In the spring of 1989, computers in Europe, the United States and Asia began to suffer from unknown malware. At every sixteenth start of the infected executable file, the virus overwrote an arbitrary sector of the machine's hard disk and displayed the phrase "Eddie lives ... somewhere in time" on the monitor. The country of origin of the virus was directly indicated by the signature: "This program was written in the city of Sofia © 1988-89 Dark Avenger". In Soviet computers, there was a strain of the virus that looked a little different: "BORODA takes revenge in time."
This is what the virus looked like
If you look closely, you can see the text Eddi lives ...
The virus has been signed
Dark Avenger was the most prolific of Bulgarian hackers to make their mark in the late 1980s and then in the 1990s. In December 1990, The New York Times reported that one of the Eastern Bloc countries had become the main vector of infection in the new information economy. The late John McAfee stated: "I would say that ten percent of the sixty calls we receive every week are related to Bulgarian viruses." According to another estimate, at least ninety of the three hundred then existing viruses for IBM devices came from this country. In 1997, Wired magazine called Bulgaria “the heart of darkness”.
How could a small country cause digital epidemics? The West has always believed that the communist countries from Eastern Europe are technologically backward states that could not enter the information age because of the “iron curtain” that impeded the free movement of people and knowledge. However, in Bulgaria, progress in the field of electronics was considered a key component of achieving the ideological and economic prospects of the state.
The authorities hoped that the computer would help realize the ideas of communism. For example, automation will streamline planning across a nationwide information network, and people will be freed from routine work. Computers were supposed to revive an economy that had lame by the 1980s.
In part, their hopes were justified: by the mid-1980s, Bulgaria supplied up to 47% of all computer equipment in the Eastern Bloc. It was the most famous manufacturer from Berlin to Vladivostok. But weak growth and low labor productivity, coupled with the slow spread of technology, did not allow this area of the economy to strengthen. Computers and CNC machines were often idle due to the lack of up-to-date software.
Bulgaria pinned serious hopes on computer education of the younger generation. It was planned that children would be taught how to create software, and as a result, the country would be able to automate everything it dreamed of in a few years - from chemical production to pension management. Since 1983, Bulgarian children aged twelve have been enrolled in the state technical training program. High school grades and universities have become technology labs. By studying BASIC, children had to become smart and truly creative individuals, able to manage complex industrial and social processes.
In reality, however, the generation of children in the 1980s became cogs in an economy that never recovered from its burden of problems. The collapse of the communist regime in 1989 led to the fact that technological skills and entrepreneurial aspirations, cultivated by the state, somehow imperceptibly switched to virus writing and the creation of the first software companies in Bulgaria.
We can say that hackers like Dark Avenger have become the most famous product of political and cultural experiment. Communism was withering away, but its children carried the bright dream of freeing the human spirit with the help of technology into the world of capitalism
Just a generation before that, such an idea of the future of Bulgaria seemed inconceivable. In 1944, when the Red Army crossed the Danube, this small Balkan state was mainly engaged in agriculture. Throughout the 1950s, the country adopted the Soviet economic model: central planning, chimneys, industrial proletariat in the cities.
However, by the 1960s, the period of extensive growth in Bulgaria began to decline, the country was going through a debt crisis. The party turned to electronics as a good for the future. As the leader of the party, Todor Zhivkov, put it, "we could not carry out industrialization with only tomatoes and eggs." Serious government investments combined with Japanese licenses have led to the creation of the Bulgarian computer industry. By the 1970s, dozens of Bulgarian factories and institutes were producing processors, minicomputers and peripherals such as ES-1020 mainframes and IZOT hard drives. Most of these technologies have been licensed or reworked after they were acquired in the West. The most valuable product was the hard drive, which Bulgaria practically monopolized in the Eastern Bloc.
The 1980s were marked by major investments in robotics and personal computers that brought the era of automation to offices and factories. As imperfect as it is, Bulgarian automation has taken root to some extent - about 200,000 workers in the 8 millionth country worked in the electronics sector, the country's second largest industrial sector. Copies of the IBM 360/370, Winchester hard drives and an Apple II clone known as Pravetz found their way into socialist enterprises throughout the Southern world.
Bulgarian computers have flown on the Mir space station, have been used for nuclear research in India, and have helped develop the statistical offices of Mozambique. Albeit slowly and fragmentarily, but automation entered the processes of production of cars and cement plants, controlled the level of milk in collective farms and penetrated further and further into the social and state spheres.
