As the memes would “say,” if this picture caught your eye, it’s time for the more thorough check-ups that come with advancing age.

But why on earth is the wolf from Nu, Pogodi!, the Soviet cartoon whose title means “Well, Just You Wait!,” collecting eggs instead of chasing the hare? How did the wolf actually make it possible for Nintendo to turn from a playing-card company to electronics? And why is this story the exact opposite of another cult game of the same generation, Tetris, which came out of the USSR?

Oh, the fate of the egg-catching wolf, such a good friend to the kids of the 1980s and 1990s, turns out to be quite unexpected.

A Thousand and One Nights

If, thousands of years ago, you collected eggs in this game, do you remember what happened when you reached 1,000 points?

Let’s check, because you had to be among the nimblest nineties kids, with the skills of an octopus, not to give up at the unimaginable speed with which the hens maliciously fired out their eggs.

In fact, a piece of retro folklore still drifts around the internet: beat the game, and you get to see a never-before-suspected episode of Nu, Pogodi! that was never shown on television. Plenty of people still claim to have seen it, but… no such thing ever existed. Not because we weren’t good enough (some were, at the price of calluses on their thumbs), but because there was never any film in there. At 999 the counter goes back to zero, the eggs start rolling about a third faster, and that’s it.

The Russian Wikipedia puts it mercilessly: “No special reward was ever intended.” Just like in Tetris, as it happens. But, and this holds for both, with enough will you can always set yourself the next goal.

Admittedly, we are rather spoiled today. On a screen like this, where all the figures are “printed” in advance and can only light up and go dark, there can be no cartoon in principle. The only animation in the entire device is the clock mode, in which the wolf catches eggs by himself, without us.

The Wolf from Kyoto

The idea was born not on a collective farm but in the head of a citizen of Kyoto who watched a bored office worker on the bullet train. Later, without his knowing it, his idea would be “replicated” in a Soviet factory. And later still, in its own peculiar way, it would be returned, when Tetris left the USSR to become the most recognizable game in the world, mostly thanks to the Japanese maker Nintendo.

On the forum Our Childhood, one contributor recalls getting it in sixth or seventh grade and carrying it everywhere, until one day, “on a walk along the pier, it fell out of my pocket into the sea.” His parents had saved up for it, and he still feels guilty.

Another reader remembers that there was one kid in her apartment block with the “eggs,” and everyone sat on the stairs and took turns. A third writes that he bought it for his son in 1990, when the boy was 12, and he himself had fun with it “even more than he did.” Sound familiar?

The Alarm-Clock Game

Let’s go back to the source. The game Nu, Pogodi! first appeared in the December 1984 issue of Novye Tovary (New Goods), the bulletin of the Soviet Ministry of Trade. No model number, just Nu, Pogodi! Only later did it get its official name, Elektronika IM-02. IM stands for “igra mikroprotsessornaya,” a microprocessor game. The IM-01 was a chess computer nobody remembers.

The price was 25 rubles (later 23), at a time when salaries were 150–200 rubles. In 1985 alone, three factories, in Zelenograd, Arzamas and Oryol, turned out more than 400,000 units, and in the following years a dozen or so plants scattered across the USSR joined in. Production stopped only in the mid-1990s, when the state that had started it no longer existed. The Belarusian version of the same wolf, however, came out in 2000 and is still played today.

The game is also a clock, which is why the Nintendo series that first introduced it is called Game & Watch. The “Vremya” (Time) button shows the hour, while the wolf on the screen keeps catching eggs and now and then dropping them, just like that, for decoration. There is an alarm too: when it rings, the hare appears in the little window at the top and strikes a bell. For a whole minute, the same single note, brrr…

The time is set with the tip of a ballpoint pen pressed into two recessed buttons. There is no 24-hour mode, because in Kyoto they didn’t plan for one and in Zelenograd they didn’t dare add it: instead of AM and PM, the screen says DP and PP, “do poludnya” and “posle poludnya,” before noon and after noon.

Four hens, four chutes, four buttons. Nothing complicated, wouldn’t you say? Every egg caught is a point. Miss one, and a chick hatches from the broken egg and you get a penalty; three of those and it’s over. But if the hare is peeking out of the little window, the penalty is halved and the chick only blinks. At 200 and at 500 eggs the misses are wiped clean. “Game A” has three chutes, “Game B” four. Every hundred eggs the pace eases off for a moment, then climbs again. And on toward the thousand, where the speed is not for the faint of heart (or fingers).

Collectors today tell the production batches apart by the wolf’s boxer shorts: they come with polka dots, with flowers or with stars, and the last are the rarest.

Two Centuries of Card Games

And so from the USSR we fly off to Japan. Gunpei Yokoi was born on September 10, 1941, in Kyoto. He studied electronics and in 1965 joined Nintendo. Yes, that well-known company, which at the time was still mostly in the business of making playing cards, something it had been doing since 1889!

Not the kind Bulgarians shuffle for belote, but a variety called hanafuda, played with flowers. Yokoi was hired to maintain the machines that stamped them.

But how do you get from stamping to the wolf with the eggs? His boss, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the founder’s great-grandson, was at the time frantically looking for something else for the firm to do, because cards were no longer selling well enough. He tried a taxi business. He tried hotels rented “by the hour.” He tried instant rice. Well, none of it took off.

One day he caught the young technician playing during working hours with a folding wooden grabber arm he had invented himself. In most companies that ends with a scolding; in this case it ended with an order to have the toy in the shops by Christmas. The Ultra Hand sold 1.2 million units.

Nintendo discovered it could make toys, and Yokoi that he could invent them. Next came the Love Tester (1969: two people hold hands and a needle shows how much they love each other by measuring… electric current), a light gun with solar cells in the targets, and entire shooting galleries built in bankrupt bowling alleys.

Yokoi Rocks!

The legend, as Yokoi himself later told it, dates from the late 1970s. On a shinkansen, the bullet train, the inventor watched a man in a suit pressing the buttons of a pocket calculator. He wasn’t calculating anything, just pressing them, a forerunner of today’s screen zombies. And Yokoi wondered: if a bored grown man does that with a calculator, what would he do with something made for playing? Something small, that hides in your palm, so people don’t give you funny looks on the subway.

How the idea reached the president is also a legend that may or may not be true…, but it’s a charming one. Yamauchi’s chauffeur fell ill, and Yokoi got behind the wheel to drive him to a meeting. On the way he told him about the calculator. The meeting turned out to be with the president of Sharp, the biggest calculator maker in the world. A week later Nintendo had permission to make a game with the size and basic technical specifications of a calculator.

At the time Sharp and Casio were waging a calculator war, and liquid-crystal displays and 4-bit chips had become cheap and plentiful. Yamauchi gave the project to one of the departments, but they turned it down, saying it couldn’t be done. Yokoi and his assistant, Satoru Okada, did it themselves. Sharp also refused at first; then Yokoi left them the prototype “to play with,” and their engineers got hooked.

On April 28, 1980, “Ball” came out, the first game in the Game & Watch series: a little figure juggling balls, two buttons, two button-cell batteries, priced at 5,800 yen. Yokoi hoped for 100,000 units sold. By 1991 the series had reached 60 titles and 43.4 million units worldwide. Before “Ball,” Nintendo had debts of 7–8 billion yen; they were quickly paid off out of serious profits.

The Gorilla and the Plumber

Around the same time, at the same company, a young artist named Shigeru Miyamoto was drawing a gorilla and a plumber, and Yokoi liked them and pitched the idea to the president.

On October 9, 1981, exactly 45 years ago, Nintendo released two games with the same mechanism on the same day. In one, a wolf in a hat catches eggs rolling down four chutes from four hens. It was called “Egg,” model EG-26, from the Wide Screen series. In the other, Mickey Mouse does the same with a basket, under an official Disney license, model MC-25.

Why two? The Mickey license didn’t apply everywhere, and the eggs had to sell everywhere. The mouse sold about 1.2 million units, the wolf under 250,000. Officially, at least.

That same year Yokoi and his department took on Miyamoto’s arcade game, Donkey Kong, and had to squeeze it into a pocket. A joystick doesn’t fit in a pocket, so in 1982 the four-way cross was born, the D-pad that has sat on every controller in the world ever since and in 2008 won an Emmy for technology.

Copy-Paste, Comrade

Exactly how Game & Watch made its way to Zelenograd, “the Soviet Silicon Valley,” nobody knows. The author of the most detailed Russian history of the game suspects someone brought one back from a business trip.

The heart of Nu, Pogodi! is the KB1013VK1-2 chip, a copy of the Sharp SM-5A, the same chip that runs the original “Ball” and “Egg.” A copy to such a degree that the machine code is compatible: Nintendo’s program would run on the Soviet chip and vice versa. They changed only what could be seen. The wolf in the hat got Mickey’s basket. The rooster in the little window became the hare from Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin’s cartoon, which since 1969 the whole of Eastern Europe had been watching, with the wolf voiced by Anatoli Papanov. In the cartoon, the wolf never once held a basket.

Nobody asked about the rights. Soyuzmultfilm was state-owned, and Disney was far away. So alongside it came the Elektronika 24-01, in which Mickey Mouse catches the eggs and Minnie rings the bell. Then a whole family followed: “Tainy okeana” (Secrets of the Ocean) is Nintendo’s Octopus, “Vesyoly povar” (The Merry Cook) is Chef, “Kosmichesky most” (Space Bridge) is Fire, “Razvedchiki kosmosa” (Space Scouts) is Explorers of Space.

An Egg for an Egg

1984, the year of the wolf with the basket, was also the year in which, at a Moscow computing center, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris. On an Elektronika-60 computer. The same brand. In one and the same year, Elektronika copied the Japanese game and created the Soviet one that would conquer the world.

Five years later Yokoi made the Game Boy, and Henk Rogers, the man who held the rights to Tetris, persuaded the head of Nintendo of America to put it in the box, not Super Mario. The argument: Mario is for boys, Tetris is for everyone. Thirty-five million copies sold. The Soviet game sold the Japanese console all over the world, just as the Japanese game had sold Soviet electronics.

Claude, Catch the Egg

Finally, I ran an experiment. I asked Claude to make Nu, Pogodi! in the browser. One sentence: four chutes, a wolf, a basket, a hare in the little window, half penalties, misses wiped at 200 and 500, speeding up. It took minutes. 112 lines of code. Instead of liquid-crystal segments, the wolf, the eggs and the hens are emojis, but the rules are the same, and at a thousand points the counter goes back to zero. I hadn’t asked for that. In the code, right at that spot, the model had left a comment on its own: “as in the original: goes from 999 back to 0, only faster; no cartoon.”

It had obviously read about the legend, too. You can try it below these lines.

A Trusted Paradise

The name Nintendo, as we’ve discussed before, means something like “trusted paradise.” But paradise has a fence. Addressing shareholders in the summer of 2024, President Shuntaro Furukawa said that generative AI “can be used in creative ways, but we recognize it may also raise issues related to intellectual property,” so Nintendo would continue “to create value that is unique to Nintendo and cannot be achieved through technology alone.” Put plainly: we won’t be using it.

The company whose game was copied down to the last byte without anyone asking it now worries about being copied by a machine that doesn’t ask anyone either. History doesn’t repeat itself; there are always new brushstrokes.

And if you’d like to catch a few eggs on the wolf’s behalf, you can find the game online for around 100 euros, and it also exists as a browser extension.

Everything new is the well-forgotten old. Or… the other way round?

Have you heard of the literatron? It is… a machine that produces text on a user's instructions. It analyzes texts, writes bestsellers, composes campaign speeches, assembles comics and threatens to shrink the language of the media to 500 permitted words.

Because of it, celebrities give their opinion on something they don't understand. Conferences are organized on “Literatronics and Persuasion,” “Literatronics and Defense,” “Literatronics and Religion.” There is an author's manuscript, produced at a pace of one page every quarter of an hour, and the first worry about it is whether someone might sue the “author” for plagiarism. Meanwhile, the “author” himself has invented exactly one single word.

Nothing new, right? We all have AI now, and these plots are everyday life; only that word “literatron” sounds a little retro. Why it does becomes clear when you look at the date on the cover of a slim little book that it is no exaggeration to call prophetic.

The novel Le Littératron by the Frenchman Robert Escarpit came out in 1964 in the series Le Meilleur des mondes. The series was named after Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, a rather telling touch. It appeared in Bulgarian in 1985, translated by Georgi Kufov—the man who also translated Kazantzakis.

Escape Room

No, the author is not simply a science fiction writer who stumbled onto a lucky metaphor. Robert Escarpit (1918–2000) was born in Saint-Macaire near Bordeaux and hardly ever left his native region—if we don't count five years in Mexico after the war. A graduate of the École normale supérieure in Paris and a specialist in English literature with works on Byron and Kipling, he taught comparative literature in Bordeaux, and between 1975 and 1978 he was the university's rector.

At home he was popular as a journalist. For a full thirty years—from 1949 to 1979—Escarpit wrote a short satirical column in Le Monde, producing more than 9,000 pamphlets in that time. A whole generation of French people began their day with his irony about the news. He founded the first French university institute of journalism, and in 1972, together with Roland Barthes, he launched the French Society for Information and Communication Sciences. He is called the father of the sociology of literature.

In Le Littératron, his subtle irony spares neither the technocrats with their five-year plans, nor the press, nor the university, nor the church, nor the literary juries.

Seven Times Mérik

The hero, Mériadec Le Guern, called Mérik by his friends, is a sly fellow with a degree in “linguistic aesthetics and applied psychodemography”—in other words, a humanities graduate who knows how to adapt to his surroundings, juggles foreign terminology with ease and is completely incapable of inventing anything at all. He is not a scientist. Nor is he a writer. He is a man of words.

To advance his career, Mérik needs an idea, which he doesn't have. Just then he comes across an old brochure from a literary congress describing a machine that analyzes style with the help of punch cards. Mérik reads it in a single night, and at dawn he comes up with the name.

But does the invention really resemble large language models?

To put it mildly.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Maya Gorcheva of UNIBIT, the University of Library Studies and Information Technologies, noticed it back in 2023, months after ChatGPT appeared (read it here). She examines, one by one, the texts created by the Literatron and extracts a simple and unpleasant formula from them: “Through the machine, it is not quality that is assessed, but quantity.” And further: “Each of the projects shows how the statistically most widespread (but not the only) option, passed through the machine filter, becomes the only valid, profitable one.” The new novel produced by the Literatron is a “reconfirmation of the status quo,” and invention is “mimicry of the already familiar.” So, if you're curious now, here are 12 quotations from the novel itself.

1. With Words You Can Do Anything

“Huguette was feeding me nonsense. I was not a man of science, and I could hardly even consider myself a man of letters. My gift for imitation and my linguistic abilities fooled the uninitiated, and as long as I had even a vague notion of the subject, my deft handling of technical terminology allowed me to unsettle certain specialists who were no more specialists than I was. But I was utterly incapable of inventing anything whatsoever.

I went so far as to curse the rhetorical nature of my education. With words, I told myself, you can do anything, except real things.”

A gift for imitation. Linguistic abilities. A vague notion of the subject, but a deft handling of terminology that fools people.

Doesn't it sound like the biography of a large language model yet?

2. A Little Shakespeare, a Pinch of Marlowe

“Strange as it seemed, this paper, delivered at a literary congress, spoke almost exclusively about electronics. It described in broad outline a machine capable, after chewing on a text for a few seconds, of declaring: ‘This is Shakespeare 1603 with a pinch of Marlowe at a dose of 0.08 percent and traces of Bacon. All the same, I found a misplaced comma on the twenty-third line of page one hundred and two.’

It was too good to be true. I instantly saw all the applications such a machine would be fit for, if it were ever built.”

The date given for the paper is no accident. In January 1954 in New York, IBM and Georgetown University demonstrated the first machine translation to journalists—some sixty sentences from Russian into English, computed by an IBM 701. The promise was that within three to five years the problem would be solved for good.

Well, it took a little longer, but machine translation today is extraordinarily good.

And yet here we are, still arguing over whether building such a machine really turned out to be a good idea. All while we keep searching for its sensible applications, all while we keep being impressed by the next model of AI, and the next.

3. So Much Time Lost

“I looked at the date of the article—1954. So much time lost! How was it possible that after so many years no one was talking about this wonderful machine yet? Which group of researchers was keeping it under lock and key? Had it emigrated to some other country? Whatever had happened, the doors of history had to be opened for it. Our century was waiting for the verbal machine. Thanks to it, literature, pedagogy, information and politics would at last become exact sciences. All night I built grandiose plans around the machine. At dawn I found a name for it—literatron.”

Actually, the name isn't bad at all; to my mind it's even far more meaningful than the catchy “ChatGPT.”

Or what about “artificial intelligence”? Is it still artificial if it was created by a natural one? Is there no artificial in the natural? Is it even intelligence?

Of course, we owe the term, as readers will remember, to a group of scientists, again from the era in which the novel takes place.

But couldn't we come up with a more fitting name?

4. Evasive Answers

“In a series of interviews, Brigitte Bardot, François Mauriac, Fernand Raynaud, the Reverend Father Riquet, Louis Aragon and André Malraux expressed their favorable or unfavorable opinion of the invention. And since they understood nothing about the matter—and rightly so—it was not hard to lend their evasive answers a subtly implied favorable meaning.”

And again… just like today's large language models, wouldn't you say? The speakers are different, but the public conversation about what we have is just as evasive and “subtly implied.”

Escarpit adds two opponents—the demographer Alfred Sauvy and the biologist Jean Rostand, who condemn the machine in the name of humanity. We have no shortage of those today either, including among the very scientists who develop artificial intelligence…

5. The Name of the Rose

“The Literatron did not need to be invented. It lacked only one thing—a personality, a civil status, a trade name… Provided you use such a machine properly, you can ask it to identify a given text, to analyze it, to evaluate it and even to correct it. We can also, by reversing the order of operations, ask it to combine words, ideas and grammatical structure on its own—that is, to write, to compose literary texts. All of this was tried, tested and acknowledged as possible many years before you did me the honor of becoming my student. There was even some sort of poetry machine that produced perfectly acceptable verse…

– It was called Calliope.

– Exactly. That name is prettier than Literatron, but, I admit, less profitable.”

A machine for… verse?! Apollo from the machine?!

Until a decade ago we could look at this idea with a smirk; some may still approach it with prejudice, indignation, even denial, but that machine is already here… Whatever we call it.

6. It Looks Sensible

“The advantage of your Literatron is that it looks like something sensible. We will know why the money is being spent, or at least we will pretend to know. The Literatron is a goal, a motivation, as the psychologists say. Naturally, it is an empty undertaking, but that doesn't matter. The best hypotheses for research, the ones that open the financial floodgates, are neither the truest nor the most honest. Look at the discovery of America!”

The machines are far too expensive for what they do—because texts have to be encoded, programs written, “the memory fed.” Today we say “collect data,” “train a model,” “build a data center,” and the sums we're talking about are measured in hundreds of billions.

The Literatron “looks like something sensible.” It is a goal, a justification. We'll know why the money is being spent. Or we'll pretend to know.

7. Literatronics and Religion

“– And what topics have you planned for your colloquium?

– So far I have ‘Literatronics and Persuasion,’ ‘Literatronics and Culture,’ ‘Literatronics and Defense,’ ‘Literatronics and Decolonization.’

– Fine, add ‘Literatronics and Religion.’ I'll find you a first-rate man in that sector. An American canon. He drew up the plans for an automatic confessional. You mark your sins on a dial, drop half a dollar into the slot and get a coupon of absolution, which you exchange in the sacristy for so many candles, so many prayers, for whatever you need, really! Very ingenious! And have you thought about education? You need a ‘Literatronics and Education’ sector.”

Try the experiment: replace “Literatronics and” with “AI and” and look through the program of any conference from recent years. Persuasion, culture, defense, development, religion, education.

The automatic confessional with half a dollar in the slot… today it is so close to the truth. And “Literatronics and Defense”…? Alas, here too Monsieur Escarpit is frighteningly on track.

8. More of the Same

“The three sheets contained the same text. It began like this: That's politics for you, the more it changes, the more it stays the same. It's all cronies, swindles and the like. If they hanged a few of them, things would go better! The smartest ones, no doubt about it, are the dumbest. The little guys get into trouble, and the big ones always get away. What we need is a man with a firm hand… And it went on like that for a full twenty-five lines, down to the last sentence: And it's always the same ones who go off to die.

I raised my eyes.”

The novel's “Project Narcissus” works like this: pollsters write down what voters say in bars and markets, the Literatron extracts the most frequently repeated claims and hands them back to the same voters as the candidate's speech.

Escarpit wrote this in 1964. Half a century later we would pretend not to remember Cambridge Analytica, microtargeting, messages calculated from the profiles of the very people they reach, and we would feel betrayed by technology. But it simply did what it was designed to do—it gave us back our own words.

Yes, if we spew out the same simple, banal prompts, if we use the same base models, the results of our interactions with AI won't be pretty.

“Slop.” We still don't have a good Bulgarian word for it.

We see it everywhere. But is the problem in AI or the literatron, or in the pre-computer device?

9. In the Shadow of Stethoscopes in Flower

“The report presented four projects for novels. In first place, with a print run of 700,000 copies, was a sentimental novel in a mass-market edition, titled Virgin and Typist. Next, with an estimated print run of 500,000 copies, came a fat medical-sentimental novel. It was titled In the Shadow of Stethoscopes in Flower. Finally, the fourth project was a novel described as ‘objective-phenomenological,’ which was to consist of a series of sentences in the second person plural of the present tense, without periods or commas.”

How much words deserve to be valued and loved in times when, at first glance, they seem so cheap.

10. Tempo, Tempo, Keep Painting!

“During the week, Boomerang finished editing Virgin and Typist. The Literatron had worked around the clock at a rhythm of one page every quarter of an hour. I was assured that no writer had ever achieved such a pace of production, except perhaps Georges Simenon, but only when he stayed awake, whereas the Literatron did not sleep at all.”

I could name you Bulgarian counterparts of Simenon without much difficulty, too. Yes, the speed Escarpit describes is laughable today. But the question of speed versus quality, of human limits versus machine ones, of the obvious advantages, is becoming ever more important.

11. People, Future!

“And strangely enough, from each of these texts it retained only five words, always the same: I, me, France, people, future. To broaden the vocabulary, we lowered the threshold of frequency and semantic intensity below the one at which these words had been isolated. And then there appeared: prosperity, peace, justice, and a little later—freedom.”

“Project 500” is the only one left unfinished in the book. Its goal: to extract, from a huge mass of texts, 500 words that would be the only ones permitted in the press, on radio and on television. Orwell had published 1984 fifteen years earlier, and his Newspeak is exactly this—a language whose vocabulary shrinks until thought becomes impossible.

The difference is that in Escarpit's book nobody bans words. The frequency threshold is simply raised. Whatever falls below it doesn't exist.

And you—do you already sense the loss of certain words? A poorer vocabulary, more clichés, partly because of the arrival of AI?

12. Claude, Freud, Einstein

“They had to know me, but not know too many things about me. In the same way, if we had given too many details about the Literatron, some of its applications would certainly have provoked objections. The ideal was to make society hold, about literatronics and about me, that kind of mythical notion, that semi-religious feeling it has, for example, about Freud and psychoanalysis or Einstein and the theory of relativity.”

Good publicity is not to be underestimated. Ask people like Sam Altman or Dario Amodei.

Ten years later, Escarpit wrote a sequel to the literatron—Le Ministricule (1974), The Little Minister, with the same characters, in which he mocks politicians and businesspeople; alas, it has never been translated into Bulgarian.

Is everything new just the well-forgotten old? Or is everything old a new thing not yet invented?

Is there nothing new under the sun? Or is there nothing old?

I confess, I came up with these sentences myself; neither the literatron nor Claude gave them to me.

This piece was prepared based on an idea by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Pavlina Todorova.

And if you have an idea for the next Digital Story, I'd be glad if you shared it with me here!

You open the chat with the artificial intelligence, you try to explain what you want from it… and there it is, the result is astonishingly good! (Or maybe it isn't.)

Today we all do it. ChatGPT and its “colleagues” are changing the way we search for information online, the way we get to know the world, the way we try to handle our everyday tasks. (If that doesn't apply to you, believe me, it's time!)

Today we all chat with ChatGPT or Gemini, but… how could anyone possibly have imagined this phenomenon of ours back in the good old year of 1981?

The Missed Chance

Sometimes it is thought-provoking and fascinating to peek into the past and see how subjects that seem possible to us only today are in fact much older, and how the people before us were stirred by them and offered important points of view. There are quite a few such Digital Stories—for instance, about Dobri Zhotev's Kibernet, about an artificial intelligence poet from 1967, or about Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria's longtime communist leader, who said that “with programs and more programs we must infect the young generation.”

Is AI the great chance of our day? Will we seize it, or let it slip? Propusnatiyat shans (The Missed Chance) is one of Lyuben Dilov's lesser-known books. Here one of Bulgaria's most popular science fiction writers, also known as the author of the Fourth Law of Robotics, isn't even a writer. At least according to the plot. Instead of writing, he orders a series of stories in various genres from his new computer, which in turn creates them in his name and in his style…

Sound familiar, by any chance?

The Computerized Scheherazade

“A computerized Scheherazade tries to please a capricious creative mind by copying its own style of thinking and expression. In its indifferent attempt to be a creator, the computer spews out story after story,” reads the back cover.

“On the computers of previous generations, tasks were entered on the keyboard of the video terminal—the new computer talks. So my hands have almost nothing to do, and yet they are used to stepping in here and there, correcting the text that lingers for a while on the screen before it heads off to the printing device.

According to the claims in the brochure, it is connected directly to the Central Information Bank, to the National Library, and through them to the main scientific repositories of the world. In this way it also frees your brain from the burden of the knowledge a writer needs—the computer knows everything for you.”

It knows everything for you… Oh, there's no way to put it more precisely, even today, when this claim so often turns out to be true. For knowledge and for skills alike. And what does the writer do with his hands, freed from the need to write? He reads the instructions on how to use the smart computer…

“Again according to the brochure, the game automaton that does the actual composing supposedly held the whole of world literature in its memory unit. It served as a point of comparison and correction, so that in practice it could not repeat a single situation, that is, compose anything unoriginal. I very much doubt this, and it smells of advertising, but it doesn't trouble me, because I see things rather differently. True originality does not lie in the uniqueness of a plot or a situation—the question is what you will express through them.

There is hardly anything more banal than the love triangle in Anna Karenina, and yet to this day we revere it as one of the greatest novels in the world.”

And what about today, in times when AI writes poetry, for example, better than a huge share of the people who consider themselves poets? (The opinion isn't mine, but that of the juries of two of the most prestigious poetry competitions.)

Creativity Is Creativity

The stories themselves, “written” by the computer, are definitely interesting and worth reading, but… who is going to read content generated by an algorithm?!

Today we all do it every day. We just don't always realize it. Because we are already in a world where generated text cannot be told apart from text written by a human. What's more, few of today's popular science fiction writers peer into these colossal subjects. That is exactly why it becomes even more intriguing to see how Lyuben Dilov imagined them 45 years ago:

“In fact—I have realized it by now—what bothers me most is that I will have to talk to it. True, people today are used to talking to computers: through them they order goods from the shop to be delivered home, or book plane and theater tickets. But there they talk about simple things, while here I will probably have to put into words even the inexpressible—creativity is creativity, however advanced the technology. That must be why my hands tremble and are so agitated, as if they want to say: ‘And what are we going to do? Throughout the whole history of humankind we have taken part in the creation of every art, and now suddenly—you're free, we don't need you…’”

What will we do in times when technology reaches not for the dull, routine, repetitive work but exactly the opposite—temptingly offers that, after our memory, we entrust it with our creativity too?

