The summer was full with berries and mushrooms. The early fall brought salmon back to Fraser River. It’s time to catch it:
And make red caviar:
I am continuing my story and soon will tell about my trip to Sakhalin Island where red caviar recipe was learned.
Stressmen 20
KuAI was developing in the end of the 70s. Campus was sprawling in the area of Moskoskoe Shosse near Botanical Garden. The Aviation Structures Chair got a new hangar built in the campus territory. The Chair boss, Valery Komarov, decided to reconstruct hangar into university building with auditoriums, labs and research offices. All professors, docents and researchers of the Chair were converted into simple construction labor for more than one year.
This time coincided with introduction of the Soviet’s clones of IBM/360 (so called ES computers) into most of Design Bureaus, which were our clients and PRASAK users. The Design Bureaus were forced to replace BESM-4 and M-220 for ES type computers equipped with IBM OS/360. The need in new FEA software operational in OS/360 became urgent and the decision was made to start creation of new system written in PL/I language for OS/360. The name for new software was invented too. We baptized it as RIPAK (Raschet I Proektirovanit Aviatsionnykh Konstruktsiy what means Analysis and Design of Aviation Structures).
We had no ES computer with OS/360 in KuAI in 1979, but there were even two of them (two ES-1022) in Polytechnic Institute. My friend worked there in position of the IT Department Head what helped us to start working. At least one of the ES-1022 was underloaded and available for us at night time. I made unofficial agreement with my friend and he provided us computer time for 10 rubles per night. This is a price of two bottles of Siberian Vodka, popular brand in the Soviet Union.
PL/1 in OS/360 was very different in comparison with DOS. It was powerful tool. Allocate and Free operators allowed us to control memory usage during program run. Pointers gave a chance to work with strings and arrays very flexible way. Data structures made data presentation clear and effective. Index Sequential Access Method became very popular. So many new degrees of freedoms for programmer and we tried to use all of them.
Nights were our computer time and we were construction workers during daytime. All reconstruction was done with our hands. For example, Misha Vilchek and I installed very steep nonstandard stairs to Aviation Structures Laboratory. Sergey Rychkov made welding job. All of us assembled walls and laid parquet.
As most of Soviet workers sometime we fulfill duties of People’s squad for protection of public order. There were big crowds on Volga piers, landing places for ferries, during summer weekends. People would like to leave city and spend leisure time on the other side on the Volga River, where meadows and good beaches are situated. I remember well as ones they sent us to keep order on the landing stage on Ulyanovsky Spusk where famous Dno (Bottom) takes place. The situation there was difficult from the early morning: the mob was rioting. Ghenka Makeev, very good negotiator, made agreement that our team will keep order on the other side, land stage in Proran, where we finally sailed taking two canisters of beer with us. Proran was quiet in the morning, no need in People’s squad at all. Therefore we went to pine tree grove not far from the beach on the border of village cemetery. We spend the whole day there, drinking beer, discussing our deeds, playing cards, swimming and sunbathing.
Tags: Stressmen