Unfortunately, Bulgarian products sold poorly on the world capitalist market because of their sometimes useless quality. Rather than viewing economic principles (such as central planning) as a potential source of the problem, the party focused on the "subjective factor." In their opinion, it is not so much the system that is to blame as the Bulgarian worker who dodges duties, steals change and sleeps in the workplace. Only a computer and a robot could solve this problem, eliminating the human factor in an environment where personal connections and the gray market played a key role in the acquisition of scarce goods. In these conditions, the next, truly computerized generation was to grow up.
Her Majesty really began to take part in the lives of children. In 1979, officials commissioned twenty-seven schools in various cities across the country to conduct an experiment to teach computer use. But it was the personal computer revolution that opened the Bulgarian school for electronics. In 1983, the Sofia Secondary School of Electronics received its first fully equipped classroom of eighteen Bulgarian personal computers, and computer science became part of the school curriculum.
Within a year, there were more than 300 PCs in Bulgarian schools, and their number continued to grow. Educational software was used in foreign language, mathematics and science lessons, along with BASIC lessons. The eleventh grade curriculum was revised to include topics such as "Introduction to Cybernetics" and "Industrial Automation". The magazine Computer for You published plans of architects to create new classrooms in which students were treated almost like cyborgs: - “integration into the school environment is effective only if it ensures optimal functioning of the system“ man-machine-environment ”" - the cybernetic engineer told the magazine.
If the economy will consist of a man-machine system, then schools should also be ready for this. New teaching methods were developed under the auspices of the mathematician Blagovest Sendov, who in the early 1960s participated in the creation of the first Bulgarian computer, Vitosha. In his article for the magazine, Sendov called the computer a "fantastic object" and considered it the defining metaphor of modern times. The new society is a society of information overload, and children must be able to “continuously learn” throughout their lives in order to sift through information, synthesize it and see the connections between different areas of human activity. Learning computer languages - what Sendov called "second literacy" - was to become the backbone of the school curriculum.
Children were also attracted to a new dream through a network of computer clubs operated by DCMS. The first appeared in 1984 in the capital of Sofia, and by 1987 there were already more than 530 of them throughout the country, even in villages. They had more than 4,000 PCs, and there were also small domestically produced robots that students could program to perform various tasks, for example, moving small loads between two tables. Annual national Olympiads in computer science were held throughout the country, and Bulgarian computer clubs appeared in various countries of the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, Ethiopia and Vietnam. According to DKMS estimates, over 600,000 students and young workers attended computer clubs annually.
By 1985, the first student computing venture was already helping solve the country's economic problems. In just a few months, Avangard, a team of senior pupils and students from Sofia and Plovdiv, created sixty games and twenty educational programs for the school and the computer club. They also collaborated with government factories to create specialized data processing packages for the economy: graphic editors for design studios, electronic databases for enterprise personnel records, troubleshooting programs, and much more. The young engineer who was in charge of Avangard noted that by 1986 in many regional cities there were software enterprises,
Two years before the fall of communism, in an attempt to stave off the collapse of the economy, the party began to implement small economic reforms. Limited forms of private enterprise were allowed, and Bulgarian youth set up several of the country's first legal private companies.
This transition to market capitalism was easy for many children. As Computer for You noted, young programmers, in particular, have already experienced the freedom that the state now proclaimed. Most of the software used by large firms comes from the intelligence of young people. The state-owned Balkan Airways used Busoft's Syntez program, in which a tenth-grader was astonished by a tenth-grader who displayed flight schedules and booking systems in Bulgarian and English. Young developers automated hotel booking systems, office correspondence and salary databases, and demonstrated their inventions at the 1985 international exhibition in Plovdiv, which was dedicated to the work of “young inventors”.
At the end of the decade, when the Bulgarian economy collapsed, young Bulgarian programmers lost their job prospects and lost much of their creative freedom. In the context of this crisis, another face of the computer revolution in socialist Bulgaria was born: a virus. First mention of "computer viruses" in Computer for Youmagazine appeared in April 1988. Essentially, the magazine was teaching young programming enthusiasts what a virus is and that it can be copied, improved, and spread. Since most of the Bulgarian computers were public, that is, they were used by dozens of people in classrooms and computer clubs, it was not difficult to get a virus and infect a machine through negligence. Viruses were also suitable for the logic of reengineering and copying, on which the Bulgarian computer economy was already running. Why not play around with a digital pathogen and send it out to the world outside of Bulgaria? After all, you knew it would work just about anywhere, because your Pravetz was Apple compatible!
Since the beginning of 1989, many computers in countries as far away as the USA and Thailand have been infected with Bulgarian viruses. Some of them were more like self-indulgence. For example, the Yankee Doodle virus, which simply played the melody of the same name on your computer. The other viruses were what the first Bulgarian antivirus expert Veselin Bonchev called "technopathic". One such virus has caused more than a million dollars in damage to a company on the East Coast.