What will we do in times when even children's drawings turn out to be indistinguishable from generated images?

What will we do in times when you're more likely to get it wrong than right when telling a human voice from a generated sound?

We still don't know what we'll do; we aren't even talking in order to look for the answers.

But those times are here.

A Hare Out of a Blackthorn

“Today's society, it said in its appeal to us, does not treat talent as something irrational, the way it once did, when people resigned themselves to its inexplicability and expressed this, for example, with the proverb ‘You never know which blackthorn the hare will jump out of,’ meaning talent. Now society insists on always knowing exactly which blackthorn which hare will jump out of. What's more, it strives to make a hare jump out of every blackthorn…

A footnote explained what a ‘blackthorn’ was, because with today's radically altered nature the plant is no longer found. It was a low shrub that grew in very poor soil, with sharp thorns, spines and small blue-black berries, astringent to the taste, which caused constipation when eaten.”

Well, here the science fiction writer missed the mark: the blackthorns are still around, though I do have certain doubts about how many of today's children would recognize them. And also about whether there is any particular reason for them to recognize blackthorns specifically. Forgive the digression—the hare really is more important than the bushes in this metaphor.

How and why can we be sure today that the new, different, original idea won't come from artificial intelligence more often than from our own?

And what about personalized content, in which every fan of Lyuben Dilov could have their own personal version of each of his next stories, just as he imagined it, with the help of the enormous computer that frees his hands?

At Home over a Glass of Absinthe

“‘The brochure praises you,’ I say a little more firmly, ‘for composing only original things. I'm very curious what you'll come up with if, say, everything that has been sought so far in other crime stories is already known from the very start. Let's assume the criminal is known, even his name and where he is, let's assume the victim is known too, and the motives for the crime, when and with what it was committed—in short, everything is known. Can you compose something criminal then?’

I'm aware this is pure needling. That overly mild preachiness of his a moment ago irritated me, but then again I am supposed to be testing his abilities—with banal orders I won't find out whether he really is more capable than my previous computer.

‘I cannot answer in advance until the composing automaton has received all the conditions. Please submit them in accordance with the manual,’ the computer replies, and I find it very hard to picture a pretty secretary with such owlish eyes.”

The 1980s ChatGPT has owlish eyes. Is it because it's showing off its intellect, or because it's trying to imitate wisdom? Or is it because we catch a glimpse here of the author's not-so-positive attitude toward it—the author who, even as a character in the book, “needles” it?

Tell Me a Fairy Tale

“Good and evil, I say sadly to the computer, or rather to myself, they keep fighting, keep defeating each other, keep chopping off each other's heads, and new ones keep growing back, and it seems it will go on like that for ever and ever. In fairy tales! Because in life it isn't quite like that, my dear fellow or my dear girl—what am I supposed to call you, after all? In this strange fairy tale called life, this good and this evil live together quite amicably, or to put it more philosophically: in a compromise that is sometimes reasonable and sometimes not so reasonable. And if someone set out to write a fairy tale about life, something rather different would probably come of it.”

And isn't it truly wonderful that today, even if you can't play an instrument or sing, with the help of AI there's now a way to make music? To tell a fairy tale made especially for your grandchildren? Even if building fantastical plots is a drastically weaker area for you than knowing football scores…

What kind of fairy tale will the retro algorithm with the owlish eyes write? Will the “author” be pleased? (I confess that in cases like this I get more and more confused about where to put the quotation marks.)

“I read it twice. It is a fairy tale all right, following all the rules of a fairy tale—though soaked in quite a bit of bitterness. Could they have palmed off a misanthropic computer on me? No, that's impossible—nobody would create a computer that hates people! It is merely a reasonable skeptic and by no means shuts the door on hope: there, it states clearly and definitely that always and everywhere three new brothers will be born to set out against the monsters.”

Well Done, Computer

And well done, author. I'd like to share the optimistic view that nobody would ever create a misanthropic computer. The experience of recent decades certainly gives plenty of food for thought in the opposite direction.

“‘Well done, computer,’ I repeat to him. ‘I'm sure we'll work well together. The important thing is to figure out what you do best. I'm not tired, and I hope you're even less so—let's carry on with the exercises, shall we! What tempts me most is to try genres I've never dared to touch. I see you have a special theme key, “historical plots,” and that sets me thinking. Why don't you have special keys for the others? I'd like to believe this one simply serves to connect you to the historical archives, or wherever is needed, so you can get the relevant references and dates. Otherwise it would be absurd. Because… what really sets a historical novel apart from a science fiction one, for example? Perhaps only that science fiction lies less.’”

Does it always lie less? Or could the reason be that “who controls the past controls the future”…?

“‘It's easy for you—you compose whatever takes your fancy, and you've got an excuse too: you're a machine, but does anyone ask me? You probably have no idea what completely different eyes would stare at me if I dared to show them the thing I tore up! Come on, that's enough for today! Rest and, as they say in human language, get some sense into your head! Meanwhile I'll pop over to the café to hear how my colleagues are getting on with their new computers. And no more of that sort of thing, understood, right!’ Not once did it respond, nor did it defend itself in any way. Had its designers not given it that right, or was it so full of itself that it followed the age-old rule of the wise not to argue with a fool?”

Experience Does Not Lessen Our Foolishness

Being polite is far from just an imaginary message from kindergarten that's hard to translate into our relationship with artificial intelligence. Or at least it shouldn't be, if we allow for the idea that the scenario from The Terminator or Roko's basilisk is possible…

“Experience increases our wisdom but doesn't reduce our follies. Henry Shaw (1818–1885)

‘Hmm,’ I said to the computer, which was gaping at me in fresh expectation, ‘you've really made an effort for your technician, no doubt about it! You've even given him an epigraph, and I didn't even know you could handle quotations! Where on earth did you dig up this Henry Shaw—I've never heard of him! Experience increases our wisdom but doesn't reduce our follies—fine, as long as you mean human behavior in love, fine! But if you're hinting at my experience with you so far…’”

And here are the hallucinations, something that would have been so hard to foresee in times when “artificial intelligence” was just a wishful label, devoid of content, which even scientists shied away from. Who are you, Henry Shaw?

The Dog Drags a Computer

“But I think about the time that created you. Does it really need you, or is it simply that same time about which my friend, the poet Marko Ganchev, wrote his sad insight:

Till yesterday it was “the dog drags off…,”

but now the world is changing, though.

Tomorrow it will be otherwise:

the dog will drag off computers.

I'll be frank. I've already called the complaints department, and tomorrow they'll come to take you away…”

Everything in its own time. And yet, when time outpaces even our boldest expectations, it is time to try to slow it down a little, in search of salvation and explanation.

Over Mastika with a Strugatsky Brother

“‘An idea is an essential condition for any work of art,’ the computer replies, unexpectedly long-winded.

‘Please adhere to the instructions for formulating the task.’ I burst out laughing:

‘You're right, machine! A human being really isn't a work of art; if anything, he's anti-art. By the way, something like an idea had popped up a moment ago—that's where this conversation started, isn't it. What will you do if they give you to another author, while you carry me inside you, as you claim? Look, I've filed a complaint, they'll come and replace you with another computer. Isn't that an idea? No, not yet.’

‘It's more the age-old problem of personal identity,’ I correct myself, but by association a memory of a remark bubbles up like a gas bubble from the depths of my brain. The summer before last, at a lunch, I was drinking ice-cold mastika, the Bulgarian anise spirit, with my guests from Moscow, Arkady Strugatsky and Karl Levitin. We felt cozy and cheerful in the cool, half-empty restaurant and had no wish at all to part, while my working hours were ticking away relentlessly.

I had, of course, a perfectly good excuse: none other than the world-famous science fiction writer Strugatsky was Bulgaria's guest, but I had at least to let the editorial office know so they wouldn't wait for me. I set off for the telephone, and then the undying science fiction writer in Arkady Natanovich tossed out behind my back:

‘Hey, Lyuben, just imagine that when you call the office now, the person who answers is… Lyuben Dilov!’ All three of us laughed, but while I was dialing my own number—it was a party line, it served the office too, so our secretary always picked up first—I asked myself: ‘What if I really hear my own voice on the other end?’”

Hearing My Own Voice

What if you really… hear your own voice? What if you read a text that is so good, indistinguishable from your style, from your skills? I have asked quite a few writers who have been guests on this site, and the answers are colorful, varied, unexpected. Will they keep writing?

Often they aren't particularly optimistic. So it is here, too.

“I unplugged the computer from the mains as well, so that it wouldn't take it into its head, as before, to start working on its own. I stood there as if over a coffin until its eyes lost their treacherously innocent color and turned into ordinary glass, then I left my study. And I didn't return until they had taken it away for good.”

In the novel, the ending isn't a happy one. But in the real world… I still think we have a chance at one. If we dare, and manage, not to stop peering into the future. Just as Lyuben Dilov did in The Missed Chance.

:)

In the beginning it even had a “nose”:

:-)

With the arrival of the internet, text spilled over into images and back again. And although everything in the online world changes at breakneck speed, one “pioneer” symbol has survived to this day.

The smile we all use every day, “drawn” with just two or three characters, is perhaps the most recognizable sign of the online era. Fashions, technological generations and social networks come and go, while the “smiley” stays, eternal and recognizable.

Do you know who its “father” is? Strange as it may seem, this combination of characters has a specific “inventor,” plus a “godfather” who helped it leap onto the internet. For his venture—a stylized laughing face—graphic designer Harvey Ball earned a “whopping” 45 dollars. He never claimed copyright. Instead, decades later, he set up a foundation that raises money for children in need, whose symbol is, of course, the smile.

Smile at life! It’s time for a radiant digital story.

Not in the Mood to Sing, Not in the Mood to Smile

Once upon a time, we simply wrote what we had to say. Then we found ourselves having to add extra characters, ones that aren’t on the list of letters, to explain ourselves a little further.

:)

Are we joking, are we serious? We no longer had time to hunt for nuance. Good thing Shakespeare didn’t have emoticons in his arsenal, or we would have been deprived of quite a few of his stylistic gems.

Emoticons—combinations of letters and symbols—arrived at the very dawn of the internet. First, undisputedly, came the smiling little face, then the sulky one: :(. By the end of the twentieth century we practically had a parallel alphabet of typed emotions, which became an inseparable part of online communication. Something that survives to this day. Try an experiment: chat with a friend for a long time without using a single emoticon… Almost impossible, isn’t it?

Then came the idea of additional ready-made pictures, to explain even more than our words could, and to grab attention too: emojis.

Laughter in the Hall

They, too, are based on combinations of typed characters (if you haven’t come across it, keyboard layouts for Bulgarian are an interesting subject). But they automatically turn into simple pictures that can travel universally between different apps.

You understand me, I hope.

:)

When the internet came, you had to express maximum content with minimum effort. Alas, not all of us are Shakespeare, nor are we Valeri Petrov, the Bulgarian poet celebrated for his Shakespeare translations, and besides, we were always in a hurry, rushing before the already fragile dial-up connection over the phone line cut us off from the chat. And so, almost without noticing, we started adding emoticons. They evolved quickly, growing into a long series, and yet, just as the optimistic beginnings of the global network suggested—a place where everyone had their spot—in the beginning was the smile. Back then, even Cyrillic online was a distant dream, but the little smiling face was already here to show that something was meant as a joke:

:-)

If we go even further back in time… how can a smile have a “father”? Allow me to introduce the modest and likable American Mr. Ball.

Harvey Ball was born in 1921, in times when there wasn’t even an internet. The third of six children of Ernest and Kitty Ball of Worcester, Massachusetts, Harvey turned toward art in high school, and a local craftsman who created trademarks for companies in the area taught him the basics of graphic design.

Alas, while Mr. Ball was devoted to art, the world was busy with more “important” things and swept him along. “The smile man” was drafted into World War II and saw active combat in the Pacific and Asia.

I never met him personally to ask, but according to most of the contradictory sources about his life, he remained part of the National Guard for no fewer than 27 years, deciding in the meantime to also pursue his true calling: design.

In 1959 he founded his own company, Harvey Ball Advertising, and just four years later, as part of an advertising campaign, he drew his most remarkable, simple and brilliant creation.

Don’t You Dare!

Since the story comes from the U.S., big business was bound to be involved. Right around that time, the Massachusetts state insurance company had bought a small private insurer from Ohio. The merger didn’t go smoothly, the new employees weren’t happy at all, and their bosses were looking for a way to improve the situation. Preferably a cheap one. That’s exactly why they hired the graphic designer, with the task of creating a clean, poster-style image that would lift morale in the insurance ranks.

Perhaps they could have considered higher salaries, shorter working hours… but with no other option, posters might do some good too. Whether they did, history is silent, and we don’t have a 1960s Ohio insurance man at hand to ask.

It doesn’t even matter that much. What matters more is that Mr. Ball took the task to heart. He agreed to deliver a proposal for a modest $45 (today equivalent to about 500). By his own account, it took him exactly 10 minutes to draw a bright yellow circle with a small bracket inside it for a smiling mouth. He quickly realized the work could literally turn against him: flip it upside down and the smile easily becomes a frown. So he added eyes, two quick dots. And done!

The Yellow Visitor

How our hero spent this handsome sum, history is likewise silent. But what is certain is that his work quickly became the Mona Lisa of the modern age. The comparison isn’t random. On the one hand, art historians have found non-coincidental similarities in the proportions of the smile that lead back to Leonardo’s classic. On the other, the little yellow face really did become a recognizable, globally popular symbol. When, if not in modern times, could we compare the brilliant and misunderstood work of the Renaissance genius with a commissioned advertising doodle dashed off in 10 minutes by a bored military man…

The first idea was for “smiley” to appear on a poster, but the insurers soon came up with a better one: put it on a button that would become a company emblem. The plan was to hand out 100 of these buttons to employees, but they liked them so much that production got rolling… So much so that it exceeded the number of the insurance company’s employees many times over. By 1971 at least 50 million buttons had been sold, and the image had been recognized as an “international symbol.”

These are things that not even my friend ChatGPT will understand in its search for the secrets behind human art. The yellow smile became a primal, recognizable sign, an archetype. And since Mr. Ball had “forgotten” to protect his copyright in any way, over the following decades it became an advertisement for just about anything, from restaurants to socks. And no, the author’s colleagues didn’t even need to invest their design skills in improving the proportions among the four graphic elements in total—he had obviously arranged them in the best possible way.

Ball passed away in 2001. “His” smile is easy to tell apart. It has narrow, oval eyes, the right one slightly larger than the left. A bright mouth that isn’t a perfect arc, and behind it, with her enigmatic subtext, peeks the Mona Lisa.

A Little Smile

Years later his son would say that Harvey never had any desire to patent the idea. According to Charles Ball, a lawyer by profession, “he was not a money-driven guy. He used to say, ‘Hey, I can only eat one steak at a time, drive one car at a time.’ My father never set out to make money. But he understood the power of the smiley face and was enormously proud of it. He left this world without apology and without regret, happy that this was his legacy.”

I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg’s daughters would also find arguments if their father hadn’t gotten rich from his college brainwave… but that is precisely what gives the story of the noncommercial smiley face even more meaning.

If there’s one other notorious candidate for creator of the image, it’s… Forrest Gump. In the cult film from 40 years ago, the hero gets splashed with mud, wipes his face on a yellow T-shirt, and the imprint leaves exactly that familiar image.

A brand created by accident, which everyone then uses however they please, without giving a damn about the author? Yes, undoubtedly an accurate metaphor for attitudes toward authorship in the times of both the early internet and advanced artificial intelligence. And for more of the big themes of today and yesterday.

Laughter Is the Best Medicine

But how did the yellow face turn into a string of keyboard characters? Harvey Ball created the image in the 1960s, when the internet didn’t exist, and there weren’t even influencers (how did people survive without them?). This is where another hero steps in—let’s call him “the godfather of the smile.” You probably never suspected it, but we know not only who created the “smiley,” but also who first used it online!

In the early 1980s Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, noticed that conversations on the electronic bulletin boards staff used to communicate weren’t going well. Jokes “broke,” nuances evidently got lost, and discussions imperceptibly slid into pointless tirades. So Fahlman floated a simple idea: if you want to say something funny or ironic, mark your comment with a smile made of a colon, a hyphen and a closing parenthesis. That way you’d produce something very similar to the smile Harvey Ball had created. From there, emoticons made their way into email, and then into all of online communication.

The Smile, With Its Gentle Thread

Another telling example of just how popular the smile became: in a public poll on what best represented the spirit of the 1970s, it beat disco, Sesame Street and the U.S. Bicentennial.

How big exactly is the influence of Ball’s supposedly primal sketch? If you speak English, you surely often say “Have a nice day.” Like its Bulgarian counterpart, this particular phrase has no history leading back to Shakespeare, but rather to the artist’s smile. Or does it?

Ball really wasn’t particularly angry at people who profited from his creation without paying. Except for those who created another legend: the phrase “Have a nice day” itself, which wasn’t popular in English until the last few decades. Whether its history really follows this trail is debatable, but one of the main versions is that it was born from the advertising slogan of Philadelphia businessmen who combined it with Ball’s smile. Another company laid claim to the trademark, and that infuriated its creator. “Suing over smiles? That’s disgusting,” Harvey snapped.

Funny Face

It was Mr. Ball who created World Smile Day, first celebrated in 1999 in Worcester. That one he did trademark, with the aim of encouraging other people “to do an act of kindness, help one person smile.”

“I made a circle with a smile for a mouth on yellow paper, because it was sunny and bright,” Harvey Ball said. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think that my little drawing would become a world icon.”

“One of the main problems with text communication is that it differs from the way we have talked to each other for most of the existence of human languages,” says computational linguist Tyler Schnoebelen. “Just words, somehow flat. We’re depleted, drained of the signals we can use to convey exactly what we mean.”

And that is exactly where emoticons proved so useful. Then came their grandchildren, emojis, which also have a specific “father” and come from Japan. Another telecommunications specialist, Shigetaka Kurita, decided it was time to find a more standard way to communicate. And as far as the smiley face is concerned, it was once again at the root of everything: it got its yellow background back and smiles in almost every message since. It survives across communication channels and networks, even on TikTok.

A Story in Pictures

Can we do without emoticons and emojis? Not anymore. Today, according to the specification of the most widely used character encoding, there are about 3,000 of them. The Unicode platform, which helped us standardize communication with letters in pictures, adds new ones every year to represent various key combinations. Thus U+1F920 is “face with cowboy hat” on every platform, and that is exactly the platform’s purpose.

And yet, one of the less radiant sides of emoticons and emojis is that they relieve us of tasks that language ought to handle. If something is funny, it could always be conveyed in words, and those words would be enough. On top of that comes possible confusion, especially when civilizations meet: praying hands for some easily become thanks for others, a religious symbol for others still.

In today’s apps, skin tones have been added too: a white, a black smiling face…

Life Is Beautiful

While the original stays a neutral yellow.

It’s easy to find a reason to sulk, isn’t it? And yet, however sad the strokes of everyday life may sometimes look, a smile is always there waiting. Only we as a species are capable of sensing it and expressing it—here even artificial intelligence lags behind.

“A smile knows no politics, no geography, no religion,” said Harvey Ball. “It is a global symbol that should remind us how easily we can connect with one another.”

Is that still true today?

“The father of the computer was Bulgarian.” Some claims we accept as axioms and repeat over and over, often without realizing what stands behind them. Was he really Bulgarian? What exactly did John Atanasoff, part of a brilliant generation of scientists, create, and was his contribution truly decisive? Do we have reason to be proud of him, or is this just another of the historical clichés that surround us on every side?

All the important answers are in a book recently published in Bulgarian, The Man Who Invented the Computer. Its author, Jane Smiley, is a Pulitzer Prize winner. Starting from Iowa, the place where Atanasoff made his great breakthrough, she follows the inventor’s path. She tells the story of the decades in the middle of the last century when a number of remarkable scientists, step by step, fulfilled humanity’s age-old dream of a machine that could help us with countless tasks.

With his discovery, Atanasoff opened the door to today’s digital world.

What do you know about him? Here are eight curious details from the book, gathering some of the most important highlights of this story.

1. Is God Bulgarian?

…or at least his father was, to twist the old Bulgarian saying that God is Bulgarian. Even if we set aside the fact that, in his homeland, the father certainly did not see the best side of life. Today John Atanasoff’s name is carried by an asteroid, a peak in Antarctica and a street in Krastova Vada, a neighborhood of the capital, Sofia. But what is his connection to our country? Here is what Jane Smiley tells us.

“John Vincent Atanasoff’s father, Ivan, was born in 1876, at the height of a period of growing political upheaval. His parents lived in the Bulgarian village of Boyadzhik. The revolutionary movement in Bulgaria gathered strength in the 1870s, reaching its climax in the April Uprising of 1876, the great revolt against Ottoman rule.

The uprising was crushed with mass reprisals by the Ottoman authorities. Ivan’s parents, Atanas and Yana, were forced to flee the village. Atanas carried the baby Ivan in his arms. In the skirmish that broke out, Yana lost consciousness and Atanas was shot in the back. Atanas was killed, and

the bullet that pierced the father’s chest came out and grazed the baby’s head. Against all odds, Ivan and Yana survived.

Later Yana married a local stockbreeder, who managed to provide for little Ivan’s education, while her brother made contact with American missionaries, who helped him travel to America. When the uncle briefly returned to Bulgaria in the late 1880s, young Ivan, by then thirteen, decided to go with him to America. Yana raised the money for the journey by selling a piece of land inherited from Atanas. On Ellis Island, Ivan Atanasov’s name was changed to John.”

2. Cross-Stitch

There is no doubt that the inventor John Vincent Atanasoff, named after his father, had a special feeling for his father’s homeland. He came to Bulgaria in 1970 and 1985, already a universally recognized authority, and visited his father’s native village, Boyadzhik. The first asteroid discovered by the national observatory at Rozhen was also named after Atanasoff.

The inventor… certainly turned out to be an unconventional personality. Let us begin far from the spotlight of his great success, with some of his unusual hobbies. As a boy he loved knitting and sewed his own clothes. Later he supervised the construction of his own house and built its electrical and plumbing systems himself.

“John loved to make things and to show off his skills—in sixth grade, because some of the older girls who had already finished elementary school gathered at the back of the classroom to crochet, he learned to crochet like them. He kept it up at school—no longer bothered by the teasing, even spurred on by it—proud of his work and boasting of his skill, until the teacher banned crocheting. Soon he learned to sew as well. In fact, John Vincent Atanasoff seemed to see in every new idea or object a chance to explore and master everything the world around him had to offer.”

3. One Winter Day on the Highway

Did you know that the idea for his great discovery, the one for which we have all heard his name and call him (not without reason) “the father of the computer,” came to him… in a bar?

“On that December evening in 1937, Atanasoff jumped into his new Ford, and he later recalled: ‘I was in a terrible state of mind, because it was impossible to find a solution. I was simply worn out to the utmost degree.’ But he enjoyed his new car. He relished its speed and handling. It calmed him, and he felt a kind of suspension of time. ‘When I finally calmed down, I was crossing the Mississippi River, 304 kilometers from my workplace.’ The next thought that struck him was typical of his practical, straightforward nature: ‘Now you’ll have to give up this damn nonsense.’

At that moment he saw the sign of a roadhouse. He went inside, sat down and ordered a bourbon and soda. Music drifted from the radio behind the bar. Almost as soon as the waitress brought him his drink,

the essence of the computer appeared in his mind in its logical entirety, and he began to see both its component parts and the way they could be connected.

He jotted notes on a napkin, but later he didn’t need them, because he had pictured and thought through his machine so thoroughly that he easily remembered what he had come up with. He stayed in the bar for several hours, working through each of his concepts, but concentrating above all on how the memory would work and how the electronic on-off process would calculate.”

4. Death Is a Lonely Business

Then he had the patience and the luck to turn his idea into a prototype that actually worked. His work won him the trust of Iowa State, which brought him a modest budget as well as the chance to hire an assistant. Atanasoff chose the young Clifford Berry, and over the following years the two of them built the prototype of the ABC, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer. The machine converted decimal numbers into binary and performed arithmetic operations, which it stored in its memory.

What followed was a cavalcade of new great steps before we arrived at today’s sophisticated devices. And yet, as even the book’s title suggests, one man took the most important step of all.

For many years the issue was fiercely disputed. Meanwhile, World War II had begun and ended, and Atanasoff spent a long time working on military technology. Afterward he built a successful consulting business, and the story of how he created the grandfather of today’s computers stayed in his past.

Until it resurfaced, most unexpectedly. The recognition that Atanasoff and Berry were the pioneers of the field came as the result of a sweeping commercial lawsuit. When it began, Clifford Berry had departed this world while still young. And it was precisely this that drove Atanasoff to take an active part in the search for the truth…

“To the end of her life, Berry’s wife believed that he had been murdered. Others shared her conviction. Kirwan Cox, the Canadian film producer who researched Atanasoff and Berry and conducted numerous interviews, maintains that whether or not Berry was murdered, the undeniable result of his death was its enormous impact on Atanasoff. Before Berry’s death, he had not wanted to discuss the ABC, because he was too upset by the destruction of the prototype. But he believed that Berry had been murdered and that he would not have lost his life had he not been hired to work on the machine. Berry’s death changed his attitude toward the patent litigation, and he became very energetic in the fight to resolve the patent conflict.”

5. Lawsuits and Papers

Around the time our two heroes were developing their famous prototype, they had a visit from another of the great scientists of that generation, John Mauchly. Before long he created his own version, and in the years that followed companies began developing the next steps, some of them protected by patents.

It was just such a commercial dispute that suddenly proved important and revealed the truth unequivocally. The question at its heart was mainly this: was the Atanasoff–Berry prototype working when Mauchly visited them, or not? If it was, it would have been the first computer, and Mauchly had simply copied it. Gradually things fell into place, the evidence came to light, and in 1973 the court handed down the ruling that definitively established that the ABC had performed accurate calculations and was the first prototype of what would become today’s computer.

But as the researcher Prof. Vladimir Getov notes, “the Watergate scandal broke on the same date the federal court’s ruling was published. That robbed John Atanasoff of the front-page columns of the morning papers, and with them the first minutes of well-deserved fame.”

“Over time, during the twentieth century, Atanasoff received growing recognition for inventing the computer (although he is left out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s website). In 1974 he was honored by the state of Iowa, and in 1989 Arthur Burks and Alice Rowe Burks, who had worked on the ENIAC, published his detailed biography.

In 1990 Atanasoff was invited to the White House, and George Bush presented him with the 1990 National Medal of Technology ‘for his invention of the electronic digital computer and for contributions toward the development of a technically trained U.S. work force.’ In the 1980s he was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but because his paper—a 35-page description of the ABC—and his other articles on the theoretical and technical aspects of the ABC had never been published, he did not meet the requirements. Atanasoff died on June 15, 1995.”

