Preface
I was born in the USSR—a country that was at least twenty years technologically behind the West. It was a curse.
I got my first calculator when I was fifteen, and it was just a calculator, not a graphing one. I saw a computer for the first time as a college freshman, and it was not a PC but a mainframe console. I punched my FORTRAN (in all capital letters) programming labs on paper tapes—and I was lucky because my classmates couldn’t negotiate tape punch access rights with the system administrator and had to finish their lab assignments on time without an option of saving them. Last but not least, we used a pirated version of IBM OS/360 with some missing bits and pieces.
However, looking back, it was a blessing. Locked out behind ...
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