During the socialist era, young people keen on punk culture and hippies were often persecuted by the Bulgarian police. During socialism, young people with trendy hippie or punky haircuts were often persecuted by the Bulgarian police. But the software development industry allowed and even encouraged self-expression, and this was reflected in the spirit of the Bulgarian viral culture. To gain access to the BBS Virus eXchange, created by a university student in November 1988, one new virus had to be submitted to a growing collection of more than three hundred pieces. The site proclaimed itself "a place for free exchange of viruses and a place where everything is allowed!"
At the same time, the health of the IT sector is the prism through which political parties are assessed. The country regressive flat income tax, introduced in the late 2000s, is considered one of the pillars of the current IT renaissance. As journalist Daniel Vasilev said ahead of the March 2021 elections, any call for progressive taxation would be “deadly” because it would force investors, especially in the computer technology sector, to flee Bulgaria.
Government investment in this sector is discouraged by the center-right. The only thing that the state should do, in their opinion, is to abolish the rules that entrepreneurs face. The labor code also needs to be reformed, they argue, as it currently prevents the creation of a flexible market, by which they actually mean the introduction of zero employment contracts (under which the employer does not guarantee the employee daily employment and only pays the actual hours worked) and work in conditions of instability.
Of course, the democrats' belief that all of Bulgaria's problems can be solved with perfect tools is not much different from the Bulgarian Communist Party's dream that central planning with "electronic intelligence" will create communism. And it is entirely possible that a new generation, raised in the face of financial crashes, pandemics and political dead ends, may draw different ideological conclusions than those expected by modern political and technological leaders.
This is what the virus looked like
If you look closely, you can see the text Eddi lives ...
The virus has been signed
Dark Avenger was the most prolific of Bulgarian hackers to make their mark in the late 1980s and then in the 1990s. In December 1990, The New York Times reported that one of the Eastern Bloc countries had become the main vector of infection in the new information economy. The late John McAfee stated: "I would say that ten percent of the sixty calls we receive every week are related to Bulgarian viruses." According to another estimate, at least ninety of the three hundred then existing viruses for IBM devices came from this country. In 1997, Wired magazine called Bulgaria “the heart of darkness”.
How could a small country cause digital epidemics? The West has always believed that the communist countries from Eastern Europe are technologically backward states that could not enter the information age because of the “iron curtain” that impeded the free movement of people and knowledge. However, in Bulgaria, progress in the field of electronics was considered a key component of achieving the ideological and economic prospects of the state.
The authorities hoped that the computer would help realize the ideas of communism. For example, automation will streamline planning across a nationwide information network, and people will be freed from routine work. Computers were supposed to revive an economy that had lame by the 1980s.
In part, their hopes were justified: by the mid-1980s, Bulgaria supplied up to 47% of all computer equipment in the Eastern Bloc. It was the most famous manufacturer from Berlin to Vladivostok. But weak growth and low labor productivity, coupled with the slow spread of technology, did not allow this area of the economy to strengthen. Computers and CNC machines were often idle due to the lack of up-to-date software.
Bulgaria pinned serious hopes on computer education of the younger generation. It was planned that children would be taught how to create software, and as a result, the country would be able to automate everything it dreamed of in a few years - from chemical production to pension management. Since 1983, Bulgarian children aged twelve have been enrolled in the state technical training program. High school grades and universities have become technology labs. By studying BASIC, children had to become smart and truly creative individuals, able to manage complex industrial and social processes.
In reality, however, the generation of children in the 1980s became cogs in an economy that never recovered from its burden of problems. The collapse of the communist regime in 1989 led to the fact that technological skills and entrepreneurial aspirations, cultivated by the state, somehow imperceptibly switched to virus writing and the creation of the first software companies in Bulgaria.
We can say that hackers like Dark Avenger have become the most famous product of political and cultural experiment. Communism was withering away, but its children carried the bright dream of freeing the human spirit with the help of technology into the world of capitalism
Automation as a development idea
Karl Marx once joked that under communism a person would be a fisherman in the morning and an artist during the day. By the 1960s, Marx's vision was nearly realized. Thousands of engineers were trained in the country's universities, and cybernetics became the main thesis of the party's economic programs. Computers were supposed to streamline information flows, provide objective information about the economy and allow Sofia specialists to accurately predict the future. The Politburo trumpeted that "science will become a productive force."Just a generation before that, such an idea of the future of Bulgaria seemed inconceivable. In 1944, when the Red Army crossed the Danube, this small Balkan state was mainly engaged in agriculture. Throughout the 1950s, the country adopted the Soviet economic model: central planning, chimneys, industrial proletariat in the cities.