6. A Sin Confessed

How did this belated recognition change his life? And what kind of person was the father of the computer? As gentle and likable as his photographs might suggest? Not exactly. Apparently, from a certain point on, his Bulgarian genes began speaking up more often.

“When Judge Larson delivered his ruling, Atanasoff was exactly 70 years old. He was still extremely active on his farm in Maryland and busy with his wife, Alice, his three children and his grandchildren. Just how busy becomes clear from a letter written by Atanasoff’s mother, Iva (by then nearly a hundred), after she moved to the farm in the mid-1980s: ‘Vincent… wants me to walk every day to the gate, 780 meters away, even when it’s below freezing outside. I have a bell that rings every hour so that I’ll get up and walk around.’ Iva came to enjoy her outings in the cold, although one day, when snow was drifting, she persuaded Alice to intercede for her with her son.

As for Atanasoff himself, she wrote: ‘He spends a quarter of his time lecturing me on the enormous need to eat less, drink more and walk more. The other three quarters… he spends in his workshop. All we hear is creaking and squeaking. I asked him what he was making, and he told me: a boat. I assumed it was a small pleasure boat, but I wondered, because he has no interest in fishing. But he told me it would be as big as a house.’

“Retirement mellowed Atanasoff very little, and he remained active and challenging toward those around him. One reporter described him as ‘creative and cantankerous,’ and his daughter Joanne believed that ‘his favorite pastime was conflict’… ‘He liked to test people, and he loved drawing his friends and family into intense discussions or arguments as a way of assessing their mental abilities… he kept track of his grandchildren’s schoolwork, and when we visited he set aside time to quiz us on the material.’”

7. On the Letters

It turns out that in his final years one of the inventor’s great passions was linguistics. Coincidence or not, today it is precisely through large language models—the meeting point of technology and words—that we are seeing progress in artificial intelligence, the great topic of our day.

“Atanasoff’s true passion at the end of his life was language and alphabets. He considered the Bulgarian version of the Cyrillic alphabet—with thirty-two letters until 1945, and thirty after that—superior to the English alphabet, and when interested groups asked him to speak about the invention of the computer, he would try to steer the conversation toward the benefits of reinventing the alphabet. In 1985 he told a Bulgarian newspaper: ‘I hear them, I hear the voices and the hearts of the people who pronounce them… I want every letter, every symbol to carry more meanings, to keep the alphabet at full strength.’”

8. Dream On

“In many respects John Vincent Atanasoff was a lucky man. He lived to see recognition for his hard work and his enterprising mind. Throughout his long life he tried many things, and thanks to his energy, his organizational skills and his persistence, he achieved everything he attempted. Atanasoff would probably have said that he had managed something very rare. Namely, to do what he wanted, the way he wanted, and to discover that the way he had wanted to do it really was the best,” writes Jane Smiley.

And truly… a person is only as big as their dreams. In technological times we can dream more and more, and achieve what until recently seemed unreal. But do we?

It is worth pausing to reflect on the lesson from the story of John Atanasoff, “the father of the computer”…

Play the video

“The writer-machine? It keeps in its memory a vast store of words and has perfect command of every subtlety of grammar and style; it knows all the organs of sensation and all the ways of writing that writers have developed over the last 3,000 years. This ‘writer’ observes, memorizes phenomena, reasons, processes the data reality gives it. In the end it writes books, and we, reading them, are thrilled, but… we remain cold.”

Is Dmitry Zhukov, the author of these lines, right? There is no way to ask him; he has long been gone. Artificial intelligence is leading us toward dizzying change; it writes poetry that wins competitions. It raises enormous questions whose answers I have been chasing for four years now.

Sometimes it is worth looking at them through the dispassionate eyes of the past. This text was published in the September issue of LIK, the magazine of the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA), in… 1967! Yet, as you will see, many of its ideas sound not even like the present, but like the future. What awaits you is a strikingly topical read that is more than half a century old!

On this topic so far:

• AI made it among the best in a second poetry competition (an experiment)

• The Bulgarian Literary Banksy

• “Poetry remains a secret treasure.” “Hristian Papazov” in his first interview

• “Poetry of a New Generation: Real and Digital Writers” – The Library, Bulgarian National Television (BNT1)

So, can a machine learn to write like Pushkin? Or is it leading us into Orwell’s world?

“Can electronic machines become great poets—creators? The well-known Soviet writer, translator and journalist Dmitry Zhukov wrote a study of this dilemma, which we present in abridged form,” is how the BTA publication introduced what lay ahead. Here it is.

When people start parodying a writer, it is at the same time a recognition of his talent.

The countless jokes aimed at computing machines speak of their secure place in our world.

They say a machine once clattered out Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). There is an anecdote about how, at the Vatican, they fed the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas into an electronic machine and asked: “Does God exist?” After processing the information, the machine replied: “Now he does.”

Today electronic computing machines have become faithful helpers of man, taking on the management of production and translation from one language into another. These machines even help with literary research.

Thus one experiment with an electronic machine helped settle a dispute that had lasted for centuries. Is Homer the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey?

There are nine accounts of Homer’s life, but all of them appeared in the time of the Roman emperors. Seven Greek cities claim Homer was born within their walls: Cyme, Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Paphos, Argos, Athens. Some say he lived at the time of the Trojan War, while others insist he lived later. In the 18th century the German philologist Wolf concluded that no Homer had ever existed and that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by numerous anonymous authors. Thus arose one of the most complex scholarly problems, one that could not be solved for more than a hundred years and came to be called “the Homeric Question.”

Only recently were the endless arguments resolved with the help of an electronic computing machine. The American philologist James McDonough had the computing machine analyze all 15,693 lines of the Iliad. The machine compared the meter of the different parts of the poem. The statistical calculations and the analyses of the many examples the machine produced allowed the philologist to prove that the poem was written by one single person and that Homer is a historical figure.

Since 1964, poems by electronic machines have been appearing in print more and more often,

and in their modernism they can be compared to the poems of Eliot.

We have already read science-fiction stories and novels about electronic writers who compose marvelous poems and novels.

Perhaps the future promises us the mechanization of literature?

What can we not expect from machines that have an excellent memory and are gradually mastering all the wisdom of language?

The famous English writer George Orwell, in his grim novel 1984, showed the future of humanity as a kingdom of machines in which people are soullessly processed. In the fascist state people may read only books written by the Ministry of Propaganda…

“Mysticism” or calculation

What is creativity? Can one analyze and build a logical chain of the creative process behind even the smallest literary work, starting from the birth of the idea and ending with the choice of creative means? Why, in Babel’s words,

“can no iron pierce the human heart as chillingly as a period placed at the right moment”?

Or is there, in the creative act itself, some mystical principle that does not submit to human reason?

This problem is not new. We know the statements of many great writers who tried to analyze the mechanism of their own creativity.

Maupassant believed one should avoid vague inspiration. Pushkin described inspiration thus: “Inspiration is a disposition of the soul toward the lively reception of impressions…”

Tolstoy writes of his preliminary work on a new piece as of the reflections of a chess player who thinks as many as ten moves ahead…

According to Dostoevsky, the writer and the poet are in fact jewelers cutting a diamond…

Now scholars are striving to penetrate as deeply as possible into “the secret of creativity.” In 1962, prominent Soviet literary historians arrived at the creation of a new scholarly discipline—the psychology of creativity—which had long been neglected because it had been compromised by idealists who placed creativity on a mystical foundation.

In 1963, engineers and literary specialists, mathematicians and linguists gathered at a symposium in Leningrad and tried to find points where their interests meet.

The cyberneticists spoke once again about the possibility of building a machine-creator, while the literary figures protested furiously against it…

The human writer and the machine “writer”

During the discussion, Academician Sobolev said that “to doubt the possibility of understanding the creative process means to doubt the possibility of understanding the world.” We agree with him, and so let us suppose that “the secrets of creativity” have been uncovered and the machine-creator has been built. And

a new question immediately arises: should this be done at all?

The “creativity” of the electronic poet or writer will always spring from a different source than human creativity. Human creative work moves us deeply precisely because it reflects the person, with all his flaws and virtues.

“Understand,” Walt Whitman used to say, “that in your writings there cannot be a single trait that is not in you. If you are vulgar or wicked, it will not escape the reader. If you like to have a footman standing behind your chair at dinner, it will show in your writing too. If you are envious or stingy, if you do not believe in life after death—that will show as well. There is no way, there is no recipe, to hide even one of your flaws from your texts.”

The same can be said of a writer’s virtues.

And the writer-machine? It keeps in its memory a vast store of words and has perfect command of every subtlety of grammar and style; it knows all the organs of sensation and all the ways of writing that writers have developed over the last three thousand years.

This “writer” observes, memorizes phenomena, reasons, processes the data reality gives it. In the end it writes books, and we, reading them, are thrilled, but… we remain cold.

The book may thrill us, may excite us. But it is a peculiar kind of excitement

—it may be the joy that man has created such a talented machine. Reading the book, we keep returning to the human being.

Why are we cold? Because we immediately saw in the author of the book an excellent craftsman, a cold craftsman. Otherwise, we do allow craftsman-writers to write their works, but we are forever waiting for them to produce that one “real” work.

What we need is art. We will not settle for less. Any craft can be handled by a program, but with art things are far more complicated.

The machine-author was more precise in its observations than any human, and we praise it for that. The machine also came up with a sufficiently complex plot, and the characters in the work are rendered superbly. A sense of proportion is felt in everything, and so on.

And yet this book was written by a craftsman. Or, to be more precise, by a machine trained in the literary craft…

What is the misfortune of the writer-machine? It does not live in human society, because it does not suffer with people or rejoice with them: the machine has no personality.

When Academician Kolmogorov was asked whether automatons would write poems to express their feelings, he replied:

“Why not? For now we are not yet thinking about building such automatons. Even if such a poet-automaton has been built in France, it has nothing to do with this problem. Let us suppose a machine has been created that is capable of writing a poem equal to Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman.

Such a machine could not be simpler than Pushkin’s own brain.

It would have to create a model of Pushkin’s inner world; it would itself have to create models of the psyche of its readers and use them to test its verses.

To train an ‘automatic poet,’ one would have to model the social environment outside of which poetry could not arise…

As you can see, the task is complicated. For now, poets need not fear competition from automatons…”

In the Department of Probability Theory at Moscow University, under the leadership of Academician Kolmogorov, a group of students has for several years been developing mathematical methods for studying verse. Here meter is defined. The scholars have obtained a mathematical description of the sound image of meter…

Some scholars hope that the knowledge accumulated in this department will make it possible to model the processes of thinking and creativity in machines.

But Academician Kolmogorov believes such an attempt is almost impossible.

Verse—it is a crystal of a precious stone. The machine would have to work through a great many variants before finding a satisfactory solution.

If all the possible variants of one and the same poem were gathered together, the result would be a pile of paper three light-years wide, high and long.

Whereas a person writing a poem uses only a few variants…

Man is always ahead

The scholars went into the empty university hall, and the scientist, without saying a word, covered the blackboard with formulas for hours. Einstein did not interrupt him once. When the last proof had been written out on the board, Einstein stood up and said:

“Technology makes people’s lives as easy as possible.”

This easing must extend to art and to creativity in general, if we do not want to end up in spiritual impoverishment.

Technology helps bring nations closer together, but its international character, unfortunately, contributes to erasing the national boundaries of different cultures.

By all appearances, man will never need to build a machine-poet. But robot secretaries with phenomenal memory will be needed by people of science and literature within a few decades.

Pyotr Kapitsa expressed the opinion that power plants will soon be run by machines, and

the freed creative force and spiritual energy of people will be directed mainly toward science and art.

As for the dispute over whether the machine is smarter than man or not—the question is posed wrongly. Machines are our creations, creations of our thoughts, of logic; they are the result of our labor. Many people devote their knowledge to the machine, but it will never become man’s master, because humanity is always moving forward, and every machine already built is humanity’s yesterday…

Is every machine already built truly humanity’s yesterday?

Should poets fear automatons, and which automatons?

Maybe. Here are a few more possible answers:

• AI made it among the best in a second poetry competition (an experiment)

• The Bulgarian Literary Banksy

• “Poetry remains a secret treasure.” “Hristian Papazov” in his first interview

• “Poetry of a New Generation: Real and Digital Writers” – The Library, BNT1

This piece was prepared at the suggestion and with the special assistance of Yanitsa Hristova, editor of today’s issues of that very same LIK magazine.

Could public media be the most logical media of the future?

Surely you've heard of Alan MacMasters, the famous inventor of the toaster? While searching for the perfect alloy for light bulbs, he accidentally stumbled on a substance that browned bread to a perfect tan. Alas, after a heavy evening in the company of half a bottle of whisky, his rival Stephen Crompton stole the venture and passed it off as his own. Then he reaped all the glory. And, along the way, quite a lot of money…

The BBC aired a long report about him, The Washington Times described his incredible story, and the Daily Mirror put his name among the “50 greatest British inventors.” He is still often mentioned on World Toaster Day—February 27. Articles, anthologies and encyclopedias tell his story. A popular British cooking show even dedicated a challenge to him: contestants had to come up with a remarkable dish in honor of the toaster's inventor.

The small detail is that… there is no such person. The inventor MacMasters was “invented” by two students who decided to show how important it is today to check information, especially information about the past. How easily we hand out our trust online, and how much more critical we ought to be. The made-up Wikipedia page survived for almost a decade before the truth came out.

How easy is it today to fabricate history? The answer lies in a special list in which English-language Wikipedia itself chronicles its longest-surviving fake entries.
Grand mystifications and small jokes that took on a life of their own. They are here to remind us how easily we can be led astray online.

And how well do you know Bulgarian history? Can you tell some widely accepted claims from ones invented by artificial intelligence? Try it here until November 17. A curious challenge awaits you, and prizes too.

Once Upon a Time

This other history has been around for a long time. A history in which an entire state can appear, linking the pasts of two of the greatest civilizations, only for it to turn out in the end that a bored woman had become the Chinese Borges while writing for the Chinese edition of Wikipedia. Such stories exist all over the world, and to my mind they are a telling sign of how much more careful we need to be with the past. As a field that gives us meaning and strips us of it, that brings us together and divides us.

How do we check historical facts today? I'm sure that every day, whenever you hear something about Khan Kormisosh, an eighth-century ruler of the First Bulgarian Empire, you run to the nearest library, read sources from different decades of the 20th and 21st centuries to compare the information, gather your notes, then analyze them, summarize them…

Or you simply open your browser, and the first result that comes up is the Wikipedia page that has gathered everything important?

The common, democratic encyclopedia is undoubtedly one of the great treasures of our day. Its rules are liberal enough that anyone can add information and contribute to shared knowledge, yet strict enough that the information is expected to rest on external links, on impartial assessments… just how impartial assessments can be, I won't tell you. It's enough to open the page on the history of Macedonia in the language editions of a few neighboring, culturally close countries—Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia itself.

A Tangled History

Yes, history can hardly be unambiguous or impartial. And yet that is exactly why it becomes such convenient ground for deliberate manipulation. And again, that is exactly why it is ever more worthwhile to question every fact, every judgment that crosses our eyes. Especially in times when AI-generated content is becoming yet another very powerful threat on the wrong side of the battle for truth.

It is no accident that English-language Wikipedia maintains a detailed list of fake articles on historical subjects (garnished with an explanation of why we should never do anything of the sort). Let me stress it again: these are not simply debatable topics, matters of interpretation and “judge for yourself,” but a list of specific articles that survived for years, in which someone played a joke or built a deliberate mystification without it being caught by the thousands of readers and the experienced editors of the free encyclopedia.

The list runs to no fewer than… 71 articles that survived for more than 10 years! Not all of them are directly about history, but by a rough estimate at least three quarters are. The list of invented events and people that lasted between 5 and 10 years is so long that I couldn't count them, to say nothing of those that survived “only” a year or two. There are surely hundreds. It's important to note that the list doesn't include April Fools' pranks or honest factual mistakes. It covers only completely invented pages about people, places and events.

One more important clarification. According to Wikipedia's own data, the long survival of such fabrications is the exception. In the English edition, 89 percent of all proven hoax pages were caught within the first hour of publication, and just 1 percent survived longer than a year.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Let's once again see why this matters, with an example. An article about a made-up country survives for a year, and during that time (say) a few thousand people read it. Then all of them carry the story within them, retell it, are ready to argue about it… Then it ends up on the web, where large language models are trained on it. That's how important the benchmarks of credibility can turn out to be in the chaotic world of fluid online truth.

Or another example, not related to Wikipedia but squarely on topic. Regular readers of Digital Stories can't have forgotten the story of Chergar. The blogger wrote, as an opinion piece clearly labeled as fiction, “The Last Letter of Vasil Levski”—Levski being Bulgaria's national hero, the revolutionary hanged by the Ottomans in 1873. Only the text became hugely popular, was shared hundreds of thousands of times and liked en masse across social networks, until… it gradually began to circulate as a genuine document. Historians commented on it; it was quoted at official commemorations. Facebook groups with thousands of members even sprang up, proposing that we drop the letter rather than a ballot into the box the next time Bulgaria's seemingly monthly parliamentary elections come around…

Inventor of the Waterfall

But enough drama. Let me tell you in more detail the instructive story of the great inventor I began with. Born in 1865, Alan MacMasters died unrecognized, even though he paved the way for the modern manner in which we toast our slices of bread. Because his work was stolen.

The hoax began when the real Alan MacMasters, then an aeronautical engineering student, was warned by his professor during a lecture that “he should be careful not to use Wikipedia as a source of information, because you never know who might pose as the inventor of the toaster.”

And Alan decided… to do exactly that. He photoshopped a picture of himself, deliberately aging it to look like a 19th-century portrait. He and a fellow student sat down and, as a joke, began writing the inventor's dense biography. A genius of electrical engineering, he helped create the lighting of the Glasgow subway. Then he became famous and made his way to London, where he created the lighting of the English capital as well.

A Historic Compromise

While there, however, he met the not-unknown Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton, an inventor who founded five successful companies in his lifetime. Over a bottle of Scotch whisky, MacMasters told him his idea for saving money on light fixtures. He had found a cheaper metal for incandescent filaments. It turned out, though, that it couldn't be used for that purpose, because the filaments got too hot, but… they showed an unexpected effect! They toasted bread held near them to perfection!

Crompton (who, by the way, is a real inventor) stole the idea. MacMasters, meanwhile, managed before his death to leave one more remarkable legacy that we all use today—the electric kettle.

Once you know it's fake, the story sounds absurd. And yet it came close to celebrating its 10th anniversary as a genuine page, and in the meantime it was quoted by media around the world without anyone expressing a doubt.

What gave it away was not the absurd plot but… the photo. A 15-year-old Reddit user found it suspicious for the period it supposedly came from, and the thread gradually unraveled. Alan readily confessed, since he had created the story as a social experiment—to show how careful we need to be when checking history online. (You can see the archived version of the article here.)

Playing with Fire

You could find plots for a novel if you keep browsing the list of invented pages that Wikipedia itself provides. Take Donovan Slacks, for instance. The famous British revolutionary survived in the encyclopedia for 19 and a half years, all the way to February 2024! Only then did it emerge that he had been created not for humorous or experimental purposes like Alan, but for entirely commercial ones. He was supposed to promote a low-budget film telling his story… The film came and went, few even suspected it existed, but the page stayed put, ready to tell every visitor about the glorious Donovan.

Do you know where the Apostle Thomas died? In the town of Kalloor in India. There's no such town? Well, that didn't stop his page in the encyclopedia from surviving for 18 years.

Jack Robichaux was a 19th-century serial rapist who terrorized all of New Orleans. Most of his victims were overweight women. He was Creole, although the police initially suspected he was Black. His talent as a jazz musician was praised throughout the city until his crimes became public knowledge. The whole story was propped up by racist classifications, a single cited source and not one external link. And yet the article survived a little over a decade.

And if all this makes you think oversight is lax, nothing of the sort, as shown not only by the statistics we started with but also by the story of the jazzman rapist. Because he was the “work” of Bill Maas and Van Robichaux, students from Washington who spent long years and many attempts trying to manipulate real articles. They turned it into a kind of hobby and… failed dozens of times. In most cases their tampering was caught within minutes of appearing in the encyclopedia.

Herostratus the Second

“We were very impressed by how quickly all the edits we made, even if they seemed harmless or genuine, were reverted,” Maas recalls. Then they were banned from editing several times… So luck smiled on them when they created a brand-new page. And that's how Robichaux made his surname famous… though not in the most flattering light.

In their view, the “success” lay mostly in the book cited as a source, which really exists and tells a great deal about the history of New Orleans, but has not been digitized, so someone would have had to go and check it by hand.

The two decided to keep the joke going and changed the information about Robichaux several times, but… editors reverted their corrections. Then both of them forgot about it, and the article just sat there until a local history buff happened to dig into the subject a decade later. And Maas and Robichaux got to enjoy their dubious fame.

Not Everything Edible Can Fly

The “Bicholim conflict” was a collective hoax by several editors who agreed to approve each other's changes. In 4,500 words they described a 17th-century war between Portugal and India, so convincingly that it earned the status of “good article”—an honor granted to fewer than 1 percent of entries. A full 5 years passed before editors discovered that everything rested on citations from a single book that also didn't exist in digital form, while hundreds of links scattered across the internet pointed to the article itself.

Sometimes the lie doesn't even need to stay up for long. Shane Fitzgerald, a 22-year-old student from Dublin, decided to run a small experiment on who uses Wikipedia as their main source of information. In March 2009 the famous French composer Maurice Jarre died, and the young man seized the moment to add a made-up quote to his page. Less than an hour passed before editors removed it; he put it back several times, but that proved enough. The next day the quote appeared as genuine in media around the world, because the first thing journalists writing about the composer's death did was to gather information about him from the free encyclopedia.

“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear”—that is what Jarre (never) said.

The Highest Form of Trust

Gaius Flavius Antoninus, the supposed assassin of Julius Caesar, who was then “killed by a male prostitute hired by Mark Antony,” “existed” for 8 years. The inventor of a shower cubicle for pigeons; the fake Sheikh Yerbouti, a fierce Egyptian rival of the Americans (whose name hides an obvious English pun); the famous tap dancer Eduardo Corrochio, who lived well before the dance was invented…

The list is endless and entertaining, and we could go on for a long time. The fact is that Wikipedia's verification system is proven, successful and extraordinarily democratic. But mistakes and breaches are bound to happen.

And what about the age of AI? Of lightning-fast text generation, which coincides with the period in human history when we have no time to read slowly, carefully, to immerse ourselves? While language models have demonstrably been writing scientific papers, with all the errors that leads to…

The thing is, anyone can be fooled, and I say that from personal experience. (And clichés are another very big topic.) After I launched the experiment on whether people can tell historical facts selected by ChatGPT from ones it invented, it turned out I had missed inaccuracies in no fewer than 3 of the statements. Despite thorough checking, despite more than 10 of my acquaintances having tested them, two of them with degrees in history. But the errors were quickly fixed, and I'll say more about that soon, when it's time for the results.

No one is immune to getting history wrong, but the consequences can be unexpected.

It's still not too late to join the experiment. How well do you know Bulgarian history? Can you tell some widely accepted claims from ones invented by artificial intelligence? Try it here until November 17. A curious challenge awaits you, and prizes too.

The first Christian monastery is in Bulgaria. Plovdiv is the oldest city on Earth. Einstein bowed before Petar Danov, the Bulgarian spiritual teacher, and Khan Tervel was the savior of Europe. What's more, we have never lost a battle flag.

Which of these claims, which you can find online every day, have any historical basis? Where can we talk about differing interpretations, where is the pride fully justified, and where are we dealing with outright fiction?

History is such an important field, one that both unites and divides us. A generous field for pride and for manipulation alike.

Can you tell some widely accepted claims about Bulgarian history from ones invented by artificial intelligence? Try it here, this experiment will give some interesting results!

Meanwhile, we'll look at some of the most popular claims, the online reasons for pride you can see everywhere. No, we won't be fact-checking—in my view that idea is doomed, because history, like journalism, cannot be an exact science.

I meet the historian Alexander Moshev to talk on the basis of the sources and of logic, and to try to find a rational perspective. With no preconditions, I hand him 12 selected clichés, and he tells us more about them and how far they match the views of today's historiography.

Bulgaria is the only country that has existed under the same name for more than 1,300 years

The earliest source to mention the name “Bulgaria” directly is a statement by the presbyter Constantine of Apamea before the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 681.

It is indeed the name the state still bears today. And yet, for roughly two centuries, and then for another five, there was no state entity called “Bulgaria.”

One more thing. Whether and how the Third Bulgarian State—the one founded in 1878—has any institutional link with the first two is a rather contested, debatable question. We cannot trace any direct institutional continuity between the Principality of Bulgaria of 1878 and the state of the seventh century.

So to me the claim belongs more to the realm of national mythology and national propaganda—the idea of continuity, of an uninterrupted Bulgarian statehood, under one and the same name at that, which merely gets slightly modified on paper but is in practice the same. As we can see, if we examine it closely, that isn't quite the case.

The Varna Necropolis holds the world's first worked gold

There's no doubt about it, although the finds from Hotnitsa and Durankulak are also good “candidates” for this “title.” I even think the fact deserves far more serious promotion beyond Bulgaria's borders.

The link between the population that left behind the Varna Necropolis and today's population of the Bulgarian lands is another matter. In practice, the people who lived there most likely had no genetic connection even with the Thracians, let alone with later ethnic groups.

In a bookshop abroad I once spent a long time looking for a history book that mentioned the name “Bulgaria” at all. I kept leafing through until I came across an album in which Bulgaria was mentioned precisely in connection with the Varna Necropolis. Yes, around the world the Varna gold is associated with Bulgaria, since it was discovered on present-day Bulgarian territory.

Khan Tervel is the savior of Europe

You come across this one very often, and factually it isn't unfounded. The Bulgarians did indeed help the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) in the early eighth century during a serious siege by the Arab Caliphate. Their intervention seems to have been decisive in the failure of the siege of Constantinople and the Arabs' withdrawal.

But Khan Tervel's name is not mentioned anywhere in the sources contemporary with that era. They speak of the Bulgarians and their army. This leads some researchers to suggest that the events may have taken place in the time of the next ruler, Kormisosh.

There are also arguments that the ruler who sent the help was Tervel, since during his reign he built good relations with the emperors in Constantinople. He came to the aid of the Eastern Roman Empire more than once and received the title of “kesar”—a modified form of the ancient Roman title “caesar.” Granting it to a ruler who was not a Christian was unprecedented not only for its time but for the whole history of Byzantium.

There is another aspect, too. What does the phrase “savior of Europe” mean? Is it assumed that if the siege of Constantinople had succeeded, the Caliphate would have continued its expansion and conquered not only Southeastern Europe but the whole continent? From today's perspective, it is quite hard to judge whether events would have unfolded exactly that way.

The very term “savior” reveals an unambiguous Euro- and Christian-centrism. What are we saving Europe from? From a development that sounds undesirable from today's point of view—but still, as I read in a Greek historian, the Arab conquest of Constantinople “did not happen, for good or for ill.” An alternative scenario simply did not play out. What's more, Europe was not entirely “saved,” since a little later the Arabs entered the Iberian Peninsula and reached present-day France, where they were driven back by the Frankish ruler Charles Martel. And it was precisely in Moorish Spain that some of the highest achievements of civilization at the time are attested—street lighting, well-developed sewage systems.

