Kasparov’s Komputer
 I’m not really into chess or politics, but I had occasion to write about Gary in the ’80s when he became the proud owner of an Atari 520ST home computer.
Not so many Russians had computers at the time. There was a Western technology embargo on Russia and most micros snuck in from India. In fact they were macro micros, and the huge mouse was dubbed the rat.
The eighties were still fairly snoopy times in Russia and photocopiers were often padlocked in high security cupboards, well away from the reach of dissident pamphleteers. For some reason computers provoked less paranoia with the authorities. And anyway, Gary was only going to play games on his Atari.
The 520 was indeed a great games machine. The US military used Atari’s ‘Battle Stations’ to war game against Soviet tanks. But the 520 was first model Atari introduced for serious computing too. It was built around the same Motorola 68000 chip as the Mac and featured an interesting GEM graphics environment - which handled cyrillic fonts better than most.
So when Gary was asked to an international tournament in ‘86, he insisted that his fee included an Atari 520ST with a chess database. From this event the game Chessbase was developed on Atari, which is still around today. Gary was a chess buff and a computer buff and not alone. Russia in the 80’s wasn’t entirely the techno wasteland popularly presented.
In 1986, for example, the legendary Tetris game was written by Alexei Pajitnov, a student of applied mathematics in Moscow. It was a game that addicted millions to Nintendo, but Alex didn’t get to collect any royalties until 1997.
Coincidentally, that was also the year Kasparov first lost to a computer - an IBM - in competition.
Some consolation: Gary collected 400,000 dollars for his appearance.
Fun and interesting piece on technology!
I actually first learnt that there was something called e-mail when visiting the Soviet Union, probably sometime in the late 1980s. Instead of postal addresses, some research people handed me strangely-looking notes with what turned out to be e-mail addresses, as if I had any idea what that was at the time.
And no, it was not the hopeless telex system, if anyone is unfortunate enough to remember that.
Luckily, back home, a friend of mine working at a technology college, could help me with correspondence. This was simply so high-tech then!
As often visiting the USSR in those days, one met with exactly the people that were unique and privileged enough to know about such things as e-mail. Just imagine how many times one has felt a total fool in such company.