However, by the 1960s, the period of extensive growth in Bulgaria began to decline, the country was going through a debt crisis. The party turned to electronics as a good for the future. As the leader of the party, Todor Zhivkov, put it, "we could not carry out industrialization with only tomatoes and eggs." Serious government investments combined with Japanese licenses have led to the creation of the Bulgarian computer industry. By the 1970s, dozens of Bulgarian factories and institutes were producing processors, minicomputers and peripherals such as ES-1020 mainframes and IZOT hard drives. Most of these technologies have been licensed or reworked after they were acquired in the West. The most valuable product was the hard drive, which Bulgaria practically monopolized in the Eastern Bloc.
The 1980s were marked by major investments in robotics and personal computers that brought the era of automation to offices and factories. As imperfect as it is, Bulgarian automation has taken root to some extent - about 200,000 workers in the 8 millionth country worked in the electronics sector, the country's second largest industrial sector. Copies of the IBM 360/370, Winchester hard drives and an Apple II clone known as Pravetz found their way into socialist enterprises throughout the Southern world.
Bulgarian computers have flown on the Mir space station, have been used for nuclear research in India, and have helped develop the statistical offices of Mozambique. Albeit slowly and fragmentarily, but automation entered the processes of production of cars and cement plants, controlled the level of milk in collective farms and penetrated further and further into the social and state spheres.
Unfortunately, Bulgarian products sold poorly on the world capitalist market because of their sometimes useless quality. Rather than viewing economic principles (such as central planning) as a potential source of the problem, the party focused on the "subjective factor." In their opinion, it is not so much the system that is to blame as the Bulgarian worker who dodges duties, steals change and sleeps in the workplace. Only a computer and a robot could solve this problem, eliminating the human factor in an environment where personal connections and the gray market played a key role in the acquisition of scarce goods. In these conditions, the next, truly computerized generation was to grow up.
Wednesday "Machine Man"
The organization that prepared the majority of Bulgarian children for the technologies of the future was the Dimitrovsky Communist Youth Union (DKMS). In 1984, DCMS began publishing a monthly magazine for the new generation, Computer for You . The first editorial of the magazine informed readers that “we will strive to offer you knowledge, experience and creativity from the interesting world of Her Majesty ELECTRONIZATION.Her Majesty really began to take part in the lives of children. In 1979, officials commissioned twenty-seven schools in various cities across the country to conduct an experiment to teach computer use. But it was the personal computer revolution that opened the Bulgarian school for electronics. In 1983, the Sofia Secondary School of Electronics received its first fully equipped classroom of eighteen Bulgarian personal computers, and computer science became part of the school curriculum.
Within a year, there were more than 300 PCs in Bulgarian schools, and their number continued to grow. Educational software was used in foreign language, mathematics and science lessons, along with BASIC lessons. The eleventh grade curriculum was revised to include topics such as "Introduction to Cybernetics" and "Industrial Automation". The magazine Computer for You published plans of architects to create new classrooms in which students were treated almost like cyborgs: - “integration into the school environment is effective only if it ensures optimal functioning of the system“ man-machine-environment ”" - the cybernetic engineer told the magazine.
If the economy will consist of a man-machine system, then schools should also be ready for this. New teaching methods were developed under the auspices of the mathematician Blagovest Sendov, who in the early 1960s participated in the creation of the first Bulgarian computer, Vitosha. In his article for the magazine, Sendov called the computer a "fantastic object" and considered it the defining metaphor of modern times. The new society is a society of information overload, and children must be able to “continuously learn” throughout their lives in order to sift through information, synthesize it and see the connections between different areas of human activity. Learning computer languages - what Sendov called "second literacy" - was to become the backbone of the school curriculum.
Children were also attracted to a new dream through a network of computer clubs operated by DCMS. The first appeared in 1984 in the capital of Sofia, and by 1987 there were already more than 530 of them throughout the country, even in villages. They had more than 4,000 PCs, and there were also small domestically produced robots that students could program to perform various tasks, for example, moving small loads between two tables. Annual national Olympiads in computer science were held throughout the country, and Bulgarian computer clubs appeared in various countries of the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, Ethiopia and Vietnam. According to DKMS estimates, over 600,000 students and young workers attended computer clubs annually.