That's why I consider the claim a cliché: the historical reality is in fact deeper, more complex and multilayered, and it cannot be summed up in a single sentence. The “truths” of history are rarely unambiguous or flat, and they hardly ever line up along the vectors of “good versus evil” or “us versus them.” If we strive for some basic objectivity, our view shouldn't be so one-sided.

Bulgaria is the third country to adopt Christianity

According to this claim, the first two are Armenia and the Roman Empire. But before us came Ethiopia and several states around the Black Sea, such as Georgia and the Bosporan Kingdom. The latter was Christianized in the fourth century and was sovereign, not part of the Eastern Roman Empire at the time. If we look more closely, the claim turns out to be debatable, to put it mildly.

The Bulgarian army has never lost a flag in battle

If we set aside the First and Second Bulgarian Empires, it is accepted that in the Third Bulgarian Kingdom all the flags were saved. Even when large groups of Bulgarian soldiers were taken prisoner, they took their battle flag with them, hid it, and so it never fell into enemy hands.

The fact is confirmed by the leading specialists on the subject.

The Proto-Bulgarian calendar is recognized as exceptionally precise and was declared by UNESCO the most accurate in the world

What's more, websites often mention that this happened in 1976. Apparently the specific year is supposed to add credibility to the claim. In all my attempts to verify it, I found no UNESCO document anywhere dealing with any Old Bulgarian, Proto-Bulgarian or ancient Bulgar calendar.

UNESCO has never issued such a document for the simple reason that this isn't part of the organization's “profile”: it deals with cultural, historical and natural heritage, as well as with education around the world. This certainly never happened, yet it lives on in hundreds of websites and has somehow become an accepted “truth.”

The other aspect is that whatever data we have about such a calendar is fragmentary, coming from only a handful of sources. The main one is the so-called Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans (Princes). It contains words that have not been definitively interpreted, but according to a number of specialists they are the names of years and months in a cyclical calendar, presumably related to the 12-year cyclical calendars still used in Asia to this day.

It seems to me this is not enough for a detailed reconstruction of an ancient calendar system. Such a system involves many other characteristics and specifics, too many for us to draw categorical and sweeping conclusions from a few very fleeting mentions.

The first Christian monastery in Europe was founded near the village of Zlatna Livada by Saint Athanasius himself

The legend says that Saint Athanasius took part in a council in Serdica, today's Sofia, in the fourth century, and then went to Philippopolis, today's Plovdiv. After that he passed through the lands of today's village of Zlatna Livada and founded a monastery that now bears his name.

The facts, however, are far more prosaic. The monastery in its present form was founded in the 19th century, and its buildings date mainly from the late 1970s. Near the monastery there is a so-called “squeeze-through”—a rock formation through which people crawl as part of a ritual practice, pointing to cultural layers that are ancient from an ethnological point of view. But that is hardly a conclusive argument for dating the monastery to the fourth century. The thesis needs very serious verification and possibly confirmation, including through archaeological excavations, and I am not aware of any having been carried out.

Kolyu Ficheto repaired Notre-Dame

This is a series of claims so unprovable that they can't even be refuted; they sit outside any context whatsoever.

The idea is that in the 1860s the master builder Kolyu Ficheto, the great architect of the Bulgarian National Revival, was summoned to Paris, perhaps through Midhat Pasha, and went to help save Notre-Dame from groundwater. And having handled the task brilliantly, he left the French a small drinking fountain as a memento of his stay, from which Parisians still drink water to this day.

There is no information—serious, documented information—confirming such a version. According to Kolyu Ficheto's descendants, it is simply a beautiful legend with no historical basis. Even so, you can find it on many websites presented as the plain truth.

It's wonderful to have legends, but let's clearly distinguish them from historical facts.

Einstein said: “The whole world bows before me, and I bow before the Master Danov”

This myth dates from the “pre-internet era”; it was first voiced in the 1980s and is cited today as absolute, unshakable truth. But it has been checked, and in the surviving documents and archival records on Albert Einstein there is no evidence that he ever said anything of the kind.

What's more, if he had been so impressed, he would probably have said it more than once. The words don't fit the context or style of Einstein's public statements at all. He would hardly have declared that the whole world bows before him. It isn't even clear whether Einstein knew who Danov was. The supporters of this legend will probably have to look much harder for evidence of their claims before we believe them.

Seven of the ten portraits in La Scala's hall of fame are of Bulgarians

From interviews with Bulgarians currently working at La Scala, we learn that there are no portraits in the foyer at all. There remains the possibility that the La Scala museum holds portraits of singers who have performed on the opera house's stage, but they are hardly just ten. The names mentioned in the legendary accounts—Ghiaurov, Ghiuselev, Kabaivanska, Christoff—are without question authoritative and significant enough that we have no need to add non-existent honors to their image and to the memory of them.

Plovdiv is the oldest city in Europe

It is extremely difficult either to prove such a claim irrefutably or to reject it categorically. It does seem, however, to have some basis. In a number of foreign-language online resources Plovdiv is listed as the oldest city in Europe. The city is said to be 8,000 years old. Some sources mention that Plovdiv competes with the Greek city of Argos, for which there is said to be evidence of habitation from 7,000 years ago, meaning Plovdiv is older by about 1,000 years. Personally, I would be cautious about using the label “oldest,” because in my view everything depends on what we mean by “city” and how we can prove continuous habitation of a given place over thousands of years.

Bulgaria ranks third in Europe for the number of archaeological monuments, after Italy and Greece

I don't think we have any verifiable quantitative data for this cliché.

If we take the number of UNESCO cultural and natural heritage sites as a criterion, without treating it as absolute, we see the following: according to UNESCO's website, the countries with the most historical sites are China, Italy, Germany and France. Bulgaria has ten, of which only seven are archaeological and three are natural. That is many times fewer than a number of European countries, even taking into account the size of the territory and the population.

I have heard this cliché repeated even by people with a solid education, but without any argument to back it up. There are simply no serious studies giving the total number of archaeological monuments in a given country.

What's more, archaeological research is an ongoing process, and so far no one can boast of having completed 100 percent of the archaeological study of a given territory.

Bulgaria is undoubtedly a country with an exceptionally rich archaeological heritage, but exactly what place it holds in the “European ranking” is something we can hardly determine unambiguously.

So, we've checked 12 clichés from Bulgarian history: some turned out to be myths, others entirely well founded. Now it's your turn! Can you guess which of 15 claims about Bulgarian history are accepted by scholarship and which were made up for you by artificial intelligence? Test your knowledge here—the result is sure to be interesting…

– How did you end up in history?

– Oh, I've always loved it. My mother and father both studied Russian philology, but my father also has a second degree in history. Somehow he nudged me toward it; he used to explain a lot of things to me.

I also have an interesting family history. My great-grandfather fought in the First World War, my grandfather in the Second. I remember Grandpa Rusi—that's why I'm called Boris Rusev—telling me what it was like on the Salonika Front. I was in third grade, he died in 1985, I didn't understand much, but

all these things he told me, that he had bathed in the Aegean Sea, back when it was Bulgarian, made a deep impression on me.

And later, when I was becoming a historian, I realized—he hadn't lied to me.

He told me how the French had taken his uncle prisoner, and how they in turn had captured some Senegalese. All of this fascinated me. He was born in 1899—the nineteenth century!

– I understand you very well. My great-great-grandfather, also named Georgi Karamanev, was killed in the First World War. Anyone who digs a little into the past will find things that interest them…

– Every pear has its stalk, truly. We don't come from nowhere; everyone has some past, some history.

– I find it impressive, and also encouraging, that this is becoming fashionable. I see it in literature—books like Zachary Karabashliev's Rana (The Wound) or Viktoria Beshliyska's Nishka (Thread) are being read and are moving people. I recommend them to everyone, especially if they haven't yet given the subject much thought.

What's your favorite historical period?

– I love contemporary history most of all, the twentieth century.

– Isn't it the hardest? Precisely because we can't yet write it in a way that's even somewhat balanced.

– Yes, but it's a field we can still plow. Everything else has been plowed. For Khan Asparuh and Cleopatra, the historical sources are clear; we know what happened. Whereas here more and more new documents keep coming out. Of course, the opposition you're talking about, between the different interpretations, is very strong. The subjective approach to history.

Truly good historians, though, try to speak impartially.

What I like about the twentieth century, what draws my attention to it in particular, is that this history, what happened recently, directly concerns our lives. Whereas Cleopatra's milk bath has nothing to do with our existence today.

– And yet most often we take pride in things like the oldest worked gold in the world, even though it was made by a civilization with which we have no demonstrable connection.

– In Egypt they have even older artifacts, the pyramids. I've been there and I saw how this people, who created those great works, is now sunk in poverty.

Many nations take pride in the past because they have nothing to boast about in the present.

I want to get away from that model. Yes, I'm a historian, I love history, I'm proud of my people's past, but we can't rely on that alone.

We have to look for the milestones of our own happiness and well-being.

– Alek Popov once told me that all of today's problems, our great dividing line, were born when Vazov died. Somehow we split in two and carry on by inertia to this day.

– I would put the dividing line even earlier, in the Bulgarian National Revival. In the split between Russophiles and Russophobes. For and against the prince.

1921, when Vazov died, really is a distinct boundary. With the First World War, the thing that united us died—the national ideal. After it we have no national ideal; it has been debunked, shattered. It even becomes unpopular to be a patriot, a nationalist.

– Just as now, these categories set people sharply against each other in public life. Can't we build a national ideal again?

– This world is so complex right now that we can't possibly have just one national ideal. One person's ideal is to succeed in a united Europe; another tries to find it in the past, to multiply it.

Somehow people back then seem to have been more candid, more sincere with each other. And they believed that what had happened on March 3, 1878, and on September 6, 1885, would happen again.

Those were the dates of Bulgaria's Liberation from Ottoman rule and of its Unification with Eastern Rumelia. People believed that, in some other way, the remaining Bulgarian lands would be united too. That they would be able to come together with their brothers and sisters who lived under foreign oppression.

Now, though, we're talking about unification again. Many of those Bulgarians outside Bulgaria are in fact in a united Europe. Until recently, borders were much harsher. Not even a bird could fly across. Bulgaria was isolated after the First World War; it had been on the losing side.

– Can we be impartial about the twentieth century? Because here we are divided again, and anyone will tell you: at the start of the century we were flourishing, everything was wonderful, but then 1944 came. Or the opposite—1944 came so that we could develop.

– I think that if we asked a 100-year-old German woman whether things were good in good old Adolf's day, she would say yes, they were good, because she was young. But in fact there are parameters that show how “good” it was and how bad it is now.

Yes, comparing ourselves with other European countries, today we're last in the EU. But the question is the cornerstone we're looking from. We live better than back then. The problem is that many of those who form their opinions today are frozen in the past and don't want to change.

Of course, that past had its positives, its good moments. In space exploration, say, successes in sport, but on the whole our industry wasn't nearly as competitive as people make it out to be. Our agriculture could only export within the socialist bloc.

What gives us opportunities now, in modern Europe, is competitiveness. The possibility for each of us, based on how good we are in our field, on our own personal path, to grow, with no ceilings to hold us back.

In my view, if you're honest now and work hard, of course there will be obstacles, but your chance of succeeding is greater than before. The very fact that you had no right to private enterprise limited the possibilities a great deal.

– Is that really so? I think there are barriers today too, they're just different. More insidious, more rooted in a capitalism that isn't suited to today's technological age. And all of this has led to an unprecedented brain drain from our country.

– It's a process seen in many other countries before us. A huge number of Spaniards and Portuguese emigrated to France in the 1960s, and then came back when living standards rose. On the other hand, we can't restrict people. It's better to create conditions so that they return, rather than lock them behind a fence so they can't get through.

– Of course. The question is how to create better conditions.

– This transition lasted too long. If we had stepped onto the path we're on now more quickly, the gap between us and the Western countries wouldn't be so wide.

Polish emigrants have long been returning to Poland, the Czechs too, because it isn't worth living in a country where you have to pay rent. But we're on the right track. Last year more people came back than left.

– My technology site now has more than 400 articles, and the two most read are about history. Why are we so absorbed in that direction?

– Because history is being politicized.

This very history of the twentieth century.

We're constantly trying to find some roots of our present in the recent past.

And to understand, right there, why we are as developed or as underdeveloped as we are.

History is very often used as an argument in disputes. And instead of bringing us closer, it divides us. We have to admit that. Weak historians use history as a tomahawk to hack down their opponent. I remember the first time I went to Serbia. They started asking me questions—whose is Krali Marko, the legendary hero claimed by Bulgarians, Serbs and Macedonians alike, what about Macedonia… That's not the positive side.

We make the same mistake. When some boy or girl from North Macedonia comes along, we immediately start with “You're Bulgarian, admit it!” That's no way to do it.

We have to find a common language. They will decide what they are. Yes, we know what the history is, and there's no dispute there.

But if a person feels they are something, nobody can tell them otherwise. We mustn't force people. They themselves will become what we'd like them to be if we're more well-meaning. If we approach them by setting a good example and not looking for arguments for supremacy, for grandeur in the past.

Because anyone can bring up the Battle of Achelous in 917 in an argument with Greeks. And the Greek will say, “We crushed you in Samuil's time.” The Serbs crushed us at Kyustendil… That's no way to go on.

Some time ago I was a teacher in Targovishte, and there were quite a few Turkish and Roma kids. I had a very good student, a Turkish girl, who told me, “I really like Levski and Botev! But when I have to talk about them, I feel awkward. Because often in the hallways, half joking, half serious, the other kids say to me, ‘Why did you people hang Levski?’ I haven't hanged anyone. I have nothing to do with those things in history.”

In that sense we have to be very careful. Because by pinning collective responsibility on a people, we in turn risk being condemned for something else.

– That's true. The story of the Bulgarian Jews… Or Germany's history in the twentieth century as a whole. I don't know if you've come across the story of Chergar—a blogger who wrote “Levski's Last Letter” as an opinion piece, as a provocation. But it gradually began to spread as undisputed truth. At one of our recent countless elections there was even a call to vote with it.

We love talking about history, but… online we seem far too gullible.

– That's the fight against fake news, against lying websites. Very few of them do it for fame or notoriety; most of them do it deliberately, with the intent to do harm, to inject false information into society.

First of all, people don't want to hear things they don't like.

They don't want to look closely at the four question marks in “People????”.

That's Vasil Levski's famous note from his notebook, full of bitter doubt about his own nation. Meanwhile people want to see us as a projection of Levski, not of Bai Ganyo, the archetypal Bulgarian boor from Aleko Konstantinov's 1895 satire. Of course, there are many people who have taken up Levski's legacy, but Bai Ganyo-ism is everywhere. This Bai Ganyo-ism, in which you're a great Bulgarian if you beat your chest and shout “Bulgar, Bulgar!”, is somehow triumphant.

And that's sad. Because it's easier to fling yourself into the pool than to risk your life beyond the little vials of rose oil.

To have a mission. It's hard to have a mission. It's much easier to be a consumer of other people's goodies.

Somebody once said that the Bulgarian loves freedom, but only if it's served to him on a platter. Somebody else should die for it, somebody else should sacrifice himself, somebody else should take the risk.

– But how do we become more serious, better prepared on historical topics? How do we check our sources? You come across some fact about what Khan Krum did… how do you find out whether it has a historical basis?

– By reading different sources, at least two or three. Speaking of Khan Krum, for example, there's a myth that he cut off hands. It's not true. That's been proven, and yet it's taught from early childhood, from first grade. Very edifying. He cut off hands. But everywhere, in the Suda, the Byzantine encyclopedia, it says he broke the hand. Because if your hand is cut off… you could also lose a hand in battle. How would we then tell the liar, the thief, from the war hero?

Yes, Khan Krum is a great ruler not because he cut off hands, but because he united the people through common laws, which served as a guide for the future of the First Bulgarian State in its pagan period. He laid the foundations.

Things have to be checked. We have to look for more sources. We mustn't trust everything. These are supposedly harmless myths; we repeat them like mantras. But they lead to more serious problems.

– That's exactly the next topic on this site. We'll talk with a colleague of yours about some of the popular myths. But is it really so hard to tell the truth apart? I'm running an experiment like that right now. And I think the way forward is still to turn to authorities, to specialists. But history is a science you can easily talk about convincingly without being one. With chemistry, for example, you can't…

But can there be objective and impartial history at all, or is it doomed to be a subjective science?

– The further back in time we go, the more objective and impartial it becomes.

In ancient Egypt there's no left and right—so that someone who supports one side could say which pharaoh he likes better.

The closer it is to us in time, the more we tailor the past to ourselves, sewing it on like a pocket to our historical or political coat.

And we think that if it's good, we'll sew it on so that the patches don't show. If it's bad, we'll attach it like some foreign element. We'll say it's small and insignificant, we'll unpick it, we'll throw it away. Or we'll make excuses that the cut wasn't good.

In that sense, yes, authorities are very important. The facts are important too. There's no “I want it, I don't want it,” “I like it, I don't like it.”

Things happen the way they happen. Nothing personal. It's just history. Whether we like it or not.

– And yet, very often it's written by the victors. For the First Bulgarian Empire, for example, we have to rely on our greatest enemies, who can't possibly be impartial.

– Yes, they definitely write in an appalling way. I've read quite a few Greek sources: when we defeat them, it happened by chance. And when they win a battle: “Behold, God granted Basil II the Bulgar Slayer the opportunity…”

We have to sift, to think critically about the sources too. Unfortunately, we didn't write much ourselves, and we learn thanks to what they wrote.

They write about their own history, and we learn what was happening in Bulgaria only when the two states were at war.

We know much less about the periods when we were at peace. And still, in that rivalry, Bulgaria definitely has something to be proud of. This is the Eastern Roman Empire, and we're in its backyard. We build a state on its territory.

– We even save them—another historical cliché that will come up in the next digital story.

– And then we spend 170 years under their rule. Another interesting thing in history. And they too were under foreign rule.

Only the Japanese have never been conquered. The Mongols take China and Russia, the Normans the English. Everyone has been conquered at some point. In that sense, though, everyone has also brought in something from the foreign experience—both the good and the bad.

– We come to an unpleasant question, to which I expect an unpleasant but honest answer, the kind Georgi Bardarov gave me. Is war really a natural phenomenon for human beings? History supposedly ended, yet wars keep happening, so close to Europe…

– Yes, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history… Well, it won't come anytime soon.

I have a different theory. That the end of history will come when women in Saudi Arabia go out in short skirts.

Then there will be absolute peace. Everyone will be able to dress as they please; there will be no religious, political or historical barrier holding people back. To pray or not to pray, to go about however they like.

– In Iran they wore short skirts for quite a while. In Afghanistan too, supposedly, but things quickly go back. It's still not universal…

– Yes, it has to become universal, to become final. For now it isn't, because many governments,

many policies need a rival, an opponent, an enemy, otherwise they don't hold up as concepts.

They have to justify themselves with the other side. “I wouldn't be demanding such sacrifices from you if it weren't for them! In the name of God we must…” But most people aren't that intelligent. They can't see that they're being manipulated.

– On the other hand, we're all naturally manipulable and don't even realize to what extent. What do you think the history textbooks will say in a hundred years about Bulgaria in its current period?

– I think it will be a deeply contradictory period, but that despite the mistakes made at the start of the transition, we finally found, historically, the right path of development and bet on it.

The other thing wasn't natural, not having a market economy. We were cut off from normal development for 45 years. I don't mean anything negative by that; I'm saying what I think.

I don't like revolutions. I love reading about them, telling about them, but I'm a bit like the English. After the English Revolution of 1649 there were no more revolutions, only evolution. No upheavals like in France, rivers of blood, Delacroix. There are two paths, and in my view they chose the better one.

– I'd like to share your optimism that we're on the right track, but frankly I wouldn't reach that conclusion. And maybe we can't do without the other path? Maybe it's the one that moves us forward? If we stick with those two nations—without the French Revolution, wouldn't we be missing so many of the achievements of the modern world?

– That's true. In the long run it matters, but…

– …just don't be there.

– Exactly. But here we didn't even have a revolution, just being driven into a dead end and a very slow way out of it.

– Is it worth remembering facts today that seem pointless to us? Algorithms already remember for us, and that strikes me as an underestimated risk. For you it was useful, sure, when you go on quiz shows and show yourself as knowledgeable, but… Why do we need to know, say, the capital of Madagascar?

– By the way, I was in Madagascar this March… Yes, we can look the capital up. As a teacher, I rely less and less on facts. Dates matter, but many kids tell me they don't like history because it's just memorizing dates.

Is that so important? No, what's important is knowing the processes.

The science of processes is called history; the science of dates is chronology. Whether we're liberated on March 3 or April 5 isn't that important. What's important is that the processes are such that they will lead to our liberation.

Of course, we have to remember March 3. But fixating on dates for their own sake leads to problems. The human brain has a certain capacity for memory. What's important is to remember the process of how things happened. It was hard for me as a student too; now I know about 5,000 dates by heart… There was a Chinese man who knew 50,000 phone numbers in Shanghai. So what?

– Once upon a time we all knew quite a few phone numbers; now we don't bother, and I think this is changing us as a species, as a civilization, and not for the better.

– I had a student—we were at the seaside, and after the disco he had slipped away with a classmate behind the teachers' backs. They went for a night swim. It was 4:30 a.m., nothing had happened to them. But they undressed, went into the sea… and their clothes were stolen, along with their phones and money. And there they were, stark naked! He couldn't even go out and ask someone to call me; he didn't remember the number. No one to bring them clothes… They made it back to the hotel in great shame, having torn two beach umbrellas, waddling like penguins.

– You never know when some seemingly useless piece of information will turn out to be important. And that's also how art is born. I think creativity is the layering of knowledge in our heads…

– Yes, you have to know the facts, but when they weigh you down, that's not okay, in my view.

– Besides, they can be quite relative. Like the famous year 681.

– It's been accepted for a hundred years. Before that, Vasil Zlatarski wrote 679. But what if it was 680? Or was that when the Battle of Ongal took place, and the recognition came later… What does it matter? What matters is that from the end of the seventh century there's a new state.

– You teach young people… What's most important for awakening their interest in history?

– I often ask them about their personal stories. So that they understand that history isn't something that happened long ago, to some imaginary nations and peoples who have nothing to do with us. To tell me their own personal story, to immerse me in the world of their grandmothers and grandfathers.

I very often have them do an interview with a historical figure. It's outside history proper, but it's a really good method. They come alive—they'll interview Columbus, Tsar Simeon. I have such funny interviews… You can't imagine!

To do an “interview” with that figure, you have to look for sources. Lots of sources, so that you can be objective and your interview can stand out.

I also go on with my own personal story. My great-grandmother was from Stara Zagora. She was born in 1901, and she told me about her grandmother, born in 1875, and how during the Russo-Turkish War she carried her mother on her back all the way from Stara Zagora to cross the Shipka Pass; the little girl was only two. And thank goodness for the opalchentsi, the Bulgarian volunteers fighting alongside the Russians—they made it to Gabrovo. Her grandmother's legs were crooked from running, a woman of 25 or 30.

“If they had been caught, they would have been slaughtered, and there would be no Mr. Rusev, children, to teach you this lesson.”

– That's exactly what history is—a part of each of us. My grandmother, too, escaped the Siege of Leningrad as a child on the last train; otherwise there would be no Karamanev and no Digital Stories… The past is very important, and it's worth all of us peering into it more, wisely and calmly. Thank you for this conversation!

ChatGPT was unveiled in November 2022. But when was artificial intelligence… “born”? The idea that computers can resemble humans and solve a wide range of problems. How many candles will it have to blow out on its next birthday—5, 10, 20?

A full 68! Although by 1956 the forerunners of the field, Alan Turing and John von Neumann, had long since made their fundamental discoveries, it is ’56 that is now considered the starting year in the history of the field. For 8 weeks, the greatest scientists in this future field came and went at an American college. The people who would later lay the foundations of the field gathered to talk about the main challenges they faced…

“By 1978 at the latest, we will have a machine with general artificial intelligence comparable to average human intelligence,” Marvin Minsky, one of the main scientists who organized the Dartmouth meeting, would say a little later.

McCarthyism

We had to wait “a little” longer. The field went through waves of enthusiasm and periods of calm in which even mentioning “artificial intelligence” in scientific circles was met with outright anathema.

Is there anything we can learn from the forerunners about how hard the task really is? Their ideas still matter today and should not be forgotten. Because history more or less moves in a spiral, and every mistake we have understood may turn out to be a lifesaver in the future…

No, this McCarthy is not the famous hunter of Soviet spies during the Cold War. In the early 1950s, John McCarthy was a young scientist in mathematics and computer science who turned precisely to the fledgling field trying to answer the question: can machines think like people? At the time, the field had no name; several terms were competing for the role. Teams scattered across the United States and the world were working on these ideas, rarely exchanging views, heading in different directions, running into the very same difficulties…

That is why John came up with the idea of organizing a meeting in the summer of 1956, where scientists, freed from their teaching duties, could calmly discuss their progress, talk things over and work out how to move forward in the new, nameless field.

Unity Makes AI

At the time, McCarthy was working as an assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College—the smallest of the Ivy League, an elite school located in the town of Hanover, New Hampshire. To this day it seems to remain in the ivy-covered shadow of its bigger relatives; you have hardly heard of it, except precisely because of the meeting McCarthy chose to organize here, which became the founding event in the history of artificial intelligence.

“At the time I believed that if only we could get everyone who was interested in the subject together to devote time to it and avoid distractions, we could make real progress,” McCarthy recalled.

The idea came to him a year earlier, and he shared it first with his friend Marvin Minsky, also a young scientist in neurology and computer science, but at Bell Labs. The two won the support of their scientific mentors—Claude Shannon and Nathaniel Rochester.

But… who would invest in bringing together scientists to chat about a field that, at the time, sounded like a childish fantasy?

Who Will Give Us Money?

Still, they decided to try. McCarthy and Minsky wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation, which at the time set aside funds for scientific events it considered to be of public importance.

“We propose that a 2-month, 10-man study of artificial intelligence be carried out during the summer of 1956 at Dartmouth College. The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it,” McCarthy and Minsky wrote in their proposal. And further:

“An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves. We think that a significant advance can be made in one or more of these problems if a carefully selected group of scientists work on it together for a summer.”

Brains Like the Sea, Heads Like Buoys

The budget included fees totaling $1,200 for the scientists who took part and $700 for the students. Another $800 was for the guests’ lodging. Even though money had a very different value in those days, it sounds rather tempting: for a total budget of $13,500, the foundation would cover an event promising to turn the primitive grandfathers of computers that existed at the time into machines that think like people.

The two enthusiasts did not cherish any great hopes of being approved, and it did not seem likely even to them that anyone would believe in their ambitious idea… and yet they got the green light. Yes, they received only half of the funds they had asked for. Then it turned out that almost none of the participants had the two months planned for joint work, but… in the end the goal would be achieved in the best possible way.

At the time there was no generally accepted term for “thinking machines”—people used terms such as “cybernetics,” “automata theory” and “complex information processing.” Each of these definitions, however, pointed to a more specific line of inquiry. That is why, in the proposal to the foundation, McCarthy decided to use the new term “artificial intelligence,” abstract enough to include everything the organizers of the Dartmouth workshop wanted to achieve.

