At 25, we looked like two guys from the TV series “The Brigade.” Only instead of guns, we had algorithms, and instead of criminal schemes, we had ADABAS and Natural…
At 25, we looked like two guys from the TV series “The Brigade.” Only instead of guns, we had algorithms, and instead of criminal schemes, we had ADABAS and Natural…
The story of IT-Enterprise co-founder Volodymyr Mykhaylov, who previously told how the generation of Ukrainian IT engineers was formed in Kyiv in the 70s and 80s , as well as about KPI, Professor Pavlov, and the first encounter with what today would be called APS/ERP . What follows is his direct speech.
It all started 38 years ago, when young graduate students Oleg Shcherbatenko and Volodymyr Mikhailov, who were good at writing programs, already had families and small children, realized that simply working as junior researchers and following the typical path of "graduate student-teacher-associate professor-professor" at the Department of Automated Control Systems of the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in the frenzy of the late 80s was "not a fountain", but one had to earn money on their own.
Where was the main money at that time? In industry. We knew how to program. So we have to write programs for those who have money! It was then that we created perhaps the first private industrial IT team in the Soviet Union.
Our first contract was a subcontract of our native department of ASU KPI with the famous Institute of Cybernetics, which had a contract for the automation of production management of the Ulyanovsk Aviation Production Association, which was setting up the serial production of AN-124 "Ruslan" aircraft. This plant was copied from the Boeing plant in Seattle. Everything was copied: not only the size and location of the production sites, but even the location of the lawns. Well, and of course, the approaches to control systems, but instead of IBM 370 mainframes, Soviet clones-copies of the EC-1065 were installed. For us, young specialists, working on such mainframes was like "playing Paganini's violin."
We were given the task of developing a task for scheduling shift-daily tasks. Initially, we did it in PL/1 (IBM's standard of the 70s-80s). During the project, the main contractor decided to change the platform - Soviet localizations of the ADABAS database management system and the Natural programming system from Software AG appeared. We jumped at the chance and promised to master the new DBMS and the new programming language in the middle of the project without changing the project's deadlines. The project was completed and handed over to the customer, but we were not allowed to implement it - we were very "green".
However, it was a super-technological experience that gave us a lot:
This is how we gained experience working with centralized DBMSs, the SQL language, and creating dialogic information processing systems. And there was “Egyptian darkness” all around — all large Kyiv enterprises had IBM 370 mainframe clones or DEC PDP-11 (Digital Equipment Corporation) clones, and batch processing of information on paper punch cards and magnetic tapes was prevalent.
The second contract appeared thanks to my family connections. My father's company, SVET, performed contracts for the automation of factories of the Ministry of Railways, and these factories began to receive monitors and dialog information processing systems as equipment. The in-house programmers, who were used to batch processing, did not understand how to use it. I promised to develop a technical preparation module for production for the Darnytsia Car Repair Plant on ADABAS/Natural in a short time. I had to work on this project for six months without days off. Here, for the first time, I went through the entire path of a classic project: an inspection of the enterprise, creation of a technical task, a technical design, a working design, handing over the project to the final customer with a "face-smashing", and after handover - the process of testing the liver for endurance (the most important and difficult stage of the project).
After the start of industrial operation, we sold this solution to the Stryi, Popasnyan, and Kanash railcar repair plants — that's how we earned our first real money, and our software actually worked at these plants for another 10 years!
Until now, in IT-Enterprise, in the modules NDI (normative and reference information) and TPV (technical preparation of production), many solutions and even the names of the main database fields are the same as in this 1989 project. Several customers have asked me why the country code in IT-Enterprise is called “RES”. It’s simple: the counterparty table was first created in 1989, and then it was the coding of the republics of the Soviet Union — “RES”public.
In 1990, the head of the department of the ASU, Professor Pavlov, introduced us to Vinnytsia industrial enterprises — now it would be called Vinnytsia Industrial Zone. Oleg Shcherbatenko and I went to the factories to talk to potential customers.
It looked interesting — two young guys with fire in their eyes, in “banana” pants, Turkish “cube” sweaters and leather jackets (it was cool then, but now I understand that we resembled the “brigade” from the cult TV series) were telling fat guys in ties something about technical training of production, production planning algorithms and development of programs on the modern ADABAS DBMS. But Oleg and I had such energy and such confidence in our abilities that they listened to us and for some reason did not ask: “And in which Gartner quadrant are you?”. For solidity, we printed business cards with the scientific degree “Candidate of Technical Sciences”, although we defended our dissertations a few years later.
At the Department of ACS at that time, Lysenko Yuriy Grigorovich was a doctoral student, who joined our efforts - he wore a suit and tie and helped us a lot in communicating with the management of the enterprises. In 1990, we signed a contract with the Vinnytsia 45th Experimental Machine-Building Plant of the Ministry of Defense of the Soviet Union for the full automation of production management on the ADABAS/Natural DBMS platform. It was a huge plant that received KAMAZ, MAZ, URAL, KRAZ chassis and manufactured tank trucks for the needs of the army. 250–300 cars per month, 15,000 parts of its own production, work in 3 shifts 7 days a week. I have not seen such a scale before or after.
I wonder now how “two guys in leather jackets” at the age of 25 with fake business cards of “candidate of technical sciences” were able to sign a contract for 120 thousand Soviet rubles with a huge factory subordinate to the Rear Service of the Soviet Army. The answer is self-confidence, competence, understanding of production needs and the most modern programming technologies at that time.
Then the most interesting part began. Don't miss the next series, in which I will tell you: why we had to completely rewrite the project 2 months before delivery and how we could have easily ended up behind bars.