By 1985, the first student computing venture was already helping solve the country's economic problems. In just a few months, Avangard, a team of senior pupils and students from Sofia and Plovdiv, created sixty games and twenty educational programs for the school and the computer club. They also collaborated with government factories to create specialized data processing packages for the economy: graphic editors for design studios, electronic databases for enterprise personnel records, troubleshooting programs, and much more. The young engineer who was in charge of Avangard noted that by 1986 in many regional cities there were software enterprises,
Viral load
Ultimately, party dreams remained dreams, the USSR collapsed, and communism gradually began to disappear from geopolitical radars. Nevertheless, an intellectual revolution took place in the country: the cyborgization of Bulgarian youth was crowned with success, both on a technical and cultural level.Two years before the fall of communism, in an attempt to stave off the collapse of the economy, the party began to implement small economic reforms. Limited forms of private enterprise were allowed, and Bulgarian youth set up several of the country's first legal private companies.
This transition to market capitalism was easy for many children. As Computer for You noted, young programmers, in particular, have already experienced the freedom that the state now proclaimed. Most of the software used by large firms comes from the intelligence of young people. The state-owned Balkan Airways used Busoft's Syntez program, in which a tenth-grader was astonished by a tenth-grader who displayed flight schedules and booking systems in Bulgarian and English. Young developers automated hotel booking systems, office correspondence and salary databases, and demonstrated their inventions at the 1985 international exhibition in Plovdiv, which was dedicated to the work of “young inventors”.
At the end of the decade, when the Bulgarian economy collapsed, young Bulgarian programmers lost their job prospects and lost much of their creative freedom. In the context of this crisis, another face of the computer revolution in socialist Bulgaria was born: a virus. First mention of "computer viruses" in Computer for Youmagazine appeared in April 1988. Essentially, the magazine was teaching young programming enthusiasts what a virus is and that it can be copied, improved, and spread. Since most of the Bulgarian computers were public, that is, they were used by dozens of people in classrooms and computer clubs, it was not difficult to get a virus and infect a machine through negligence. Viruses were also suitable for the logic of reengineering and copying, on which the Bulgarian computer economy was already running. Why not play around with a digital pathogen and send it out to the world outside of Bulgaria? After all, you knew it would work just about anywhere, because your Pravetz was Apple compatible!
Since the beginning of 1989, many computers in countries as far away as the USA and Thailand have been infected with Bulgarian viruses. Some of them were more like self-indulgence. For example, the Yankee Doodle virus, which simply played the melody of the same name on your computer. The other viruses were what the first Bulgarian antivirus expert Veselin Bonchev called "technopathic". One such virus has caused more than a million dollars in damage to a company on the East Coast.
During the socialist era, young people keen on punk culture and hippies were often persecuted by the Bulgarian police. During socialism, young people with trendy hippie or punky haircuts were often persecuted by the Bulgarian police. But the software development industry allowed and even encouraged self-expression, and this was reflected in the spirit of the Bulgarian viral culture. To gain access to the BBS Virus eXchange, created by a university student in November 1988, one new virus had to be submitted to a growing collection of more than three hundred pieces. The site proclaimed itself "a place for free exchange of viruses and a place where everything is allowed!"
Long way of development
Today Bulgaria is one of the poorest economies in the European Union, but it nonetheless boasts a strong software industry. Post-1989 generations continue to flock to the sector in search of high salaries. According to Eurostat, in 2018 Bulgaria ranked third in the EU in terms of the share of information and communication technologies in gross domestic product. There was even one high-profile success story of domestic software: in 2014, the Sofia-based company Telerik, which creates tools for web development, was sold to an American company for $ 262 million. Svetozar Georgiev, one of the four founders of the company, said that he learned to program on the Pravetz-16 computer, which his father brought home in the late 1980s.At the same time, the health of the IT sector is the prism through which political parties are assessed. The country regressive flat income tax, introduced in the late 2000s, is considered one of the pillars of the current IT renaissance. As journalist Daniel Vasilev said ahead of the March 2021 elections, any call for progressive taxation would be “deadly” because it would force investors, especially in the computer technology sector, to flee Bulgaria.
Government investment in this sector is discouraged by the center-right. The only thing that the state should do, in their opinion, is to abolish the rules that entrepreneurs face. The labor code also needs to be reformed, they argue, as it currently prevents the creation of a flexible market, by which they actually mean the introduction of zero employment contracts (under which the employer does not guarantee the employee daily employment and only pays the actual hours worked) and work in conditions of instability.
Of course, the democrats' belief that all of Bulgaria's problems can be solved with perfect tools is not much different from the Bulgarian Communist Party's dream that central planning with "electronic intelligence" will create communism. And it is entirely possible that a new generation, raised in the face of financial crashes, pandemics and political dead ends, may draw different ideological conclusions than those expected by modern political and technological leaders.