Who’s Talking?

Nothing went as expected. Even if we compare the participants’ notes, it is not certain exactly when the meeting began and ended. Somewhere between June 18 and August 17, some scientists came for a few days, others for weeks, but no one stayed for the full 8 weeks planned.

McCarthy was deeply disappointed. He would later describe this period as an era of learning in the spirit of the child’s “Look, Ma, no hands!” He remembered that “it seemed as though there was no way we could organize ourselves and meet regularly. That was very disappointing to me. There was no real exchange of ideas.”

What’s more, no concrete discoveries came out of it, nor any document other than the one with which the organizers initiated the event itself. And yet… in the years that followed, the people who showed up at Dartmouth on one day or another would take fundamental steps in the field and would note again and again that it had all started right there.

Time to Break Up the Party

It was at this time that the two main directions in the development of artificial intelligence took shape—“strong” and “weak.” Beautifully explained by Prof. Preslav Nakov here, according to the first, the goal is to create systems capable of solving tasks that require human intelligence, while for the second the idea is to solve the task exactly the way a human would solve it.

Besides the organizers and their mentors, (perhaps) 47 people took part in the event. Among them are the names of future Nobel laureates Herbert Simon and John Nash, whose story is familiar from the film A Beautiful Mind.

Apparently, sometimes it is enough simply to bring the right people together in the right place and leave them in peace. Because in the exchange of ideas, in conversation, real breakthroughs are sometimes born. And one more thing: sometimes more time has to pass before it becomes clear what actually happened.

Think about what times we are talking about. Even a decade ago, talking about “artificial intelligence” was a distant utopia—let alone the late 1950s, when personal computers were still an imaginary idea and Bill Gates could barely walk upright under the table…

The New Oppenheimer

Optimism and faith in the future are often what lead us forward. But they are also what lead us astray. Because, caught up in the enthusiasm of the meeting and the spirit of the times, the Dartmouth scientists would begin to herald unrealistic expectations that, one way or another, would bring about the end of this first wave of interest in the idea of a computer resembling the brain.

Take, for example, Minsky’s words we began with, promising an algorithm with human intelligence before the end of the 1970s. And he was by no means a random scientist—he would later receive the Turing Award, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel.

“When intelligent machines are constructed, we should not be surprised to find them as confused and as stubborn as men in their convictions about mind-matter, consciousness, free will, and the like,” Minsky would later write. He was also a scientific consultant on the famous film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Another interesting parallel. Minsky graduated a little later from the same school as Oppenheimer, the creator of the atomic bomb. And from the very beginning his teachers kept saying: “Oh, we have a new Oppenheimer here,” although at the time the name meant nothing to him. A chance occasion for yet another link between nuclear technology and artificial intelligence…

Marvin the Robot

Scientists from various fields took part in the workshop—mathematicians, electrical engineers, physicists. Even back then the conversation turned to getting to know better how the brain works before trying, one way or another, to imitate it. Marvin’s wife, Gloria Minsky, a neurologist, also took an active part in the meetings. Decades would pass before the idea of deep neural networks was developed further by Geoffrey Hinton and his colleagues, bringing us to today’s renaissance.

Months after Dartmouth, once again as a result of those conversations, another term would appear that long drove the field forward. Arthur Samuel would propose the idea of “machine learning”—the search for algorithms through which computers teach themselves on given data.

A year after the workshop, laboratories for artificial intelligence research were founded at a number of universities, such as Carnegie, Stanford and MIT.

The careers of the other initiators also took off dizzyingly. Shannon went down in history as the father of information theory. Rochester was one of the creators of the IBM 701—the first mass-produced computer ready for scientific applications. John McCarthy made his name as the creator of the programming language LISP—created precisely for the needs of Rochester’s machine, only the second higher-level language, considerably more understandable and convenient for the people who would later become known as programmers.

Through Hardships to the AI

After Dartmouth, “artificial intelligence” appeared on the map as a separate field of science and gradually took hold in society too. People began dreaming of thinking machines and how they would make their lives easier… But, alas, technology was still far from such capabilities, and so, naturally, the first “winter” arrived—a moment of sharp decline in interest in a given field.

In the 1980s came expert systems, which many consider the second peak of artificial intelligence, but it did not last long, once again limited by the capabilities of the technology of the moment.

Until we reach the present day, when artificial intelligence is the hit of the day and, perhaps, of the era.

Could we once again overestimate it, carried away by some impressive successes that successfully hide its limitations? Hardly. It has long since stopped being true that “everything new is something old, well forgotten,” at least in the world of technology, where the news is big and daily. And yet it is always worth drawing on the experience so far, especially in such a dynamic field. And it is always worth keeping something in the back of our minds…

The Seven Problems

Minsky and McCarthy formulated seven problems to be solved at the Dartmouth meeting. Some of them, however, remain open to this day…

1. Automatic Computers

If a machine can do a job, then an automatic calculator can be programmed to simulate the machine. The speeds and memory capacities of present computers may be insufficient to simulate many of the higher functions of the human brain, but the major obstacle is not lack of machine capacity, but our inability to write programs taking full advantage of what we have.

2. How Can a Computer Be Programmed to Use a Language?

It may be speculated that a large part of human thought consists of manipulating words according to rules of reasoning and rules of conjecture. From this point of view, forming a generalization consists of admitting a new word and some rules whereby sentences containing it imply and are implied by others. This idea has never been very precisely formulated, nor have examples been worked out.

3. Neural Networks

How can a set of (hypothetical) neurons be arranged so as to form concepts? Considerable theoretical and experimental work has been done on this problem by Uttley, Rashevsky and his group, Farley and Clark, Pitts and McCulloch, Minsky, Rochester and Holland, and others. Partial results have been obtained, but the problem needs more theoretical work.

4. Theory of the Size of a Calculation

If we are given a well-defined problem (one for which it is possible to test mechanically whether or not a proposed answer is valid), one way of solving it is to try all possible answers in order. This method is inefficient, and to exclude it we must have some criterion for the efficiency of calculation. Objections will be raised that in order to obtain a measure of the efficiency of a calculation, one needs a method of measuring the complexity of calculating devices, which in turn can be done if we have a theory of the complexity of functions. Some partial results on this problem have been obtained by Shannon, and also by McCarthy.

5. Self-Improvement

Probably a truly intelligent machine will carry out activities that may best be described as self-improvement. Some schemes for doing this have been proposed and are worth further study. It seems likely that this question can be studied abstractly as well.

6. Abstractions

A number of types of abstraction can be clearly defined, and others less clearly. It seems worthwhile to make a direct attempt to classify them and to describe machine methods of forming abstractions from sensory and other data.

7. Randomness and Creativity

A fairly attractive and yet clearly incomplete hypothesis is that the difference between creative thinking and unimaginative thinking lies in the injection of some randomness. To be efficient, the randomness must be guided by intuition. In other words, the educated guess or the hunch includes controlled randomness in otherwise orderly thinking.

Lately we have all become boxing experts. From Bulgaria's first medal at the Paris Olympics to the fine print about chromosomes and who should and may hit whom, and when.

But why do we fight at all?

Wrestling is mercilessly brutal. Boxing is no gentler, and worldwide it is a far more sought-after, contested and glorified sport.

And over the past two weeks, thanks to the expected and unexpected drama of the Olympics, it has become the focus of so many conversations.

Two people stand in opposite corners of the ring with the open intention of landing as many hard punches as they can… while taking as few as possible themselves.

Chivalry or barbarism? Poetry in gloves, or life without mask or makeup, laying bare the most unchanging human qualities?

Hit Them So They Respect You

Anyone who takes up this subject runs head-on into one and the same big problem. The first to write about it was the American writer and journalist Paul Gallico. Exactly a century ago he was a cub reporter at the New York Daily News, assigned to cover combat sports.

He decided to start off with a bang, making a rather unusual request of the reigning world heavyweight champion: to face each other in the ring. In Gallico's view, you couldn't write anything with “depth and understanding” on such a subject unless you had felt it firsthand.

And so the man standing across from him was Jack Dempsey, remembered as one of the hardest-hitting and most aggressive boxers in history. The journalist's only request was that the big man spare his body and aim only for the head. The bout lasted a full minute—that's how long Dempsey gave him before landing his first and last punch of this “fight.” His opponent described it as “a terrible explosion deep inside the skull, followed by a bright light; a sense of being blown to pieces, and then darkness.”

If the reporter had been ChatGPT, or any of today's sportswriters, he wouldn't have put himself through that, would he?

Fencing with Fists

Well, I wouldn't either, so I'll take my colleague Gallico's word for it—all the more so because it matches what you can imagine watching the masters of the gloves pound each other, especially in professional boxing.

I also think of a story by Palmi Ranchev from his themed collection Boksyori i sluchayni minuvachi (Boxers and Random Passers-By), in which a professional fighter insists on tracking down the journalist who writes about his performances between the ropes, so he can explain to him, in a very direct way, just how big the difference is between the view from outside and the boxer's own…

So, precisely out of respect for the people in this sport, we won't rush to the dangers of brain damage and its other controversial sides. We'll begin with literature and with those colleagues who have something to say on the subject.

The Old Man and the Hook

Boxing is a permanent fixture of pop culture, with an enormous string of box-office films, media and cultural images, archetypes.

Byron and Hemingway, Pavel Vezhinov—one of the best-loved Bulgarian writers of the twentieth century—and Camus, Jack London and Sherlock Holmes himself: here is a lineup of characters who know very well the “magic” of looking for a way to hit your opponent square in the face.

Muhammad Ali and the preacher George Foreman, “ear-eating” Mike Tyson and Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko, “Gypsy King” Tyson Fury and billionaire Floyd Mayweather—these are the colorful figures this so very controversial sport gives birth to.

Punching Bag

And how could it not be controversial, when it is perhaps the crudest form of combat contest? Stripped of the New Age gloss of the Eastern martial arts, which are also “arts,” yes, its goal is simply this: two people, fitted out with gloves, not merely to cause each other pain, but for one of them to lose the ability to stay on his feet altogether—the supreme victory, the knockout…

But let's go back in history. It begins long before counting to 10 became mandatory… or higher, like the wolf from Nu, Pogodi! (“Well, Just You Wait!”), the Soviet cartoon, who ran into a much stronger opponent and kept wondering where he'd landed while the count reached 1,000.

This story is older even than Soviet cartoons. Its first versions appear in Ancient Greece, like everything else; the Romans borrowed them and even carried them off to Albion… And still, between the simple urge to pummel someone as hard as you can with your hands and the professional sport of boxing as we know it today lie quite a few centuries.

Fighting Clinch with Clinch

It is no accident that this sport has become a cultural phenomenon today: it sits at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which, more or less, dictates the Western worldview.

The rules began to take shape in the eighteenth century. England gave the world boxing well before it settled into the cliché of being the home of soccer. One of the pioneers, James Figg, presented it as “fencing with fists.”

In a way, that remains both the simplest and the most accurate definition to this day. Attack and defense, technique and strength, speed and agility… and not just a brawl, right?

Figg founded the first academy, where he also taught swordsmanship and fighting with the quarterstaff. He proclaimed himself the first boxing champion back in the good old year of 1719, long before even the United States came into the world.

Super Featherweight

The modern era hadn't yet arrived, and here was the first champion already. In a way, this brings us to the present day, when sport has turned into a vast universe, almost a world of its own. We follow champions in so many different competitions, while in the world of combat sports the ruler remains one and irreplaceable.

The history of boxing plods on through its first appearance at the modern Olympics and the inevitable split between amateurs and professionals. Amateur boxing became an Olympic sport in which fighters wear protective headgear, usually fight three rounds of only three minutes each, and technique outranks power…

On the other side stands the professional game, with its bloodthirsty rules and gladiatorial character. Similar splits have appeared in quite a few other sports, and yet only here is the difference between “professionals” and “amateurs” so drastic. However absurd these two labels sound—Olympic boxers, after all, undoubtedly train professionally, and for them too this is the main chance to succeed.

Million Dollar Baby

Many of the amateurs who do well enough move over to the “professionals.” And yet, if we tried to separate the two branches in more current terms, the first would certainly be closer to what we call “sport” in every other discipline. The “professionals,” meanwhile, are like nothing else—somewhere between showbiz stars and gladiators.

According to most people who understand the sport, how interesting, closely fought and technical a bout in the ring will be has nothing to do with the size of the athletes. At the same time, over the past century the undisputed superstars have been the heavyweight champions.

Boxers

And while the various associations and promoters divvy up their champions' belts and billions in prize money, stars keep being born and fierce rivalries keep forming. They keep their magic even after the rise of MMA, the no-holds-barred fights that finally created a platform for combat sports that somehow reaches beyond cultural limits and separate disciplines.

In chess, computers “beat” us long ago—won't they beat us in boxing too? The two sports that, in a way, complete each other's palette of competition in the intellectual and the physical world?

Even the greatest boxing champion couldn't handle 1,000 opponents, while a chess champion could (as long as the contest isn't boxing). And if we decided to build them, could future android robots be better boxers than the world champions? Absolutely, because our physical limits are a much “lower bar” for machines than our intellectual skills.

And to be a really good boxer, do you have to feel the pain too?

Punching with Pawns

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” was Muhammad Ali's motto, and he gave his autobiography that title too. A beautiful comparison, isn't it?

It's interesting how chess and boxing go hand in hand. You've probably come across the flashy competition called chessboxing, where competitors alternate between a round of uppercuts and a game of blitz. Now there's something that would give the algorithms a real headache.

But not the poet Ivan Landzhev, who gave an unforgettable interview to Digital Stories. He trained in both sports for many years and, as he writes on his blog, “the two arts have even more in common—control over time and rhythm, pulsations, pauses and the manipulation of distance, seizing the moment, precision. And above all—improvisation. According to the popular stereotype, boxers move and throw punches in rhythm. That is only partly true.

A sense of rhythm is undoubtedly extremely important, but a good boxer knows how to break and change his rhythm to surprise his opponent. Otherwise he is quickly figured out and can easily be caught and countered. In other words, fluidity in movement and decisions is of paramount importance. That is why we can speak of the most varied, vivid and recognizable styles in boxing, much like the styles in jazz. And none of the greats plays like another of the greats, despite the obvious lineage.”

Boxing as jazz—now there's a most curious comparison, isn't it? It turns out even Miles Davis loved to box.

Straight Left

The first boxing champion, James Figg, was succeeded by his pupil George Taylor; both relied in their fights on techniques well known from fencing. The third champion, Jack Broughton, took the title after a victory in 1738, and at one of his defenses four years later there was a ferocious 45-minute bout of “fencing with fists,” after which his opponent died.

Broughton decided it was time to write clearer rules about what happens in the ring. Roles were introduced: the referee, who watched for blows below the belt, the seconds; gloves appeared… even the ring itself.

Then came the next great champion, Daniel Mendoza, who added the skill of “working” your feet, managing the distance from your opponent, relying far more on defense at a time when the next hard blow to the head could turn out to be final…

Which brings us to the age of Zuckerberg and Musk, who were going to fight by MMA rules in the middle of the Colosseum, but, alas, something always got in the way. Weak promoters, a dispute over advertising… True, neither of them is any good at boxing—they're into Eastern martial arts, so popular in the Bulgarian IT sector too—but the idea isn't all that different. They have the will, but it never quite works out, like the debates before Bulgarian elections.

Boxing has produced remarkable stories and keeps doing so in the digital age. But where is the magic in never losing the urge to smash the face of the person across from you—only in a gentlemanly way?

It will be there as long as we humans are (even after Musk and Zuckerberg, I hope).

For Whom Hemingway Swings

Ernest Hemingway was always a kind of embodiment of his love for boxing and of a thoroughly “macho” view of the world. “My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything,” said one of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century. When it came to him, though, our friend Jack Dempsey was once again as uncompromising as he had been with our first hero today—only verbally.

He met the writer when Hemingway was 25, in good shape and forever looking for someone to fight (he never managed to talk his colleagues Ezra Pound and Fitzgerald into it). Dempsey wouldn't agree either. “Because I could ‘read’ people. I had the feeling that Hemingway, who truly believed he could box, would come charging out of his corner like a madman. To stop him, I'd have had to hurt him, and I didn't want to. So I never boxed with him.”

“All the great poets should have been boxers,” said Muhammad Ali. “Take Keats and Shelley, for example. They were tremendous poets, but they died young. Because they didn't train.” In fact, Keats really was fond of the sport. So was Byron, who sparred on the morning of his mother's funeral, because “boxing is a balm for the spirit.”

But the former Cassius Clay was wrong about something else: long years of taking blows to the head can hardly be harmless, as was evident in his own case during his last decades.

The Gauntlet Thrown

The medical side of blows to the head is horrifying. It's no accident that boxing has been banned in many countries, and serious debates continue to this day, especially when it comes to young people. It isn't hard to imagine that punches to the head are not the most harmless encounter life can offer.

There have even been deaths, like that of 18-year-old Jeanette Zacarías Zapata, who died in 2021, days after a boxing match.

Perhaps even more frightening than the injuries, though, is the invisible damage. As neurologist Steven Laureys says, “our brain is sensitive and needs a lot of energy. It is supplied by four large arteries and a multitude of small blood vessels. As a result of many blows, 10 to 20 years later you end up with a brain that has shrunk, is diseased and demented.” In medicine the diagnosis is known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, but it is also called “boxer's dementia.”

“Brain cells communicate with each other through a kind of bridge. When you take a heavy blow to the head, these are destroyed and communication is literally cut off. Shake them, and they simply break,” says Laureys. The insidious part is that these problems often stay hidden for a long time, until they are practically untreatable.

“I think future generations will look at boxing the way we look at the gladiators of Ancient Rome today,” says Laureys. “I ask myself how it is possible that we as a society allow young athletes to pound each other on the head and fall seriously ill.”

Fight or Flight!

And yet, anyone who decides to put on the gloves surely has the risks in mind, so to finish, here is something more positive.

Many studies show that this sport actually helps us develop our brains, instill discipline and technique. It is also invaluable in the fight against stress.

Boxing skills are often the only shot at truly serious success in life for many young people from the lower social classes—you can see it all over the world.

As the aforementioned Palmi Ranchev puts it, “this sport is always drama. A spectacle without a set script. Every harder punch or well-timed defense can send it off in an unexpected direction.”

After all these persuasive words, I find myself wondering… maybe I should do what Gallico did after all? Now where has Kubrat Pulev, Bulgaria's heavyweight star, been hiding lately…

This piece is part of the new issue of Dolce Far Niente magazine

You love computers, and to be able to use them… you buy magazines!?

Isn't that strange? Isn't everything online? It is today, but this digital story was born in a computer past that feels both recent and very far away. A kid dreams of getting an unfamiliar magazine with James Bond's face on it, which has caught his eye. He gives up his pocket money to buy it, but just a few hours later the “big guys” take it from him. That, however, is how his interest awakens in the cult computer magazines of the end of the last century, the favorite reading of an entire generation.

Decades later the boy “meets” the same Bond again, and the magazine sets the rest of the story in motion. Thousands of stubborn hours go by until, today, Project Lazarus is complete, and anyone can browse the full collection of the legendary computer magazines of the 1990s and the first years of the 21st century. A peculiar Bulgarian cultural phenomenon that is hard to explain to the young people who came after…

Which magazine did you love? PC Mania, Gamers Workshop, or another one from the long list?

Game On

This remarkable phenomenon reminds me of the story of gamebooks. It begins in the late 1990s, when the internet became more accessible and computers began to appear in homes en masse. Its speed, however, was far from today's, and so for quite a few years computers lived side by side with paper. We bought books to learn how to use the net. And, even more often, the computer magazines we'll be talking about today. Most were devoted to games, and they often came with a gift—a disc of game demos and programs. Plenty of readers bought them for the discs; the net was still in its early stages, and downloading even a picture was slow and expensive.

Little by little, computer game magazines grew into a culture of their own. Different schools took shape, and each publication had its own profile (more on that soon). Some of them gradually managed to gather their readers into a community that talked actively about the topics it cared about.

Then the speed went up, and with it came the end of the magazines. Some turned into websites, others quietly slipped into history. The very place from which they are now returning…

The Game of Toys

And here this cultural phenomenon is again, thanks to our hero today. Diyan Karolev is a journalist with serious experience who in recent years has been working in computer game development. And after 8 years and 5,000 hours of stubborn volunteer work, anyone can now read, on the Project Lazarus site, every single one of the 440 issues of computer game magazines ever published in Bulgaria! Together with the games section of the magazine Computer, Diyan's enormous labor covers no fewer than 659 issues.

Try it, leaf through them virtually—it's such fun. A time machine that, for me at least, filled me with nostalgia for my school days…

But how did our guest decide to take on such a massive task for the common good? As you've already gathered, the story begins more than two decades ago, and it involves none other than Agent 007.

The odyssey (it may not be in space, but still) begins in 2001. Diyan, born on the first day of the watershed year 1989, is only 12 and often goes to the bus station in his hometown of Pleven, where there's a toy shop. “After school I'd stand there with my nose pressed to the window, staring at a Batman I finally bought many years later. At some point I also started looking at the newsstand, where I noticed some colorful magazines with titles that meant something to me—PC Mania, Master Games,” Diyan recalls.

Tomorrow Never Dies

At the time he doesn't even have a computer at home, but he often spends hours at the computer club next to the school—back then these were favorite haunts for kids. But… “My eyes stayed glued to those covers, but they also stayed glued to the price. I'm in sixth grade, I get 50 stotinki a day for school”—stotinki being the Bulgarian cents, a hundred to the lev—“and the magazines cost 2 leva (about $1.10) without a disc and 4 leva with one.”

Those 50 stotinki are for a sandwich during the long break, and that's also what an hour at the computer club costs, but our hero has already developed an obsession—to buy a magazine, and one specific issue at that. A little earlier he has seen the latest James Bond film, and it's the cover with his favorite hero that becomes his dream…

Except that a cavalcade of unpleasant surprises awaits him—by the time he has saved up the money, that issue has sold out, so he buys another magazine instead: a PC Mania with a purple cover featuring the game Oni. And to top it all off, before he has even read it, the “big guys” from the upper grades take it from him that same afternoon.

Just a few months later, though, the dream comes true in the most unexpected way. The boy is sent to his older cousins for the summer holidays, and since they can't be bothered with the little one, they hand him a whole pile of computer magazines to keep him entertained. He devours them cover to cover, even though… he doesn't understand much.

We Played Well…

“I had no idea what I was reading—first the foreign words, second the specialized terminology I was discovering for the first time. But once I got used to it, I got really hooked. I was hugely impressed that there were people who wrote about games, and were probably even paid for it.”

So his next, much bigger childhood dream is born—since he loves to write, he starts thinking how wonderful it would be one day to earn his living by writing about computer games.

That is exactly why he later turns to journalism, graduates in the field and starts working at Bulgarian National Television (BNT). And although by then the computer magazines no longer exist on paper, he also fulfills his dream of writing about games, on the PC Mania website, which is still running today.

The Love of Words

And so all these fulfilled childhood dreams lead up to the last one, the one that has brought us here.

We move to 2013—the magazines are long gone—when our story proper begins. Diyan is already working as a journalist and stumbles online upon something that takes him back in time.

He remembers one of his favorite childhood books, The Cucumber King by Christine Nöstlinger, and decides to find it online. It turns out to cost just one lev. “That seemed terribly insulting to me—the courier would cost more than the book—so I decided to look at what else the same shop was offering… And at that moment I see the purple cover of the first magazine I had ever bought and had stolen from me, a precious childhood memory,” Diyan recalls.

He spots a few more magazines, buys them all, and as he leafs through them he travels back to the phenomenon. That's when the next idea comes to him—to make a documentary about the history of computer magazines, because it's so interesting that it simply has to be told. He starts meeting his favorite writers from back in the day, collecting… And he notices how hard it is to find the old magazines today: some carry unjustifiably high prices, and others can't be found at all.

With Dragons in the Heart

“Because I love collecting things, I ended up hoarding them like Smaug the dragon and gloating over them. I met writers, did interviews, and then I thought—these magazines, I'm literally sitting on them like the dragon and they're gathering dust. Why not share them with people?”

First he decides to check whether there are any legal restrictions, and it turns out that PC Mania and Gamers Workshop are the only trademarks still registered. He manages to get their blessing and rolls up his sleeves…

He chooses to call the project Lazarus, after the biblical Lazarus. That way the magazines rise again from their paper death.

And so, 8 years and about 5,000 hours of scanning later, all the magazines can now be browsed on his site.

In his work he is careful and precise; each magazine takes him about 3 hours. He “takes apart” the issues, processes the images, straightens them. We joke with him about how useful the sharp eye he's developing will be if the software industry falls victim to artificial intelligence and we all have to move into construction.

Game On

Diyan is so meticulous that when an image has a hole in the middle because of a prepress error, he hunts down a replacement, swaps it in and adjusts it. Why, when he could always leave the hole and it would be authentic? Because he wouldn't be able to sleep if he did. Lately, generative artificial intelligence has helped him quite a lot.

And why does he put in all this enormous work?

“I've always imagined the project as a library devoted specially and only to game magazines. It costs me out of my own pocket, but I don't see a problem with that. I want to be able to share with other people the thing that inspired me to write in the first place. It seems only fair to me that there should be free and open access to these texts, because otherwise they'll be lost.”

Magazine Makers

“The magazines had a huge influence on all of us; they're a cultural phenomenon,” Diyan says today. “1998, around the release of StarCraft, is the moment when suddenly everyone decides to make gaming magazines. That's when the cult titles Gamers Workshop, PC Mania and Top Games appear—the last of which is renamed Master Games after two issues. Each has an extremely distinctive style and way of covering games and everything related to them.”

At the time, as we said, the internet is slow, expensive and runs over the phone line. Most kids don't have computers; others don't have internet. So, according to Diyan, the magazines on the one hand become a rescue from having to search for information in English, and on the other they provide programs and game demos that can't be found anywhere else. And then all of this turns into a community, which is more of an unexpected side effect. Many of the early magazines organize tournaments; others open their own clubs.

The magazines come out actively until about 2010; the last survivor is Gameplay. From one of his interviews Diyan learns that their usual print run was between 10,000 and 15,000 copies, higher in winter, when more games were released.

Still Not Played Out

Plenty of people thank him for his stubborn work. Writers who wrote for the magazines and never kept copies. “There were several emails like that: ‘I saw the site, found my articles and cried with emotion.’ Others write just to congratulate me. ‘Hey, well done, man!’ Very often, especially on social media, I see the sentence ‘Thank you for your work.’ To be honest, that confuses me a little. I'd never heard or seen it before, and I've never thanked anyone for their work either,” Diyan admits. “But maybe I should.”

How valuable it is sometimes simply to say thank you. And how important it is to keep the strong moments of childhood, to treasure them and bring them back to life. Surely many people will return to them thanks to the enormous work Diyan has put in. Few things are more precious to us than childhood memories…

Which Were the Cult Magazines?

Diyan's quick take on his favorites

Top Games isn't a separate magazine but the games section of the magazine Computer. Yet that's where it all started, back in 1992! Gathering the complete collection was a real adventure—it took a year of going around libraries.

PC Mania were very precise and clear; they're like BNT. Always there, you know what you'll get. It may not be the most original journalism, but they'll cover everything that's important, everything you're interested in, and you'll get the discs. From a certain point on it was written by young people, which, for me at least, added a lot of extra value.

