Humor of programmers from the 80s of the last century

A modern reader may have a reasonable question: why programmers and not IT specialists? The answer lies in the title itself. In the 70s and 80s of the last century, or rather in the USSR, there was no concept of IT. There were the concepts of “cybernetics”, “computer technology”, “electronic computers” (or simply computers), and there were the concepts of “programmer” and “machinist”. If everything is clear with the programmer, then the machinists were responsible for the operation of the computer, their repair, maintenance, etc. They were also called electronic engineers. A modern IT specialist may wonder – what kind of maintenance, what kind of repair? And he will be right, but right in relation to modern times. And then computers occupied huge premises and required a large staff of various specialists:

The photo shows a computer room with two ES computers – ES-1061 and ES-1055. There were also system specialists, as they would say today, operating system (OS) specialists, who loaded the OS.
Programmers sometimes did not even see the computers themselves, but dealt with punched cards, which they handed in through the window and received back a printout of the result. Then came the display classes:

There were no personal computers yet; the first of them appeared at the institute only in 1986. But I digress a little from the topic.
The other day I opened the doors of the bookcase to take one of the books, and my gaze stopped on the spines of Jean Effel’s four-volume “Creation of the World,” and on the next shelf lay a stack of “Technology and Science” magazines. Forgetting why I reached into the bookcase, I took the four-volume volume and magazines, sat down at the table and plunged into pleasant memories:

The four-volume “Creation of the World” was published in 1984. There was not a person in the USSR who did not know Jean Effel:

Personally, I became acquainted with his work while studying at the Kazan Suvorov Military School, where I mastered the French language:

Volodya Komarchuk was the first to purchase this book from us:

He, like the entire department where I came at the very end of 1982, participated in the development of a translator from the ALMO language for the ES computer to ensure continuity of the software previously developed for the M-220, Vesna, SPEM-80 computers.
And if my memory serves me right, he purchased this four-volume set using coupons for waste paper. There was such a form of purchasing books: you handed over old newspapers, magazines and received a coupon for books. And there were no problems with the separate delivery of garbage (people received money for the bottles they handed over). Volodya Komarchuk was not only a good programmer and volleyball player, but also a real book lover. For a long time he could not regain this four-volume work, which began to circulate from hand to hand.
Time passed, I was unexpectedly appointed head of the department, and even more unexpected for me was the offer in 1987 to run the “Engineer and Computer” column in the All-Union magazine “Technology and Science”:

I decided to devote this column to the propaganda of the Unix operating system, which during the reign of the EU, computers with the EU OS (read IBM and OS/360) looked like suicide. Some other zest was needed. And I remembered Jean Effel, about his drawings. But Jean Effel never once addressed the topic of computer technology in his work (at least I couldn’t find it). True, already now looking through his drawings for the umpteenth time, I found a couple of drawings almost on the topic of today:

It’s worth replacing Adam in the left picture with a computer or AI (artificial intelligence), and in the right picture the recording cabinet with the Internet, and everything falls into place!
By this time, I managed to get into my department not only the first personal computers ES-1840 (albeit without a hard drive), but also the programmer about God Blazhnov Valery Yuryevich:

We also managed to purchase the Minix OS with source codes (reader, do not forget that in those days there was no Internet yet and there was nowhere to download from), which successfully worked on the first domestic personal computers ES-184x and Valera Blazhnov wrote a driver for data exchange between personal computers for Minix via RS-232 interface. And all this happened long before the advent of Linux. But these are programming matters. Yuryich (as I often called him), like many talented people, was a very good drawer, and I decided to take advantage of this. I told him about my idea to illustrate the column in the style of Jean Effel. He grabbed the idea on the fly. This is how the first illustrations appeared in the magazine “Technology and Science” under the heading “Engineer and Computer. All illustrations were inspired by newly appeared personal computers, database management systems, and Unix with its mobility. The illustrations, one way or another, were based on the drawings of Jean Effel:

I think that few people will argue with me that comic drawing has not lost its relevance today, when software mobility is almost its main attribute.
This also applies to databases, or more precisely to how they are designed:

And, of course, software debugging:

Unfortunately, this is all that has survived from the drawings of V.Yu. Blazhnov and only because some of the journals “Technology and Science” have survived.
Valera Blazhnov was not lost as a programmer in the post-Soviet era:

In the photo, third from left is Valery Blazhnov, who was already a leading specialist in software implementation of Russian cryptographic algorithms.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, he was part of the development team for the computer game Su-27 Flanker. “Su-27 Flanker” is a computer game in the genre of realistic flight simulator, developed by the Russian company Eagle Dynamics and released on November 10, 1995. I still have the retail packaging of one of the first copies of this game, which was presented to me by my friend Igor Tishin, CEO of the Russian company Eagle Dynamics: