.
Talent is talent, it can come from anywhere but tends to congregate in certian places. Usually because talent attracts other talent. Not merely just existing opportunity/attributes of the area.
> They often write better English than English developers as well.
I do have a working theory for why that is.
In my home country of Romania, as well as throughout most of Eastern Europe, it is part of the culture to actively and condescendingly correct other people's grammar. I'm still not sure if this is a good or bad thing, but some people take it very seriously.
As an example, if someone would make a common mistake, such as "your" instead of "you're" in English, chances are that he or she would get corrected or even laughed at. I don't recall ever seeing this sort of behaviour in the UK, though I'm sure it happens.
> I also remember they had 2x optic fiber networks, one underground and one from the telephone/uitility poles.
This is still an unresolved nightmare even today with some fiber hanging on telephone poles and some being dug underground. In the capital city, the underground fiber is handled by one company (Netcity) and there's been a lot of controversy around it because of discriminatory pricing.
Eastern europeans and people from the balkans usually have a very negative image about the people they share the nation with — and while this might be rooted in reality I found it most of the time exaggerated in the negative direction.
I say that as somebody who grew up with a bosnian neighbour and worked on a few projects in Serbia.
You will find the fake-it-till-you-make-it people there, and they are usually easily spotted (because they will spot you first), but I found there are many talented, extremely humble and hard working people their too — you just tend to overlook them because they would never sell themselves.
>We joke in Romania, how every one is a lawyer here. Because getting these degree in Romania is lot easier than anywhere else in the world!
You actually are right. The problem is that the market doesn't need lawyers. Sometimes even we joke about how Romanian language (hybrid latin) is imprecise to build logical foundation for justice.
Inspiring! As a middle schooler, I was given free non-destructive reign in my tech class to do whatever I wanted. From that, I learned so much- I set up a Beowulf cluster out of old desktops, scavenged RAM from a pile of unused desktops to get the workstation I found up to speed, and did so much more. [I also mined BTC at school, but I lost the wallet :( ] As one of those people that will do ridiculous things out of intellectual curiosity, it was a huge boon to me. Similar to Lari, I broke my share of stuff, and learned a lot in the process of fixing it.
It is from those days, six years ago, that my passion for technology truly blossomed, and I've been so much better for it.
I definitely think that breaking and fixing stuff, or just fixing broken stuff, is vital to understanding any field where "stuff" is involved. Doctoring and nursing are both apprenticeships in part so doctors and nurses can learn how to fix broken people in a real setting, and we should do something more like that in the computer field so the kids who didn't grow up with their own systems they could break and fix can get the experience they missed.
Yes, those were the days. I was there with Lari for a couple of years. The article is accurate but does not mention the hortible smells in ed 011, especially after 2-3 days of some of us being there non stop, no showers included.
Unfortunately the article also hypes up the value and impact of "hacking".
There was no rocket science nor much valuable to learn after hacking the 20th server with the same old tired exploits. Plus most stuff was easy then.
This is why after the first 6-12 months of 3am hacking excitement, most of us moved on to learning difficult fundamental things such as algorithms, compilers, complexity, threading, AI and many others while others would still be in ED011 years later "hacking" away ... without really making progress.
If you are thinking of pursuing CS as a major, certainly hack away in highschool and early on in collegebut eventually don t forget to go for the difficult fundamental things.
Interestingly, Lari was not a CS student and ED 011 was his place of connection with computing ...
Those were the days, when you had to load software from cassette tapes and even the slightest movement could make the computer reboot (but that was 4 years earlier, when I was getting into 9th grade).