Gamers Workshop—if you follow them from beginning to end, you could write a whole book about a group of friends who get together every week, talk things over, do things together, and you share it all with them. They were very natural; you could tell when someone was joining or leaving, when someone was sad, when something had happened in their life. They were also extremely honest in their opinions, regardless of whether they were objective—that was never their goal anyway; the goal was to be sincere.

In Master Games I like the abstract art—there you can see a complete chaos of words, visuals, colors. The magazine itself isn't consistent at all and at the same time covers an awful lot, jumping from topic to topic. Not just games—sometimes reportage, articles about aliens, about conspiracy theories—you never know what you're going to get. I remember an article about a game with the subtitle “Monologue to a Cat Close at Hand.” I have no idea what that means, and I'm convinced it has nothing to do with the game being written about, but it makes an impression. The whole magazine was written in that contrarian style, and it's also famous for the comic about Doctor Gas.

Computer Games is also an impressive magazine. I found it incredibly interesting how, back in 1993–94, they managed to dig up information about the development of Myst, about how Roberta Williams's Phantasmagoria was made—topics on which, even today, it's hard to find lesser-known facts, yet they managed it.

Kompyutarni igri (Computer Games) is a magazine published by Softpress that was never announced, and even the publisher itself didn't know it had existed. Only 6 issues came out, but it's the only one that came out every two weeks. It was written in an interesting, somehow more Western style and came with free stickers—very unusual.

In PC Club I like Boyan Spasov's section “Format C,” with its humorous articles and parodies—for example, what would happen if The Matrix came to life in Bulgaria. For me this is a much more sterile publication, designed to be more profitable and to pull in advertising. At first it was a partnership with the newspaper Monitor, and it took writers from PC Mania and Computer.

At some point PC Club became Gameplay because of a trademark dispute. It started being published by Haykom, which assembled a team that had previously worked at Workshop. Some kind of coup took place there in 2006, and the writers who left moved to Gameplay. The result was a serious publication, professionally executed, with the most modern design.

Are Java and JavaScript cousins, and if they have nothing in common… why do they have such similar names? Why did Apple pick something as overused as the apple for its name and symbol? What on earth is… Adobe? Or Google? Does Lenovo have anything to do with Lenin?

“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” says Juliet, as quoted by Shakespeare. And would what we call Apple or Amazon smell as sweet under another name?

We can only guess. But behind the names of the online world's biggest players there are sometimes funny stories. In the lines that follow, we'll run quickly through some of the most instructive and unexpected ones.

In the Name of Prose

A man lives “for honor and for a good name,” according to Rachko Pradleto, a character created by Ivan Vazov, Bulgaria's national poet. You probably haven't thought about Rachko (not Rachkov, the TV comedian) and his “good name” lately, but you certainly mention often the names whose stories we'll talk about in the lines that follow.

Our alphabet begins with a fairly well-known story, the one behind the name Apple. For a long time the company's founders wondered what to call it, until at one point, as Steve Wozniak tells it, Steve Jobs came back from a trip to a commune in Oregon that tended an apple orchard. They never came up with anything better, and in his biography Jobs says he liked the name because it was “fun, spirited and not intimidating.”

And indeed, it hasn't intimidated quite a few million users since then—quite the opposite. While we're still on the letter “A,” let's mention the neat logic behind the name Adobe. The company that looks after Photoshop, Illustrator and many other software solutions for designers and for humanity at large was named by its co-founder John Warnock after the little stream of the same name that flowed not far from his home—Adobe Creek.

What I Call Myself

Yes, names obviously often come about simply because they have to sound good, without excess baggage or negative associations. And ideas pop up from under every stone and tree.

Or in exchange for a fee. In 2001, the company Research In Motion hired a consulting firm to come up with a good enough name for a new service they were planning to launch—a little machine for sending emails, so fashionable at the time.

To these consultants, the tiny keys on the gadget looked exactly like the drupelets of a wild berry. Blackberries, say. And so, through a fresh and accurate association, BlackBerry phones were “born.” Soon the client company itself, which loved the name, renamed itself the same way.

Sometimes the search for a name is quite hard. Have you ever wondered what kind of oracle Oracle is? The project's three founders say they can't reveal the exact etymology, because it comes from a project they had worked on for the CIA just before founding the company.

Christening

Then again, it can be that simple… ChatGPT became a superstar despite a clearly not-very-marketable abbreviation that means something to only a few. Or take OpenAI, who, you could ask Elon Musk, haven't been particularly “open” for a long time.

Let's move on so we don't wander into ticklish territory. Some names are downright wacky by design, Twitter for example. As its creator Jack Dorsey tells it, the company was looking for a name that somehow sounded like the service itself. “Well, when you get a message, your phone doesn't go ‘buzzz,’ or ‘jitt,’ or ‘dinggg’—to us it sounded just like ‘tweet.’”

It's great fun to picture the entrepreneurs sitting there “buzzing,” “jitting” and “tweeting” until they hit on the best onomatopoeic solution.

Hence Twitter, the network that shares “tweets”… which never did become “X-es” after Musk applied his marketing genius with the platform's new name—X. (Or with Tesla—sure, he may try to convince us it's a tribute to the Serbian genius, but judging by some of the ideas in the models, there could easily be a connection with the tesla, the multipurpose adze-hammer so popular in Bulgaria.)

The story of TikTok is similar… Something goes “tik-tok” in there; “linguists” call it “onomatopoeia”—a word that imitates a sound, in this case the notification of a new short clip from your favorite influencer.

Pixar was named by Steve Jobs after a Spanish word for “to make pictures.”

Nothing Bigger Than Google!

Google, as you may know, came about simply to announce enormous possibilities. A googol is the largest number that arithmetic currently honors with a name of its own.

And Amazon? Supposedly at first Jeff Bezos insisted on calling it Cadabra (a pet name from “abracadabra”), but then decided the name absolutely had to start with the first letter of the alphabet, so it would always come first in any search. And then came this word, tied to the name of the Amazon River (Bezos says it inspires him because it's different, exotic and the biggest in the world). And, of course, to “amazing”—“Really cool!”

Nintendo, meanwhile, is a classic Japanese solution—the first syllable means “trusted,” and the rest “paradise.” So when we play, do we land in a “trusted paradise”?

There may not be so many TV sets anymore, but YouTube is… “your television.” Why that is, and how the biggest video platform was supposed to be a dating site—read here.

Entered in the Yearbook

And what's this Skype, and does it have anything to do with the heavens? Yes, definitely. At first they called it Skyper because of what it offered—“Sky peer to peer,” “the sky from user to user.” A metaphor meant to say that communication without a server in the middle between users was now possible, communication that could take off into the clouds.

Viber doesn't come from the phone vibrating, but from the idea that when two people talk, they vibrate on the same frequency. WhatsApp, of course, is a play on the colloquial English “What's up?” and the abbreviation for application.

While we're on ways to communicate… Telegram seems pretty obvious—Pavel Durov takes us back to the days when we dictated messages at the post office so they'd reach our friends in the next town… Curiously, that's also where Instagram comes from—an “instant telegram.” I wonder how many of the people who use them today have ever even seen a telegram?

Facebook is pretty dull too; in Bulgarian we'd call it a “face-book.” In fact, Mark Zuckerberg named his project, meant to connect with fellow students, after the word used for the student directories at Harvard and other renowned universities. Still, it's endearing that he kept the name after his little project turned into a mega-venture that swallowed the whole world.

The same goes for WordPress. Its creator Matt Mullenweg was looking for something memorable and understandable enough, nothing more (and yet more than enough—read here).

The Name List of the Bulgarian Khans

In Bulgarian, the combination of the two words that make up Microsoft—“micro” and “soft”—doesn't sound good at all; you've surely heard the jokes about Bill Gates's possible physical attributes. Actually, the name was suggested by Paul Allen and comes from… “microprocessor” and “software.” Other interpretations we leave to you.

The logic behind Intel is similarly dull—“integrated electronics.”

And Lenovo? Does it come from Lenin, or from laziness, леност (lenost)? Not exactly—the etymology leads to “legend.” In 2002 that word occurred to the project's boss, Yang Yuanqing, who even began using it actively. Soon, however, he saw there were already quite a few ventures with the same name. So he decided to combine the beginning—“le” from “legend”—with “novo,” which in Latin means “new.” The marketing for the transition from Legend to Lenovo cost 32 million dollars.

It Has a Name

Sony also comes from a Latin word, “sonus”—“sound.” Easy to pronounce for people from different cultures.

Since “novo” means “new,” does Sega come from the Bulgarian сега (sega, “now”)? Not at all—it's an abbreviation of “Service Games of Japan.”

The story of how Linux got the name of its rather modest creator, Linus Torvalds, is quite funny. His other “offspring”—git—has an instructive name too, but you can find more about where they came from here.

eBay—created by Pierre Omidyar, the popular online store, which started out more as an auction site, took the name of the consulting company its founder ran. It was called Echo Bay, but alas, it turned out that the domain of the same name was taken and something different had to be invented. Omidyar decided simply to shorten it.

And the competition—does Alibaba necessarily come with the 40 thieves? Jack Ma was sitting in a café in San Francisco when it occurred to him that this was quite a popular name, and he decided to check. He asked the waitress what it made her think of, and she replied: “Open Sesame!” So he concluded that this was one of the few names known all over the world, across cultures. (Speaking of which, that sounds a bit like… Shazam, open up, doesn't it?)

Yahooo!

Sometimes it's downright banal. The question-and-answer forum Quora comes from… questions & answers. The global networking-equipment giant Cisco, as you can tell from a mile away, carries the name of San Francisco, the city it comes from.

Yahoo! sounds like an enthusiastic whoop, and that's exactly what it is. The founders of Google's onetime rival as the world's search engine were looking for a cry that sounded loud, unbridled and rude.

In Bulgarian, ксерокс (kseroks) is more than a brand—it's simply the word for a machine that copies pages. The real Xerox gets its name from the technology of “xerography,” which in turn comes from the Greek words for “dry” and “write.”

This section is for polyglots. Samsung in Korean means “three stars.” Nokia owes its name to the Finnish river Nokianvirta. Wikipedia combines the universal “encyclopedia” with the Hawaiian word for quick, and the story is definitely interesting.

Before we part, it's time for one more interesting group of names—those of programming languages.

Alphabet Soup

First let's tick off the most common case—languages that house abbreviations in their names. Here we find some of the most characteristic solutions from the past, when people apparently weren't so keen on marketing and the main task was for the name to explain the language. BASIC is short for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Roughly speaking—“symbolic instruction code for beginners with many uses.” Another revolutionary language, COBOL, is an acronym for COmmon Business Oriented Language—“a general, business-oriented language.”

FORTRAN comes from FORmula TRANslator, and LISP is purely and simply… LISt Processor.

Go, which has made waves in recent years, simply carries the first letters of its creator's name—Google. A rather unusual lack of imagination for that company…

In more recent times, among the most-used languages “named” after abbreviations are SQL—Structured Query Language—and PHP. For the latter you may come across the claim that the abbreviation stands for Personal Home Page, but these days it's more a matter of Hypertext Preprocessor.

Named After Grandpa

Quite a few languages got their names in honor of a person. The most popular example is Ada, named after Ada Lovelace. Lord Byron's daughter was one of the pioneers of computer science, long before computers even existed. Languages have been named after Euler, Turing and other mathematicians and programmers. And not only them—others bear the names of figures like Mozart, Occam, Eiffel, even Orwell.

Among the more popular are Pascal, revolutionary for the 1970s, named in memory of the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, and Haskell, bearing the name of one of the pioneers of programming—Haskell Curry.

From the world of mythology and literature come Delphi, Oberon, Oz and Alice.

C, Is That You?

Today's most popular programming languages have a common ancestor—C. Later some of its descendants kept the letter and added to it so you'd feel the difference (C++, C# or Objective-C). There's even a language called C--.

But where does the name of C, so important to computers today, come from? It's a bit banal. Its creators simply considered it the successor to a systems language called B. Which in turn was a simplified version of the language BCPL, to which it owes its name… As you can see, programming languages have rather complicated family ties here, which could definitely rival the plot of a telenovela.

And if we continue with inherited names, it's worth mentioning Ruby, which was simply inspired by Perl. Except that the ancestor has a letter “eaten” from “pearl,” to make it sound fresher…

No Questions Asked, Python

Programmers really are a bit banal, you might say after the examples above. For the finale I've saved a few examples that show the opposite—a sense of humor among the creators of programming languages, skillful in some places, less so in others.

Wondering what kind of python stands behind the name of the most popular language associated with developing artificial intelligence—Python? It's not actually the snake at all. It's “Monty Python”—the language's creators were fans of British comedy.

We've already talked about JavaScript, which got its name at the last moment for purely marketing purposes—so it could ride on the shoulders of the fame of its “half-namesake,” Java. And rather cheekily, since the two were projects by completely different creators, who apparently just weren't very careful about protecting their copyright.

Java from Java

And looking back up the chain… what is Java? At first the language was supposed to be called Oak. But something about it “grated” on the creators (and just as well—in Bulgarian it doesn't sound charming either, you'll have to take my word for it). So they sat down and chatted about a name that would sound cool to them, without necessarily carrying some deep meaning. So the language became Green. That, they decided, was too plain.

So they settled on Java. Programmers drink quite a lot of coffee, you know? That was fully true of this team, which happened to prefer Java coffee, named after the Indonesian island. The rest is history (and free advertising for that kind of coffee and for Indonesia as a tourist destination).

And so, we've been through quite a few stories… Which show that a name may not matter, but it can also pave the way for a venture. Did I miss something important? Which of the stories did you find most interesting? I'd be glad to hear any interesting opinions…

We often mention George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. And rightly so! The possible dystopian worlds we thought had stayed behind in the 20th century have returned as a theme, as a threat.

This writer inspired them both. His only novel is a dystopia, no less thought-provoking and illuminating than those of the two classics. Because it looks not so much at a possible totalitarianism come true as in a direction that is even more relevant today.

Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is a brilliant novel because it offers a glimpse of a future in which technology has defeated humanity. It has locked people in its mathematical grip, turned them into numbers, into tools. It is one of the most powerful metaphors for what may be coming, and something worth talking about more and more. Technology sets the rules, and we have become the meaningless parts of a harsh mechanism…

The Ship with Scarlet Sails

Real literature can exist only where it is created not by diligent and well-meaning clerks, but by madmen, heretics, hermits, dreamers, rebels, skeptics. And if a writer must be sensible, must be orthodox, must be, as today, useful… then literature has no meaning, it is just paper you read today and tomorrow use to wrap soap in at the shop.

(The quote is from the essay “I Am Afraid.” All other quotes in italics are from We, in the Bulgarian translation by Rositsa Bardarska.)

No less remarkable is the story of the author himself. A shipbuilder by profession and an accidental witness to what happened aboard the Battleship Potemkin, he wrote a letter to Stalin in which, once again, he peered into the dark future. And although he managed to leave his homeland in those bloodthirsty times, he never stopped missing it until his last day.

Yevgeny Zamyatin is a fascinating figure whose words are worth recalling today. When war, dictatorship and the clash of civilizations are returning with what seems their eternal historical weight. Now joined, however, by the incredible rise of technology and the dangers it brings.

He was born in 1884 (Orwell?!). His father and grandfather were priests, and although he grew up, as he himself put it, in the deep Russian provinces, he was surrounded by an intellectual circle—his mother was a pianist, and Chopin could often be heard in the house. At four, the boy was already reading Gogol on his own. At school he did well in literature and tragically in mathematics. But, as he writes in his autobiography, out of sheer stubbornness he decided to enroll in the discipline with the most mathematics at the Saint Petersburg Polytechnic—shipbuilding.

There, by the River

And further—a question to myself: why is it beautiful? Why is this dance beautiful? Answer: because it is unfree movement, because its whole deep meaning lies precisely in absolute aesthetic subordination, in ideal unfreedom. And if it is true that our ancestors gave themselves up to dance in the most inspired moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), that means only one thing: the instinct for unfreedom has been organically inherent in man since ancient times.

Zamyatin entered university at the beginning of the 20th century, just as the Russian Empire was giving birth to the phenomena that would steer the history of the entire Eastern Bloc. He was quickly drawn into politics, became part of revolutionary circles and grew close to the Bolsheviks.

Perhaps that is why chance played its part, when as a student he ended up aboard the ship Knyaz Potemkin-Tavrichesky, where he witnessed dramatic events. It is the story that Sergei Eisenstein would immortalize in one of the first undisputed masterpieces of cinema—Battleship Potemkin. Driven to desperate conditions, the sailors mutinied and seized the ship. Troops were sent against them and crushed the mutiny with bloodthirsty brutality.

Back at the university, Zamyatin became quite active on the political front. So much so that in 1906 he was arrested and forcibly sent back to his hometown of Lebedyan. Although forbidden to do so, he returned illegally to Saint Petersburg that same year and even… completed his education. Miracles possible only in the rebellious first years of the 20th century.

It was around then that he wrote his first short story. And the miracles continued. Since he stood out as an exceptionally talented shipbuilder, and such specialists were important and in demand at the time, he was soon pardoned. In the following years he worked quietly, until the First World War broke out. He publicly declared himself for peace and called for revolts, for which he was arrested again and deported far from civilization.

The Battleship Potemkin

The state forbade the murder of an individual, but did not forbid the half-destruction of millions. That means that to kill one person, that is, to reduce the sum of human lives by 50 years, is criminal, but to reduce the sum of human lives by 50 million years is not criminal. Funny, isn’t it?

After serving his sentence, however… it suddenly turned out once again that he was too valuable a specialist. He was sent to Great Britain to take part in building, on a Russian order, the icebreaker Saint Alexander Nevsky, which… by the time it was finished, the October Revolution had come, and it sailed back under the name Lenin. A huge ship, innovative for its time, capable of handling the harshest challenges of the Arctic Ocean.

Not only the ship but also the shipbuilder changed dramatically during his time on the island. Zamyatin traveled between shipyards scattered across the kingdom. What amazed him most and shaped his worldview from then on was technology. Progress, advancement. Inventions that promised to change our lives… not necessarily for the better.

Does that sound familiar from today’s point of view?

A Burden Without Shores

And isn’t it absurd that the state (and it dared to call itself a state!) could leave sexual life entirely without control? Whoever, whenever and as much as they wanted… Utterly unscientific, like animals. And like animals, blindly, they bore children. Isn’t it funny: to know horticulture, poultry farming, fish farming (we have exact data that they knew them) and not manage to reach the last rung of this logical ladder: child farming. Not to arrive at our Ideal Mother and Ideal Father.

The shipbuilder changed outwardly, too. He adopted British manners, the local fashion and customs so thoroughly that later, after his return home, people would often call him, ironically, “the Englishman.” Korney Chukovsky wrote of him: “Yevgeny Ivanovich had one forgivable weakness: he behaved like an English captain. He smoked a pipe, spat like a true Yorkshireman, often said ‘alright,’ and, having put on his British face, listened and spoke without changing his expression. But his eyes were naive, peasant eyes, slyly narrowed, and his thick dark-blond hair refused to fit within the English barrier.”

Zamyatin clearly had a knack for not missing the dramatic moments: he returned home in September 1917. The writer made no secret of his enormous enthusiasm for the changes the October Revolution was bringing.

He took an active part in the Civil War, which once again landed him in prison, together with other famous artists, among them Alexander Blok.

At that time, besides taking part in the events of the day and working actively in his profession, he was writing more and more. And so we come to 1920, when he finished his first and only novel, the one we are talking about today—We.

Although many, including Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident writer, in a well-known essay on Zamyatin, find in the novel allusions to what would happen in the USSR in the following decades, it is much more than that. Zamyatin wrote it in a time of enthusiasm, when few had even heard Stalin’s name. This is not at all a book about the victorious revolution so much as about victorious technology. About a hyper-technologized society in which we have delegated everything to it, and we ourselves have become bolts in the system, little cogs that exist only to keep it moving forward…

Islands in the Stream

Hence the distribution: the ton has rights, the gram has duties, and the natural path from nothingness to greatness is to forget that you are a gram and to feel yourself a millionth part of the ton…

The fact is that the novel was never published in the years after it was written. Journalistic digging in the archives a few years ago showed that this happened more or less by accident. The editors were slow with their decisions; in fact, they had approved the novel… But Zamyatin was impatient, and that brought him serious trouble. We came out first in New York, and that is precisely what made the authorities turn their attention to the writer.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, great writers and poets whose names we all know, he was not repressed. In 1929 he was expelled from the writers’ union; it was clear that he could not cope with the demands of the new times. In 1931 he wrote his famous letter to Stalin, in which he explained his disagreement with the treatment of art and asked to be allowed to go abroad. He promised to return “as soon as it becomes possible to serve great ideas in literature without serving small men.” Pretty bold, wouldn’t you say?

He did, however, receive the support of Maxim Gorky, and, quite unexpectedly… he was allowed to leave the country. He even kept his Soviet passport.

Titanic

By turning this handle, any one of you can produce up to three sonatas an hour. And how much effort this cost your ancestors! They were able to create only after working themselves up into the fit known as “inspiration”—an unknown form of epilepsy.

Zamyatin spent the rest of his years abroad; in the 1930s, unprecedentedly, his membership in the Soviet writers’ union was even restored. He said he dreamed of returning home, but it never happened—heart disease ended his days in 1937. Abroad he never published anything new; his only creative work was as the screenwriter of a successful French film.

“The most unknown of the great Russian writers of the 20th century,” Alexei Korolyov called him.

His whole life was bound up with the greatest literary figures of the time. His wife was a close friend of Anna Akhmatova and helped her when she fell ill with tuberculosis. The writer’s personal physician was Mikhail Bulgakov’s brother. At his memorial service, his words were read by the Nobel laureate Ivan Bunin.

The Icebreaker

I rushed to him as to a brother, straight onto the blades, and started telling him—about the insomnia, the dreams, the shadows, the yellow world… The scissor lips smiled.

– You’re in a bad way! I think you’ve developed a soul.

A soul? That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word. We sometimes said “soulful,” “soulless,” “soul-destroying,” but soul…

– That is… very dangerous, – I whispered.

– Incurable.

We was first published in his homeland only at the end of the 1980s. Long before that, the book had built a reputation in the West as visionary, prophetic, as the first literary dystopia. It is especially popular in England; the Pet Shop Boys have a song called “Integral” that retells its plot.

“My most jocular and at the same time most serious work,” the shipbuilder-writer called his novel.

Zamyatin said he had been inspired by H. G. Wells. Orwell himself wrote that he was impressed by We, and in his view Aldous Huxley, too, had learned directly from his Russian predecessor. Traces of our hero’s ideas can undoubtedly also be found in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Who borrowed from whom and how, who came first and who last (and Zamyatin came first, decades ahead of his colleagues), I don’t think matters much. The fact is that in each of these classics we have a totalitarian regime and a protagonist who stands up to it, launching his own small and naive revolution before the system, one way or another, destroys him. What’s more, I hope we won’t need to argue over which of these undisputed classics turned out to be most right with its terrifying prophecies.

Man Overboard

I know from my own experience: the most agonizing thing is to sow in a person the doubt that he is real.

And yet, there are just too many tentacles of a possible technological horror described in We, and we can see signs of them sprouting all around us.

Yes, technology is an enormous treasure, but it can also be a horror.

The action takes place in the 32nd century. All people are subjects of the One State; they have no names, only numbers. The protagonist, D-503, is a mathematician, one of the engineers of a flying machine called the Integral. It is easy to see the shipbuilder himself in him… only in space. (Or… Elon Musk?!)

The citizens of the One State live in identical apartments without curtains, wear identical clothes (“unifs”) and travel in small flying vehicles. (The sharing economy?!) In their free time they enjoy music created by special musical machines. (Artificial intelligence?!)

In the novel, people live in transparent homes and are not allowed to lower the blinds unless they receive the coveted pink ticket, which gives them a chance to be alone for a short while with a specifically chosen and approved member of the opposite sex. (Tinder?!)

Lifebelt

Haven’t social networks led us to something similar? With the way they collect and process our data, the way they manipulate? The way they make us share selfies and worldviews far beyond what is properly intimate?

And what about the estrangement from nature that came with technical progress? And creativity and art, presented as technologized activities delegated to algorithms?

The hate, the drowning out of the different voice under the weight of the algorithm, of the likes?

Our confinement in bubbles with a narrow worldview, in the panopticon of an illusory reality?

The blurring of truth? Of the criteria for credibility, of being properly informed?

A Sea of Words

– This is unthinkable! This is absurd! Don’t you understand: you are plotting a revolution!

– Yes, a revolution! Why is that absurd?

– It’s absurd because there can be no revolution. Because our—I’m saying this, not you—our revolution was the last one. And there can be no more revolutions. Everyone knows that…

The mocking sharp triangle of her eyebrows:

– My dear, you are a mathematician. Even more: you are a philosopher of mathematics. Very well: name me the last number.

– Meaning? I… don’t understand: what last one?

– Well, the last, the highest, the biggest.

– But that’s absurd. Since the number of numbers is infinite, what last number can you be talking about?

– And what last revolution are you talking about? There is no last one.

Here lies the remarkable difference between 1984 and We. Orwell’s characters clearly cannot stand the tyranny they live under and only pretend to approve of it out of fear. Zamyatin’s “numbers,” by contrast, obey the laws of the One State because “that is what makes sense.” Quietly submerged and tamed, like us in today’s social networks. Which take care to bestow content on us, to give meaning to our everyday lives.

As Zamyatin’s friend Yury Annenkov wrote, in his novel he proves that “human life cannot be artificially organized according to programs and blueprints, like a transatlantic steamer. Because in man, besides his material, physical properties and needs, there is also an irrational principle that lends itself neither to precise dosing nor to precise accounting, and as a result, sooner or later, the schemes and blueprints will be blown apart.” Will it turn out that way in reality?

We is a brilliant metaphor and a prompt to reflect on a possible hyper-technological future. Yes, it may not be a beautiful love story, nor the ideal beach read, but it is a book we should not miss today.

I would very much like it to turn out, just a few years from now, that these parallels don’t exist, that I am wrong. But…

An incredibly powerful phenomenon has been discovered, one that creates a new substance! Not only does it cure even incurable cases of cancer, it will open the eyes of science in so many directions. For instance… lighting up the dark night!

Marie Curie discovers radioactivity, wins not one but two Nobel Prizes and paves the way to the future.

She opens the doors to a new technology that turns out to be unexpectedly successful… Until it becomes clear that we have badly underestimated its dangers. It will cost the lives of thousands of people who were simply trying to earn a living.

Do we know the technologies we trust well enough? Could the much-hyped artificial intelligence, or some other fashionable field of today, prove more dangerous than it looks at first glance?

The most important thing is to stop and think, to reflect, to discuss. To tell each other stories.

Stories like that of the radium girls are worth reading more often. That is what stories are for—to make us question things, to keep us on our guard. Alas, not all that glitters is gold…

Burn to Shine

“My beautiful radium,” Marie Curie called it, and to this day she remains one of the most revered and celebrated scientists to have carried progress on her shoulders. A long time would pass before humanity grasped the full horror her discovery was capable of—that would only hit with full force after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But much earlier, at the beginning of the last century, her invention was everywhere. The Curies did their first experiments with polonium—it starts a nuclear reaction that, however, stops after about a day. Then came uranium… until the ideal new substance was found. Radium, and specifically its isotope 226, has a half-life of 1,600 years! Imagine how many applications that could have!

