IT Enterprise would not exist without the lectures of Professors Pavlov, Grisha, Tomashevsky… libraries where I spent weeks, and problems that cannot be solved «head-on» even by modern computers…
IT Enterprise would not exist without the lectures of Professors Pavlov, Grisha, Tomashevsky… libraries where I spent weeks, and problems that cannot be solved «head-on» even by modern computers…
The story of IT-Enterprise co-founder Volodymyr Mykhaylov, who tells how a generation of Ukrainian IT engineers was formed. What follows is his direct speech.
In the early 80s, with my gold medal, I, like any smart guy in the USSR, wanted to enter the Mecca of Soviet high-tech — the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT). When I mentioned this at home, my parents fell into a trance. My father was silent for several days, and then very clearly explained to me that after that MIPT (and he had no doubt that I would enter there), without protection during the distribution, my path would lie in some kind of «box» with barbed wire around the perimeter and with several exits per year beyond this barbed wire only with KGB permits, with a description and approval of the route of movement. What can you do here — all high-tech in the USSR worked only for the military-industrial complex (military-industrial complex).
Here I fell into a trance — voluntary immersion in the «Gulag Archipelago» as an addition to high-tech did not appeal. And I decided to enter KPI. Where exactly? Of course, in the specialty of ASUV at the Faculty of Control Systems, which quickly became FIOT. The highest competition! But it did not stop me.
Then came the best years and the delight of the lectures of the brilliant galaxy of professors of the Department of Automatic Control Systems of the Institute of Electrical Engineering: Professor Pavlov, Professor Grisha, Professor Tomashevsky, Professor Bani, Associate Professors Kovaluk and Pechurin and many others. And when in the 5th year of my studies, Academician Volodymyr Ilyich Skurikhin, who was the author of the first Soviet complex automatic control system at the Lviv Electron plant, began to give us lectures on «Integrated Automatic Control Systems», I looked at him as if he were Einstein himself.
In those years, twice — in the 3rd and 4th years — I took third place at the Republican Programming Olympiad. Why third? Well, the cool guys from KHIRE (hello to the Kharkiv IT cluster) always took first place.
During the third lecture, Professor Pavlov began to look at me intently and, saying that he could see in my eyes that I understood everything, suggested that I engage in scientific activities with him, namely, mathematical optimization for production problems.
Personal meetings once a week with the head of the ACS department, Professor Oleksandr Anatoliyovych Pavlov, began. Hypothesis, elaboration, weekly tasks, meeting. When the professor had an idea, he could call the student on his home phone and discuss the idea of optimization for an hour. And when Professor Pavlov walked through Building 18 of the KPI and saw me, a loud «Volodya, hello!» could be heard and with an outstretched hand the professor quickly moved towards me, a third-year student, especially the impressionable girls in my class fainted.
The realization that most real-world production planning problems on real-scale are NP-hard (Nondeterministic Polynomial time), that is, they cannot be solved in real time on real computers, has led to the study of heuristic and approximate mathematical optimization algorithms.
There were weeks spent in the halls of the Central Scientific Library of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine to get acquainted with the latest materials on production planning (Production Scheduling, Capacity Planning) in such journals as «Operations Research», «Mathematical Programming», … 700 pages of the classic — «Theory of Schedules. Optimization Methods» by Tanaev, Gordon and Shafransky — were read «to the holes».
And how to use it in practice and program it? The three-volume book «The Art of Programming» by Donald Knuth became the desk book, which had the status of the «Bible of Algorithmization» and was bought for crazy money — with the entire increased scholarship. Now this style of research makes you smile — but there was no Internet back then, so somehow it was like that.
When I am asked where such in-depth development of production planning came from in IT Enterprise, the answer is from here!
It was here in the Laboratory of Combinatorial Optimization at the Department of Automatic Control Systems under Professor Pavlov in 1983 that I met a student, Oleg Shcherbatenko, who worked with Pavlov on linear integer programming problems. It was with him that a few years later we would start a company that would become the flagship of industrial automation in Ukraine.
Somewhere at the end of the 4th year, I realized: science and theory are very good, but you need to do something real in real production. I began to apply to my father’s company. I received an answer: «Come, but you will earn authority yourself. The fact that you are the director’s son is an aggravating circumstance.»
So in September 1985, I started working as a part-time programmer for a company that had been automating large industrial plants for over a decade. I quickly realized:
Thank you, Dad!
The main lesson: industrial software engineering is more important than pure programming. It was thanks to the cold discipline of the parent company and the deep academic base of KPI that it was possible to combine the optimization of NP-hard problems with a real modular architecture. This combination, and not one of these factors, became the unique advantage of the future IT Enterprise.
In the next series, I will tell you how Oleg Shcherbatenko and I, with nothing but intelligence, energy, and impudence, created our team in 1989 — one of many such IT teams in the late Soviet era — and how we got our first client. Spoiler: it was a client we had no right to serve.