Within just two years, the power of its radiation to treat cancer was discovered. Compared with what had been known before, the results were sometimes miraculous, and radium became a superstar. Bottles of radium water appeared, radium candy, rejuvenating face creams…

Very quickly another, if more everyday, application came into fashion—watches that glowed in the dark became the favorite accessory! Had there been Instagram back then, you can be sure they would have been a staple of every feed. At the time it sounded like magic… and it was magic, because the dials were coated with an innovative paint based on the Curies’ discovery.

The mixture glows thanks to a cascade of chemical interactions: radium salts are mixed with a zinc compound, and as a result the particles emitted by the radium make the zinc atoms vibrate, which produces sparks of flickering light, almost invisible by day but clearly visible at night.

The glowing “Undark” (“not dark”) watches became especially popular after the outbreak of the First World War. In the trenches, soldiers needed a reliable way to tell the time without a flashlight, which would have drawn the sights of the snipers on the other side. The production of luminous watches became a hugely profitable industry.

Enlightenment

This progress had a very specific face—the U.S. Radium Corporation, which owned mines in Colorado and Utah and was the first to sense the enormous possibilities of this technology. It was the company that created the Undark paint and built several specialized factories where the new watches were made. The largest, in Orange, New Jersey, quickly became the engine of the local economy.

This is how the story of the “radium girls” begins. Hundreds of young women were hired to paint the dials. The work was easy for its time, pleasant, and it quickly turned into an adventure. What’s more, the girls from poor local families not only earned good money, they were lucky enough to work with the most talked-about and healthiest technology of all.

To apply the paint quickly and efficiently, they developed a special technique—after every stroke they licked their brushes to give them a sharp point, so they could precisely paint the tiny numerals and lines on the dial.

Each worker was expected to paint 250 dials a day, working five and a half days a week. They were paid a cent and a half per watch, which came to a weekly wage of 20 dollars—excellent pay for a job that required no particular education. The workers earned three times as much as their relatives toiling in neighboring factories.

Along the way, they noticed one more wonderful side effect—they themselves… began to glow. They smeared the paint on their faces (after all, it was the healthiest cream there was!), until soon several hundred girls could be spotted even on the darkest night thanks to their luminescent bodies…

People began calling them the “ghost girls,” which in turn brought them a rather romantic fame and made them sought-after, delightful company for dancing on Saturday nights…

Paradise Around the Next Corner

Not only did they work with the healthiest substance, but also with the most expensive one of its time—a single gram cost $2.2 million in today’s money.

“Radium will extend human life to 100 years,” read a headline in The New York Herald in 1921.

In one of the sequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Lyman Frank Baum included the Horners, who mine radium so that people can line the walls of their homes with it, giving them a beautiful, soft light. “It is also medicine; no one can ever get sick who lives near radium,” one of the Horners explains.

How could the girls have suspected that anything was wrong? At the time, not a word was said about any possible danger. In 1921, at the height of her fame, Marie Curie toured the United States to raise money for further research. Huge crowds greeted her, and she spoke to them about the benefits of radioactivity. The climax came one evening when she pulled a vial of radioactive isotope from the pocket of her skirt and began sprinkling it into the air to show off its soft, ethereal, blue-green glow…

Today, of course, it is easy to marvel at the radium girls’ trustfulness. Alas, dangers are not always spotted in time. Even Oppenheimer, working on the nuclear bomb project, did not know exactly what he would end up with. Not to mention the cautionary tale of Thomas Midgley, who spread across the world not one but two mass-killing inventions—leaded gasoline and Freon—decades before it became clear how dangerous they really were.

The radium girls’ paradise quickly turned into hell. After just two years, they began falling seriously ill in large numbers, and deaths grew steadily more frequent. “Nothing of the sort!” their employers at the Radium Corporation assured everyone—these were coincidences, the deceased had had syphilis…

At the End of the Tunnel

The factory kept running, the brushes kept dipping into Undark and laying their progressive film on the watches. All while the hands ticked away the days of life most of the girls had left. Nearly all of them were between 18 and 22.

By 1924, nine of the girls were dead, and the rest felt an ever more stubborn weakness caused by advancing anemia; their teeth began to fall out.

The corporation’s managers decided it was time to act and hired a team of scientists from Harvard to investigate the problem. In their findings, the scientists described the entire factory as covered in radium dust and the girls as literally glowing in the dark. But also that some unknown, mysterious illness had appeared, bringing a whole series of complications in its wake. The scientists did not note that the two phenomena might be connected—radioactive technologies still had a spotless reputation.

Even so, the corporation did not like the report and forced the authors to remove all information related to radium from the final version.

That same year a second team of scientists got involved, carrying out far more detailed and thorough research and raising a serious stir around the new disease. This caught the attention of the local medical examiner, Harrison Martland, and it was his investigation that led to the inescapable truth—the technology in use was deadly, and all the radium girls were doomed.

So Simple and Logical

Radiation. That is what made the numbers on the dials glow, and it is also what made the clocks tick away relentlessly at the remaining days of hundreds of trusting girls. They turned out to be far more affected than anyone else in the factories precisely because of their habit of licking the brushes. That is how the radium compound got into their bodies, gradually building up in their bones and in all their internal organs, and beginning its destructive work.

Not, of course, according to the Radium Corporation, which accused the medical examiner of biased data, fabricated to damage its reputation.

And although everything was obvious, years would pass before the truth came out. It would take the courage of five “radium girls” who decided to sue the corporation over their deadly injuries. For two years no lawyer could be found to defend their rights—that is how strong the Radium Corporation’s position was. Then another two years went by before the first hearing was scheduled. In that time, thirteen more girls died.

In the courtroom, the plaintiffs did not even have the strength to raise a hand to take the oath. Meanwhile, the corporation kept postponing the trial again and again on every pretext imaginable, apparently expecting the problem to resolve itself naturally…

The 16th documented victim was Dr. Sabin von Sochocky, the inventor who had developed the “not dark” paint.

Eyes Wide Shut

Martland’s investigation carried weight with its irrefutable conclusions, which he published in 1925 in a prestigious scientific journal. The case ended in 1928, after an autopsy was performed on one of the girls—Amelia Maggia, who died at just 25 after four years of work at the factory.

Shortly before her death she began losing weight rapidly, her joints ached terribly, and she complained to her doctor that she could barely move and felt like an old woman. Then, while pulling one of her teeth, her dentist saw with horror that a huge piece of her jaw had come away in his forceps. Severe anemia followed, along with constant hemorrhaging. Her suffering did not last long, and her death certificate stated that she had died of an aggravated stomach ulcer.

Her exhumed bones, however, literally… glowed. Within seconds they left white spots on photographic film, and with a little more testing Martland proved that this was radioactivity.

Martland himself was shocked by the results; he could never have imagined how deadly a technology so popular in its day could be. It emerged that the plants had employed around 4,000 workers; it is not known how many of them worked with the brushes, but 112 early deaths are officially documented as a result of the radiation.

The trial ended with a ruling that the Radium Corporation pay $10,000 to each of the five girls, a substantial sum for the time, and cover their medical expenses. Sadly, they could not enjoy the compensation—worn out by the drawn-out trial, they were at the very end of their strength and died one after another within three years.

Food for Thought

Radioactivity would also take the life of Marie Curie herself, in 1934.

There is no happy ending—sometimes that is how it goes. And yet Martland’s research and the noise around the trial helped put an end to the horrifying Undark and to the other hasty attempts to attribute supernatural qualities to the newly discovered phenomenon. Their data were used in the following decades to establish safety practices in the Manhattan Project, and in all later developments involving nuclear technology. Books and films have been dedicated to the “radium girls.”

“I am not thinking of myself,” said Grace Fryer after the trial, one of the women who refused to give up. “I’m thinking of the hundreds of girls for whom this may serve as an example.”

According to experts, almost everything we know about radiation in the human body we owe to the studies carried out on the suffering women in the years that followed.

After the trial, the American government came under pressure to create a special agency responsible for ensuring acceptable working conditions.

Why is it worth not forgetting such horrifying stories? We humans are the only species that can get burned twice by the same fire.

In the rush of the tech boom, amplified by the speed of everyday life, we often underestimate the risks of every innovation. Whether it is radium, social media or artificial intelligence. And all of this is magnified by a brutal economic logic in which the online giants are stronger than states, and their leaders have to make decisions on which the future of all of us depends.

Shouldn’t we be talking about this more?

Did you know that the mains voltage in Bulgaria wasn’t always 220 volts? Or that a fascinating Bulgarian computer game from the early ’80s turned into… a prophecy with its very title? What did the first Bulgarian electric scooters look like? And could the “hipsters of the ’60s” who rode them also get themselves a radio-TV-gramophone… provided they could carry 120 kilograms on their shoulder?

Once again we set off through the colorful history of Bulgarian technology with the most precise and captivating guide. For 15 years now, Anton Orush has been gathering a sea of information (and exhibits) about its past and present. His incredible life, worthy of a novel, was one of the first digital stories.

His new book, Proizvedeno v Bulgaria (Made in Bulgaria), came out recently, and you can buy it here.

So here we go, boarding the time machine for 5 stops back in history: 5 fascinating stories from the past of technology in our lands.

1. Kill the Power!

We start with… the wall socket. Did you know that until not so long ago, the voltage in Bulgaria’s grid was far from the values we know today?

Before the early 1960s, in Sofia it was 150 volts! That was simply the standard introduced by the Belgian Electric Company for Sofia and Bulgaria, which in 1908 bought the rights from the previous electrification concessionaire and took on the job of continuing what had been started. That is why electrical appliances made in the 1950s were designed to run on this voltage. And,

if you wanted to use your stove or washing machine on a 220-volt grid, you had to get yourself a step-down transformer like this one:

This device was put into production by the Stroitel workers’ production cooperative in Sofia, designed specifically to make older appliances backward compatible with the new standard. It’s very simple! You plug the device’s cable into the mains, and the other free socket, labeled “150,” is for the cord of your beloved old “thing”—a toaster, for example (or rather a “rusk maker,” as people called it back then). And that’s it! It can power appliances of up to 600 watts.

2. The Radiogramophonotelevision

After our close encounter with electricity, it’s time for some entertainment!

This story begins in the mid-1960s, in the Samples and Exhibits laboratory of the Chief Designer’s Department at the Light-Current Plant in Sofia. All sorts of new products were created here before going into production.

In those years Bulgaria took part in dozens of trade fairs on several continents—in Leipzig, Hanover, Thessaloniki, Algiers, Barcelona, Cuba, Izmir, Harare and who knows where else. Samples and Exhibits built all the prototype television sets, to see whether a trial batch was worth making.

In 1964 the designers decided on something truly big! For the Plovdiv International Fair, they built the first radio-television cabinet in Bulgarian history. It contained not only a Simfonia radio receiver and an automatic record player, but also a widescreen Kristal 59 television set! And

the record player could be loaded with several records and would play them one after another.

The radio-television cabinet with record player was given the working name Balkan. It weighed over 120 kilograms! It was approved and ended up at the Plovdiv Fair in 1964, on the second floor of the pavilion of Elektroimpeks, the state electrical export company. “They put on a Tchaikovsky symphony, and it turned out wonderfully pleasant, with fantastic sound—it poured through the whole pavilion,” Anton says.

Two of the photos show the cabinet. The radio and record player sit one above the other on the left, the TV is on the right, and between them runs a sliding door, like on a wall unit. Only 5 or 6 of these sets were ever made, and we’re lucky that our guide to the past can show us one!

3. A Joystick for Connoisseurs

A Bulgarian PlayStation from the ’80s? Wow!

Next up is the first Bulgarian game controller for the Pravets—the Bulgarian-made personal computer of the socialist era—from 1982/83. It was intended mainly for games on the 8-bit Pravets 8M, 8S, 8A and so on. In English, this kind of gaming device is called a paddle.

We see a plastic case with a potentiometer on top and a small button on the side; the player holds the gadget between both hands. They came in sets of two, the idea being one for each player.

Can you imagine playing a game by turning a potentiometer—the little wheel like the volume knob on a tape recorder or the brightness and contrast knobs on the TVs of the day?

Turning left or right is the equivalent of pressing an arrow key. If the two players are opponents in a tennis match, the racket moves left or right to meet the ball. In the game Neptun, the spaceship moves horizontally, and turning the potentiometer steers it left or right.

The “Bulgarian joystick” was also used to play Tetris!

With this potentiometer, though, the choice of games was limited, because the player couldn’t move the hero or the ship along the other axis—up and down.

On the left side you can see a small button—it’s for “shooting,” and in Tetris it drops the block into the chosen spot.

4. Mr. Gorbachev…

“Tear down the wall”… Yes, these are Reagan’s words shortly before “the Wall” fell, but they are also the almost prophetic name of a Bulgarian 8-bit computer game from 1982.

The floppy disk with the game came as a gift with a book—a guide to working with a computer.

Tear Down the Wall could be launched from a floppy disk or a cassette by typing the command RUN. When we do that, the following meaningful words appear on the screen:

The character holds a tennis racket, and you have one ball. Your task is to knock down a brick wall with it; you control the racket with a controller like the one above.

Before you start playing, the computer asks you to type your character’s name. You press RETURN and see the playing field on the screen, along with the words:

TO START THE GAME, PRESS THE BUTTON ON THE GAME DEVICE.

At the bottom of the screen appear the points you earn whenever you manage to hit a brick with the ball and knock it out of the wall. The deeper you get, the more points you earn per brick.

5. Scooter.bg

Today electric scooters are an undeniable fashion… even a marker of social divides. But did you know that half a century ago there were already Bulgarian prototypes?

In 1972, at the Research Institute for Engines and Automobiles (NIPKIDA), engineers built the first Bulgarian two-wheeled, single-seat electric vehicle—the ElRo 72 (from “electric roller”), meant for trips around town.

The first photo shows us what this very prototype looked like—it is also from 1972, and the two-wheeler in it is called an “electroped.” This is the original mock-up. The resemblance to a bicycle is obvious—the rider reaches the brakes through levers on the handlebar grips.

The ElRo 72 was powered by two 12-volt lead-acid batteries with a total capacity of 150 Ah. Its electric motor had a rated power of 0.6 kW and ran at 4,000 rpm.

The scooter weighed 52 kilograms, and up to 167 kilograms with both batteries and the rider.

For the scooter to travel at different speeds with the same torque, the motor has to run at different revolutions. That’s why the batteries were connected in parallel and in series through contactors. So at a supply voltage of 24 volts, the motor drew a current of about 30 A.

Let’s ride! First we insert and turn the key behind the handlebar. Then we twist the right handlebar grip, which acts as the controller. Once we’re moving, we can change speed with it (like the throttle on a motorcycle).

The top speed of the first Bulgarian electric scooter was 30 km/h, and its range was about 70 km.

We have a headlight! And a bell… The ElRo 72 had 3.5 x 8″ pneumatic tires (you pump them up). The rear suspension was rigid and the front one hinged. To keep the scooter light, the side panels were made of fiberglass. This speaks of an effort to make the design up to date for its time.

Did you enjoy the trip? It’s worth carrying on! For the biggest floppy disk, the history of Bulgarian electronic chess and the “Copying Device”—six more forgotten treasures of Bulgarian technology—read here.

And for true connoisseurs there’s the new book by our guide, Anton Orush—Made in Bulgaria. You’ll find it here.

“I’m going to pass out, I can’t feel my hands…” Blue Scuti mutters, before he realizes he has fulfilled a dream that seemed impossible. Almost four decades on, he has beaten, one way or another, the game we have all played.

Sitting in front of a retro cathode-ray-tube TV, found after countless difficulties, clicking the buttons of a retro controller for 42 minutes straight at more than 20 taps per second… the teenager reminded us that there is no limit to what a human can do.

But how can you beat a game that has no end? And why are this success and the road to it such important news for humans as a species? News about our ability, through cooperation and talent, to keep moving forward… To create, to make things, to find meaning. To give birth to stories.

Tetris is a legend that passes through the generations to give birth to new legends. A week ago we took a stroll through the history of the game that came out of a Soviet laboratory during the Cold War. Today we will look at a brand-new record that has so much to tell us about ourselves.

Oh, the Games We Had Back Then…

Among the thousands of versions of Tetris, perhaps the most popular is the one for the Nintendo console. And even though this is technology that looks ancient today—you can only run it in its classic form on an analog TV—the cult around it has not faded in recent years; it has grown. Ever more fiercely contested tournaments are held around the world.

The players have become astonishing virtuosos. In the classic versions of Tetris, a player cannot beat the game—there is always another level, and another… So how did an American teenager manage to beat it?

The story is full of technical details, but in short: the classic Nintendo Tetris was built to squeeze everything out of the hardware of those prehistoric computer days, when even megabytes were a mirage.

Rolling with a Flourish

In principle, the game speeds up and gets harder until level 19; after that it keeps generating new levels, but only by cycling the colors of the pieces. So over the past decade players have been racing to set records. The speed is truly astonishing—the movements on the screen can barely be followed by eye, and the same goes for the fingers on the controller. Players think many moves ahead, and they also need a certain dose of luck.

For quite a long time it was believed that the record had hit its ceiling. Players stalled around level 50, where the algorithm starts generating pieces in colors that are almost indistinguishable from the background—the developers simply never expected anyone to get that far. These levels are known as “the coal.”

Then the limit became physical: after the 20th minute, players’ fingers simply give out, and that slowed progress once again…

In 2021, however, the new record holder came up with a completely different technique—“rolling”—which everyone uses today. Instead of just pressing the controller’s buttons with his thumbs, he simultaneously pushes the controller up against them with his index fingers, gaining those vital fractions of a second. And so the record kept climbing.

Game Over

And so a new big goal appeared. Programmers trained an artificial intelligence to play this version of the game, and it began reaching unthinkably high levels, until at some point… the game stops. Because of the limited memory and the choices made by the original programmers, those unthinkably high levels contain points that, under very specific circumstances, bring the game to an end. Or, more precisely, freeze the screen.

It was in 2021 that our friend Blue Scuti also began playing competitively. Only 11 at the time, he won tournaments and quickly settled in among the elite players chasing the unthinkable goal: to beat the legendary Tetris.

That is exactly what happened in the first days of 2024. Scuti missed his first chance, then everything seemed irretrievably lost, until… two levels later, he couldn’t believe what he had achieved. After 39 years, Tetris had been beaten one way or another (or at least outsmarted), Scuti became a celebrity, and players began wondering what the next big goals might be.

Play the video

An interesting video (in English) about the technology and the history of the record, and about the next feats in the game that players might chase.

The NeverEnding Story

Here’s an idea. Back in 1992, the mathematician John Brzustowski pondered whether a person could play Tetris forever. He concluded that the game is statistically doomed to end. If a player gets a long enough run of alternating S- and Z-shaped pieces, at some point it will make him lose. But how long would you have to play for statistics like that to catch up with you? And developers could rule it out anyway with a slightly improved algorithm.

“What is a final victory in the game?” Pajitnov asks rhetorically. “Grasp the horror of those words.”

The boy’s real name is Willis Gibson. “Scuti” comes from Scutum, the Latin name of the constellation of the Shield, and in slang it means something big, exceptional.

Scuti plays about 20 hours a week. His family approves of the hobby; they even went to considerable lengths to get him the old-fashioned TV he needed. He reached level 157, a practically inhuman performance in a game designed to go up to level 29!

He now holds the records for the longest game, the highest score, the highest level…

Four Weddings and a Funeral

The fate of this game seems somehow bound up with tragedy. Scuti dedicated the record to his father, who died a month before the kid became world-famous.

Pajitnov also said he was very impressed by the kid’s success, but he made a point of noting that it was not his game that had been beaten, but simply its implementation for the Nintendo console.

Formally, he is entirely right. But something else matters more.

For a quarter of a century now, algorithms have been stronger than us at chess… and so what? Tournaments are more appealing than ever, players keep finding unconventional moves, memorable competitors and fascinating personalities keep emerging. They even give us reasons for national pride, as Bulgaria’s women chess players have done in recent months.

The algorithm long ago beat us at Go too, a game that gave it trouble for a long time (it was a game of Go, by the way, that brought our hero Pajitnov and the Japanese together). Yet today Go is more popular than ever, and stronger players keep appearing…

In times when technology is ready to beat us at more and more games, it turns out that we humans are getting better too. That we manage to find new forms, new directions in which the machine still can’t catch us. Might the same happen in almost every field? Might the progress of artificial intelligence create new forms and help us rediscover art?

Homo Ludens

“The way this 13-year-old achieved his dizzying feat tells us a lot about how the limits of human achievement are changing in the digital age,” writes the cognitive science professor Tom Stafford. And further:

“The achievement is real, but its significance reaches far beyond the world of classic arcade games and those who love them. What Gibson did, and how he did it, offers general lessons about how people learn and how the frontiers of human achievement expand. Gibson didn’t just pick up an old console; he joined a living tradition. There are thousands of players devoted to Tetris on the NES—the platform on which the game was first released in North America.

Much of the discussion around artificial intelligence focuses on the areas where human skills may become obsolete, but it is a mistake to treat human performance as a fixed target. As Gibson’s record-breaking feat showed, we are constantly looking to the outer limits and, in reaching them, extending our grasp.

The lesson is that pushing past the limits of human skill is the result of continuous collective innovation, as well as of remarkable individuals. Humans are a species defined by our capacity to learn, and in the digital age there are more and more opportunities to venture into unexplored territories of performance in every aspect of art, science and culture—including Tetris.”

The Sport for a Peaceful World

“I invented Tetris for my own pleasure. That’s the only way anything can be invented,” Pajitnov smiles.

Recently, in an interview about the big questions of 2024, the futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova told me about her meeting with the cosmonauts who returned to Earth a few months ago. She was surprised that instead of technology, they talked about the human side of things, about our future together as a species.

“They wanted to show that when humanity faces a truly important global question that concerns everyone—in this case, the success of that space mission—geopolitical and strategic stories don’t matter at all. Both the Russians and the Americans said: we want to offer humanity the formula for understanding, a model for success, for cooperation. Up there we depend on each other and we really are like brothers.”

Isn’t Tetris a wonderful metaphor for what can unite us? It set out from a country that no longer exists, headed east, and through the East conquered the West… To remind us that we are capable of the next big steps. That we can grow, dream, and as a species use technology fully and consciously. But that is only possible when we are together.

Almost 40 years on, the original Tetris has finally been beaten!

The triumph of a likable 13-year-old kid turned all eyes back to the good old classic contest from the days when computer games were a perfect feast for the senses.

What does this have to tell us against the backdrop of artificial intelligence? Why, all of a sudden, has the human turned out to be capable of unexpected skills in so many games of the mind? How was the game everyone knows born, and how did it become a legend? What are its fascinating sides and its dark secrets?

This is a long and instructive digital story that runs through remarkable people, through triumphs and tragedies, through cultures and twists…

The Young Ones of Today

“I’m going to die, I can’t feel my hands…” These are the words of Blue Scuti just before he realizes he has achieved what he dreamed of. Almost four decades later, he has beaten, one way or another, the game we have all played.

Perched in front of a retro cathode-ray-tube television, found after countless hassles, clicking the buttons of a retro controller for 42 minutes straight at more than 20 taps per second… Blue Scuti reminded us that there is no limit to what a human can do. That it matters more to choose what we compete with one another in, and what is worth delegating to the machines.

If you don’t believe me, ask the father of Tetris. Today he drives a Tesla, but he learned to turn a steering wheel in a Lada, and he says he still uses the same habits. Because this story begins in a lab of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where secret technologies for the KGB were also being developed.

Back in the U.S.S.R.

Alexey Pajitnov’s grandfather was a well-known actor of the Soviet era who appeared in the classic screen adaptation of The Twelve Chairs. His father was a philosopher who defended a dissertation titled “The Formation of the Communist and Philosophical Views of Karl Marx,” before being fired in the late 1980s for signing the famous “Letter of the 80,” which called for reforms in the USSR.

The USSR, however, is still one of the world’s globes when this story begins, and the game’s creator graduates in mathematics and turns to computer science. At the time he works at the computing center of the Academy of Sciences, doing pioneering work on using artificial intelligence for human speech recognition. Fifteen programmers work in a room with five terminals and have to take turns—Alexey often comes in after the others have already gone home.

He likes his job, but he never stops wondering: couldn’t computers be used for fun too? It occurs to him to try to recreate on screen a board game he had loved as a schoolboy. It is called pentomino, and the goal is to fit together wooden pieces of various shapes, each made of five squares.

And where there is pentomino, there is tetromino—the same thing, except that the pieces are virtual and made of four squares each. The name Tetris itself comes from the most lucrative move, when you use the long tetromino to “burn” a full four rows of squares.

Brick by Brick, a Block

The game is born in the summer of 1984, when its creator is 29. Its first version, written in Pascal, runs on the Soviet Elektronika-60 computers of the day, which don’t even have the graphical interface we know today—the shapes appear as falling letters.

Pleased with the result, Alexey shares it with friends and brings in other developers to make the game better. He “hires” his 16-year-old neighbor, Vadim Gerasimov, to create a version for IBM computers, since he doesn’t know the programming language used there very well. The young man adds different colors to the game for the first time, along with a scoreboard.

This is where the psychologist Vladimir Pokhilko comes in, with the idea that there should be exactly seven shapes—because that is how many a player can best remember. Later Pokhilko will also be the first scientist to use the game for psychological research, and his path will become closely intertwined with Pajitnov’s… right up to a horrifyingly tragic ending.

Tetromino

But how does a Soviet game conquer the “rotten” West at a time when the Iron Curtain still hangs down in full force? Pajitnov asks his boss at the lab, Viktor Brjabrin, who travels abroad often, to help him, and in return all revenue from sales would go to the institute.

The game starts spreading on floppy disks across the former Eastern Bloc, and its road to the West begins in Budapest. There the disk falls into the hands of Robert Stein, an international software dealer from London, who sees huge potential in it. He finds the lab’s phone number, sends a fax proposing a partnership and… after long negotiations, a deal is struck. The Soviet scientists’ lab gets 80 percent of the revenue under a 10-year contract.

All this happens in 1986, just as the thaw between the two superpowers can be felt. Stein chooses a heavy socialist aesthetic for the presentation, as the official cover shows. A soundtrack is added—the folk song “Korobeiniki.” Cyrillic, the hammer and sickle, the Kremlin… with these the Eastern “Tetris revolution” begins! All that’s missing is the salvo of the cruiser Aurora.

These are the years when computer games go through their first real boom. Before long Nintendo will release the first game console designed to be connected to a TV, and its flagship will be none other than Tetris.

All of this goes through complicated negotiations and legal battles… A series telling the whole saga came out recently, while the game’s real-life series goes on to this day.

Tête-à-Tête

In 1991, Pajitnov and Pokhilko emigrate to the United States. Our hero patiently waits for 1996, when the rights contract expires and he becomes their full owner. Together with Robert Stein he sets up an organization that still takes a percentage of the sales of all the countless versions of Tetris.

His friend Vladimir Pokhilko devotes many years to clinical experiments using the game; he is the very person who encouraged Alexey early on to keep developing it.

Across the ocean, in San Francisco, the two found a software company that works on 3D graphics projects. They create several successful computer games, built on the idea that games should serve as “entertainment for the human soul.” The psychologist takes the helm, they open an office in Moscow as well, and the venture takes off…

By the late 1990s their business has dried up, and Pokhilko is forced to tell some 70 people that they need to look for new jobs. He takes it hard and withdraws into himself. And probably a mental illness is triggered. He stabs his wife and 12-year-old son to death before cutting his own throat. He leaves behind a suicide note that remains unexplained to this day: “They ate me alive. Vladimir. Remember that I exist. The Devil.”

Blocks in Colorful Shirts

Tragedy strikes Pajitnov’s life too—his younger son, Dmitry, dies in a skiing accident, and his body is found months later.

But the programmer overcomes his depression, as he himself puts it, through work—creating new game after new game. For several years he is part of the team at Microsoft. He develops versions of Tetris with various additions, such as three dimensions. He says he sometimes regrets not being born later, so that he could create games with modern technologies like today’s artificial intelligence.

In his view, the great failing of today’s game makers is that they only want to entertain players, not to develop them. That they design games as if for people of low intellect who don’t like to challenge their gray matter.

True, none of his many ventures ever comes close to the success of the first, but then how many people can boast of having created a legend?

Tetris is the best-selling computer game in history according to a number of rankings. By 2011 alone the game had sold 202 million copies—around 70 million on physical media and 132 million downloads. There are no precise statistics today, but the figure is many times higher.

We Played It Well…

The game is thought to be addictive because of a phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect: the human brain holds on to unfinished tasks and lets go of them only once they are no longer needed. And Tetris never actually ends. The “Tetris effect,” in turn, is a psychological phenomenon in which, even when not playing, the brain involuntarily pictures combinations from the game.

One of Pajitnov’s big ideas is to make a version that can be played in teams—that, too, will happen, after he has worked on it for a whole decade. It comes out in 2019, though it fails to draw much interest. The programmer often says he regrets that the global computer industry is weak at developing multiplayer games. So instead of enjoying the pleasure of connecting with like-minded people thousands of miles away, players are locked into communicating with the computer.

And yet… Tetris becomes a unifier, a pursuit that builds team spirit, a sport—and in a way quite unexpected for Pajitnov himself.

Next Friday, look out for the story of the record that showed there are no limits before the human. That technology simply creates new possibilities for us, which we have to learn to use. And all of it… thanks to a remarkable 13-year-old kid nicknamed Blue Scuti.

What will the future look like?

What would life in the 21st century be, seen through the telescope of Bulgarian journalists and science fiction writers of the 1980s? There is plenty to surprise us. Ahead lie five brilliant insights, five dashed hopes and five… particularly interesting and important reasons to stop and think.

“The new generations of machines and programs are closing in on the long-dreamed-of artificial intelligence. Naturally, we do not yet know to what extent human thinking and machine thinking overlap, but what matters is not how computers think, but the very fact that they can imitate mental activity.”

No, these are not the words of yet another user enchanted by ChatGPT. They come from the collection Silueti na XXI vek (Silhouettes of the 21st Century). The book came out in 1986, and its authors were Dimitar Peev, Agop Melkonyan and Vasil Dimitrov. Their names are familiar to every curious Bulgarian reader over forty, and to every connoisseur of Bulgarian science fiction.

On the eve of the New Year, it is more than interesting to dig into their insights. With our eyes on the future, let us wonder… what is really coming our way?

1. As Many Artificial Brains as Natural Ones

“In the 21st century, we will devote the greatest part of our free time to the computer. Its low price, ease of use and versatility make it not only accessible to all, but more than necessary. At this pace of development, by the beginning of the second millennium there will be as many artificial brains as natural ones.

The ways to use it are simply countless! The computer will be a household butler, a cooking adviser, a teacher for the children, a telephone directory and every other kind of directory, a librarian, a calculator, a consultant on work matters, a home translator and who knows what else. Even today, children in the developed countries spend several hours a day in useful communion with the know-it-all called the personal computer. For them, who will live in the 21st century, the computer will be as necessary as bread.”

And so we begin with the five undeniable insights among the authors’ expectations. The collection describes its genre as “essays on the future, science, technology, the Earth, outer space, man, society and culture,” and it gathers short texts by the three authors that sum up what they expected from the 21st century.

And here we are, about to close its first quarter. And the computer really is… as necessary as bread; on this one, the forecast proved shrewd. What will the next one be?

2. The Fiddler Agronomist

“An essential feature of people’s working lives at the end of the 21st century is that they will change their ‘professions’ many times over. We put this word in quotation marks because by then it will have a new ring to it: not one of duty, but rather of pleasure, of inner need. Today an agronomist is an agronomist (normally for life), and a violinist is a violinist. A hundred years from now, a person will change occupations (each time after brief retraining), will be an agronomist, a factory worker, a space pilot, a livestock specialist, a metallurgist and a designer, all the while remaining a musician and, let us say, a painter. Only in this way will ‘labor turn into song,’ and the worker into a well-rounded, harmoniously developed personality.”

I have already written about what Western and Soviet science fiction writers expected today to look like—here, and specifically in the field of information technology—here. The next digital story, coming right after the New Year, will be the view of futurologist Assoc. Prof. Mariana Todorova on what the future truly holds for us.

The fact is that today technology is turning the professions of the future into an enigma, changing the way we learn, and raising important questions that the quote above captures among the silhouettes with more than a little precision. Well, with the slight caveat that not all of us are space pilots, but… we will get to that topic too.

3. Every Forecast Is Inaccurate

“In recent decades, human life has changed radically, beyond recognition. Some even question humanity’s ability to adapt to these shockingly rapid changes. And so we all ask ourselves: where is our civilization headed? Will it not run out of breath from its own desire for progress? Will it be able to make sense of its own claims to a reasonable and prosperous life? And most important: does knowledge not carry within itself the seed of destruction, of doom?

Every forecast is inaccurate. And the more distant it is, the more inaccurate it becomes. We, the authors, understand this perfectly well. As people of the 20th century, we carry the limited notions of our time. That is why, besides scientifically grounded forecasts, the essays also contain intuitively sensed predictions and, of course, fragments of our dreams. We see nothing wrong in this. In our vision, the 21st century will be a grand, majestic hymn to the victories of reason, so it cannot fail to hold at least a tiny bit of our dreams.”

Yes, as you leaf through the pages, it is easy to be amused by the unrealistic expectations—turning the Earth into a garden, conquering space, the development of humans as a biological species. Technologies like cold fusion… Still, it is hard not to appreciate the dreams as well.

It is important to say a few words about the people behind these forecasts. I knew them myself when I was a kid; the lead author used to fold paper airplanes for me in the newsroom of the popular science newspaper Orbita, a symbol of its era in its own way.

All three authors were longtime journalists at that paper, where most of the collected essays were first published.

Agop Melkonyan (1949–2006) was a well-known science fiction writer, translator and journalist. An engineer by training, he spent many years writing about the technologies that change us. He wrote novels, novellas, short stories, plays and screenplays.

Dimitar Peev (1919–1996) was a science fiction writer, a journalist and… a doctor of criminal law. The founder and first editor-in-chief of the legendary magazine Kosmos, he headed the popular science newspaper Orbita for many years.

The third co-author, Vasil Dimitrov (b. 1944), was their colleague, a journalist, and the book’s editor was my teacher in journalism, the “father” of Inspector Strezov, Dr. Svetoslav Slavchev, who will get a digital story of his own.

4. Supermodel: An Electronic Oracle

“The mathematical modeling of biological processes will in all likelihood lead to the creation of forecasting equipment whose capabilities can be compared to a kind of electronic oracle. Let us imagine that a patient’s data are entered into a computer that models his physiological processes down to the smallest detail in real time.

The possibilities of mathematical modeling are enormous. It will make it possible to test structures that have been designed but not yet built, whose realization as a prototype is too expensive and whose proper functioning is of particular importance. Such devices will include, for example, industrial reactors for controlled thermonuclear fusion or certain types of spacecraft. One cannot say that mathematical modeling is underestimated today, but its truly widespread use in almost all areas of science, technology and other fields will become a reality only in the 21st century.”

And so we have reached the epicenter of today’s big topics, His Majesty Artificial Intelligence. After all, machine learning, deep neural networks and the much-talked-about large language models are precisely the next stages in the development of mathematical modeling.

Yes, you could rightly point out again that we use them neither for thermonuclear reactors nor for space stations. But, paradoxically or not, it is a billionaire who came from the world of information technology that the United States owes its return to space.

So the world of information technology turns out to have been hit rather squarely by the pens of the three authors. And before we get to the predictions that proved too optimistic, let us credit one more of their insights—about the way we communicate today.

5. Home… Office?!

“Some fifty years ago, messages were mostly in written form. In fifty years, or even less, they will be audiovisual. We have no reason whatsoever to doubt this. The videophone will connect us acoustically and visually with friends and loved ones. Add to that the laser gramophone, color music, three-dimensional television, the visual image synthesizer, perfect home sound systems—how could anyone possibly be bored?”

Communicating online?! Yes, there was no way they could have guessed filter bubbles or the hate, but it seems we can see life today here, in the world of Skype and Facebook…

“Electronic computing technology, among other things, also provides the possibility of performing certain tasks remotely. Clearly, for the draftsman of the future it will make no difference where he works—in the drafting room or at home. The same can be said for the engineer, the architect and anyone else whose functions can be performed remotely. Not to mention writers, journalists and other creative people. A person working from home has a number of advantages. Above all, he becomes his own direct boss, and this is of great importance for the creative process. He becomes, to a certain extent, master of his own time, and this is a stimulus for very high levels of creative activity.”

I don’t know about the draftsman, but as both a journalist and a programmer I can say firsthand that the “home office” turned out to be a blessing. And one of the most unexpected consequences of COVID…

But speaking of COVID… the authors clearly had a soft spot for positive forecasts, and no pandemic of the kind appears anywhere in the 21st century as they saw it. Which brings us to five of the directions in their musings that, at least for now, look light-years away from reality…

1. Pencho, Don’t Write

“The unlimited growth of general knowledge means an unlimited growth in the knowledge of each individual scientist. How is the poor brain to cope? Statistics show that to keep up with the news in his field, a physicist must read at least six hours a day. So when is he supposed to work and make discoveries?

Forecasts indicate that the information explosion is a temporary phenomenon that will gradually be brought under control by the beginning of the 21st century. The number of publications will be reined in and will become commensurate with the number of new findings. If articles are reviewed more strictly, if public appearance ceases to be a measure of prestige or a condition for administrative advancement, publications will decline on their own.”

The information explosion is a temporary phenomenon. If only, but… at least for now, it shows no sign of being one. We don’t even have to remember things ourselves anymore; we delegate that too to the machines. We are sunk in an ocean of information, drowning in it, and it is changing us both as a society and as a species. Perhaps a happy ending still lies in the foreseeable future? And, at least in my view, it runs through the next forms of media…

2. Thermonuclear Sahara

“The first and most vital task of our descendants in the 21st century in improving the Earth will undoubtedly be the elimination of dead territories, of deserts, and especially of those areas where the sun shines generously and all that remains to turn them into gardens is to add water. And the most grandiose task our grandchildren will have to take on is the Sahara Desert. Imagine 70 countries the size of our homeland, but entirely made of dead sand and stone, among which barely three million people eke out a miserable existence. And now let us peek into the 21st century and imagine that same territory entirely covered with lush vegetation, with forests and pastures, with blooming gardens, where at least a billion people can live freely.”

We are doing such a fine job of improving the Earth that 40 years later we have had two nuclear disasters, we still threaten one another with atomic weapons, we argue over monuments, we split into good guys and bad guys… Meanwhile, the global South is still mired in the same poverty, hunger stalks many places on the planet, wars break out, people kill each other…

And the Sahara stays unimproved, with no “blooming gardens.” Maybe technological evolution simply makes us think of ourselves as something more than mortal beings? Maybe the writers of that era were prone to unfounded optimism? Or maybe the sands are there waiting for the return of a little curly-haired blond boy who will remind us that we can and must be better…

3. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

“In the 21st century, the Moon will become the main (if not the only) base of astronomy. With the supergiant telescopes to be built there, it will be possible to observe across all ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, to study primary cosmic rays and neutrino fluxes. This will enrich our knowledge of the stars and of the galaxy, and we will try to observe its hypothetical boundaries.

Based on the fantastic successes of Soviet and American spaceflight over the past 20 to 30 years, and especially if reason prevails and the two superpowers agree to limit their military spending and join forces to conquer space, we can be in no doubt that this program will not only be carried out but may be considerably expanded: to settle even the most distant regions of the Solar System, and to make it common practice for ‘private individuals’ to travel into outer space and to Lunograd, and even to Mars.”

How do you like Lunograd? For my part, what strikes me as especially perceptive here is the aside—“if reason prevails…” Science fiction writers are evidently inclined to overestimate this reason. How would they have reacted if someone had told them that no human foot has set down on our natural satellite for 50 years now? And that national space programs are ever more divided, ever more lacking in ambition and long-term vision. Of course, we are learning more and more about the universe, thanks in part to technology… But the human side remains mostly in the sometimes crazy dreams of today’s “visionaries.”

4. Current and Wire

“The general line of the 21st century in the field of energy will undoubtedly be the gradual reduction in the use of chemical fuels (gas, oil, coal) until their complete exclusion from the energy balance. Not only do they pollute nature, but they are also the most valuable raw material for synthetic chemistry.

The most promising ‘fuel’ of the future is probably the controlled thermonuclear reaction—the synthesis of helium from deuterium (heavy hydrogen). In the first decades, semi-industrial installations will start operating, and by 2020 the first thermonuclear power plants will come online.

Another path that may be taken is the compact, high-capacity battery. It is hard to imagine a better engine than the electric one—silent, safe, harmless, the simplest to build and control. Going by current standards, it will be enough for a charged battery providing a 1,000 km range to weigh no more than 30–50 kg. Add to this the huge advantage that it can be charged ‘at home.’”

Are we sure Musk never read the Orbita newspaper? Yes, thanks in large part to Tesla, electric cars are already here and will clearly change the way we get around more and more (especially with the development of autonomous cars). Interestingly, even their technical specs are not that far from the prediction (except, of course, for the weight of the battery).

As for the rest, about the polluting chemical fuels… despite some timid steps, the goal of doing without them remains far too vague and distant.

5. Across the Endless Expanses

“It can be expected that in the next decade (before the end of our century) the first cosmonauts will set foot on the Marxian surface, and in the 21st century a permanent settlement with a research station will be founded there. Then the question will be settled once and for all whether specific microorganisms exist on Mars, and what the prospects are of using their genetic basis, or of combining them with terrestrial microorganisms, to create new active microcultures that would have a noticeable effect on the climate and living conditions on Mars.”

Sorry for steering you toward space again, but that really is where the gap between expectation and reality is most glaring. (I wonder whether it’s by chance that they write about the “Marxian” surface?!)

From here we move on to five big themes and questions from the book that are well worth asking ourselves today, now that we are nearly a quarter of the way through the much-vaunted 21st century.

1. Free Time Is a Blessing

“According to studies by Western sociologists, almost 70 percent of young people spend their time after the end of the workday exclusively on pleasures—aimlessly wandering around tables with a glass in hand, wearily hopping about on the dance floor. The consequences are obvious: idleness breeds crime, from drug addiction to serious punishable offenses. And more: vagrancy, sexual licentiousness, hooliganism, ultra-left and ultra-right extremism.

Man’s old dream—to sweat less for his daily bread—turned out in fact to be a double-edged sword. The person freed from labor embraced the idea of dolce far niente, and then encroached on the freedom of others. A huge part of the workforce had to reorient itself toward the service sector (bartenders, disc jockeys and so on), immorality was spontaneously born (sex shops, familyless free-love communities), and ‘covert suicides’ rose (opiates, alcoholism, serious venereal diseases).

It became more than clear: free time is a blessing only if it is given meaning.”

And indeed! With the arrival of ever newer technologies, we have more and more free time, which definitely “is a blessing only if it is given meaning.” Do we give it meaning? Will we learn to “laze around” creatively and fully? How will we answer our natural instinct to trust unconditionally everything that makes life easier? And how will the structure of society change when it no longer needs quite so much labor?

2. Sense and Sensibility

“However staggering the achievements of the human mind, today they do not arouse much enthusiasm. Why? Simply because it turned out that in many of its manifestations the noosphere is directed against the biosphere and is destroying it. The facts are so numerous and so categorical that there is hardly any need to list them. The trouble lies not only in polluted waters, felled forests or extinct animal species. What is more frightening is that through its deeds reason threatens its own existence, because the noosphere is inside the biosphere and cannot survive without it.”

What are the causes of the ecological crisis? The American scientist B. Commoner lists most of them: the rapid growth of the population, the overproduction of luxury goods (that is, goods not vital to life), the innate aggressiveness of the human race, bad upbringing, new technologies, the pursuit of profit, the bureaucratic organization of society, militarization, and even… the Christian religion, according to which nature is man’s servant. We can agree with some of these, with others only partially. What is sadder is that the overall conclusion is irrefutable.”

It is so intuitive to seek symbiosis with nature, isn’t it? And yet technology often takes us further away from it. And makes us neglect the big problems we are creating on this small planet, our only possible home for now…

3. So Long, Humans!

“And now, at the dawn of the scientific and technological revolution, we are witnessing the birth of a new sphere, the information sphere, or in short, the infosphere, and its offspring, which we could call machina sapiens if it did not already have an established name—the computer.

The invention of the computer is not the creation of yet another machine. It is a cosmic phenomenon, a cosmic miracle, equivalent to the emergence of life in the universe. And someday it may happen that we humans perish, while computers go on existing without us, independently, as the only representatives of reason in the Galaxy.

What today’s computer is—large or small, meant for games or for research, serving production or everyday life—we are gradually beginning to learn. I hope that soon we will grow as used to it as we are used to the telephone, the television and… why not, our pet dog.

Gradually, the ‘miracle machine’ is becoming a necessity for every factory. This is how humanity will enter the 21st century, which will undoubtedly be the century of computerization.”

We managed one part beautifully—accepting the computer as a friend, as… our pet dog. But are we not on the way to creating something bigger and more frightening? Something that may not only imitate us and overtake us in its development, but also deem us unnecessary? And remain as the only representative of reason in the galaxy…

And speaking of the galaxy, have you noticed that in recent years, with the new “big threat”—artificial general intelligence—we have somehow forgotten about the aliens?

4. Electronic Art

“The next stage will be tied to the efforts of ‘electronic art’ to find new means of expression. In all likelihood, new arts firmly bound to computers will emerge. It is difficult now to predict exactly which ones, just as a century ago it was difficult to foresee the advent of cinema. If we take science fiction’s advice, these will probably be arts directly linked to the brain’s imaginative thinking, that is, they will not pass through the filter of the senses.

Probably at the beginning of the next century, visual image synthesizers will be created. The question that provokes the most debate, of course, is: will the computer become a creator? The answer logically requires a second question: what is a creator? If a translator is a creator, why shouldn’t a translator computer be a creator? If arranging musical works is creative work, why shouldn’t computers in the same profession be creators?

We can, of course, say that the computer is not a creator because its activity is unconscious. There is solid logic in this counterargument. Fine, but many creators keep stressing that they, too, work under the influence of unconscious creative impulses. And again a counterargument: a person does not understand how he creates, but he understands that he creates and takes pleasure in his work. Agreed—the computer is not a creator. But it is not a creator today; what about tomorrow?”

And “today” we are still wondering whether it is a creator. The insight about a computer generating images strikes me as brilliant; even two or three years ago it did not seem real, and today it is an undeniable revolution in the way we perceive images.

Meanwhile, we are still looking for the answers: will the computer become a creator? And if so, what is left for us to do…

5. The Sound and the Fury

“In the West, forecasting is usually called ‘futurology,’ and its predictions are usually gloomy, pessimistic, often heralding ruin and doom. We are resolute opponents of such dark views and despair. Our social optimism tells us that reasonable man will find within himself the resolve to overcome every kind of upheaval, crisis and misfortune. Otherwise, our whole history, our millennia of progress, would lose its meaning.

In fact, the gravest crisis is the crisis of the last decade of the 20th century—the risk of self-destruction. All our aspirations for the third millennium can become reality only if we overcome the nuclear threat and the nightmare of star wars. A heavy shadow lies over humanity, but we are deeply convinced that this time, too, Homo sapiens will find the way to salvation.”

Well, of course, the criticism of “evil” Western futurology is understandable here. Unfounded optimism can be a vice too. But what is even more important is that our main reasons for reflection as human beings have not changed one iota.

The end of history was supposed to arrive, wars were supposed to be far behind us, Western-style democratic societies were supposed to reign everywhere… It didn’t turn out that way; great challenges still lie ahead.

Before we part, with no need for any commentary, I leave you with the writers’ farewell words on what the big question of the 21st century is.

“Our imaginary stroll through the 21st century is over. We hope you enjoyed it. Perhaps you managed to glimpse a world you will soon see up close. You will live in this world, you will work in it—wonderful, isn’t it? We, your fathers, envy you.

And there will be a 21st century, and there will be the centuries after it, and humanity will reach its starry triumph only if it finds the little key that opens the little door to goodness. And that little key is called PEACE.”

Two kids become friends over their shared fascination with computers. Then they start their first company together. Less than a decade later, that same company is the first giant of the modern computer age. And while we know a great deal about one of those kids, who for a long time was the richest man on the planet, the story of the other is far less familiar.

None other than the computer specialist Paul Allen, the “godfather” of Microsoft, turned out to be the owner of the most expensive private art collection ever sold. And this happened in November 2022, four years after he left this world. A connoisseur of art, a man smitten with sports, a huge donor to scientific research. He is also the rich man who awakened the modern interest in spaceflight.

At just 29 he learned that he had a deadly illness, and he decided to live the rest of his life the way he had always dreamed.

There is a lot we can learn from the story and the worldview of this unconventional figure. And, even more, we can ask ourselves: what would today’s tech world look like if its other leaders shared his outlook?

Great Expectations

No, no, just picture it. Bill Gates was paid at school to write a program that would schedule the classes. And he wrote it so that in English class he was the only boy, alongside a dozen of the prettiest girls in school. Bill the playboy, good luck…

While he was at Harvard, he spent many nights at the poker club, sometimes losing hundreds of dollars a night. Perhaps that was when he learned to bluff, which later came in handy at work…

These are the kinds of deliciously curious stories Paul Allen tells in his memoir, Idea Man. And there really is no way to separate his fate from that of his childhood friend. Together they sketch the story of two very different personalities, both of them emblematic of Silicon Valley.

Paul is Bill’s senior by a whole two years.

His mother was a literature teacher, his father a librarian. He kept an exceptionally close and special bond with both of them all his life, and yet… the boy was thrilled by computers rather than books. That is how, at Lakeside School in Seattle, he met the younger kid whose name you know so well.

Especially gifted at writing code, Paul Allen considered himself an artist all his life.

To the Top

In the late 1960s the two often ended up in the school’s computer lab—back then it was anything but easy to get your hands on the grandfathers of today’s computers. The machines there turned out to be rather feeble, so the kids set their sights on the University of Washington. But there too, as if it were a space telescope, you only got limited access.

Bill and Paul, however, were hackers, and they tried to cheat the system… but they weren’t good enough. They were caught and punished with a ban on using the computers.

So the two of them joined Bill’s best childhood friend, Kent Evans, in a computer club. It would be decades before a profession devoted to this work appeared—QA—but the three kids were given the task of hunting for bugs in the programs of the local computer center, and in return they were granted extra hours to tinker on the machines.

Sadly, at only 17, Kent died in a mountain climbing accident. That brought Bill and Paul even closer, and they carried on together.

Pride and Prejudice

Paul was admitted to Washington State University with a perfect score. But he found it dull and dropped out after his second year to become a programmer—at a time when that was a rather exotic profession, in the strange era of dinosaur computers.

As luck would have it, his first job was at Honeywell, whose offices were near Harvard, the very university young Bill had just entered.

It was Paul who persuaded him to drop out as well, so that together they could start something entirely different. And it was Paul, again, who suggested naming the venture Microsoft—combining microcomputers and software.

We still have much to learn about those times that laid the foundations of the modern computer world. What is certain is that the two young entrepreneurs were enormously lucky to land in the position that would very soon launch them, with a bang, to the top. There is, for instance, the well-known story of Gary Kildall, the computer pioneer who very nearly ended up in their place.

Vanity Fair

The fact remains, though, that Bill and Paul got the incredible chance to offer an operating system for IBM’s new computers, and they pulled it off in the best possible way. All sorts of legends circulate about those days—stolen code, intrigues and other episodes worthy of a soap opera. But many believe the big success came, once again, thanks to Paul and his idea of licensing the rights to the new operating system to their clients instead of selling them.

That is how the first workable MS-DOS ended up on countless computers all over the Earth at exactly the moment they became widely affordable. And from there the road to Windows, the operating system that paved the highway of today’s technology, was quite logical and natural.

Of course, there are equally good arguments that the decisive role belonged to Bill, thanks to his capacity for work and his ruthlessness. He had clearly taken enough useful lessons from poker and knew what he was doing. He worked with endless persistence and expected the same from everyone else.

Another story, also told by Paul, has become legendary: his partner ran into one of the lead programmers, who had worked 81 hours over the previous four days, rushing to finish an important task. And instead of thanking him and congratulating him, or at least asking how he felt, Bill asked: “What are you working on tomorrow?”

Beggarman, Thief

Yes, Paul later wrote that working with Bill was sometimes like being in hell, and that he had a very domineering nature. Yet after Paul’s death, Gates admitted that “Microsoft would have never happened without Paul.”

Somewhere around then the two friends’ paths parted. It was 1982, seven years after the company was founded. Barely 29, Paul Allen heard the terrifying diagnosis: non-Hodgkin lymphoma. He had to start treatment quickly. He had also sensed that he no longer felt at home in a company that had turned into an empire. And yet, one way or another, he remained part of it—until 2009 he held a formal post from which he shared his experience.

While undergoing treatment, he had plenty of time to think about what really matters in life. And so came the conversation with his childhood friend in which the time arrived to part ways. The two had agreed earlier that Bill would hold the larger share of the stock, but now Bill offered to buy all of Paul’s shares at $5 apiece. Paul said a fair price would be nearly double. They parted on bad terms, even though at that moment Paul’s future was uncertain as he faced the fearsome disease. With the help of his new partner, Bill managed to push his childhood friend into the background.

But what matters is that Paul proved stronger than the illness. Radiation and chemotherapy worked, and the lymphoma was beaten. The cancer would return decades later, but he used every moment of those years to spend them the way he had dreamed. Because once you have looked death in the eye, you know that what matters is not money but the days you leave behind.

Be a Bulgarian, Jeeves

The shares Bill Gates had begrudged buying kept piling up value, year after year. Thanks to them, in 2006 Paul Allen was the sixth-richest person in the world, with a fortune of $20 billion.

But Bill is hardly that upset. In recent years he has stubbornly tried to step into the role of philanthropist, a fighter against epidemics, which has earned him mostly… the lead role in conspiracy theories about how he will control us through chips in vaccines.

Meanwhile, the halo of the philanthropist stayed with Paul, even if it didn’t draw nearly as many eyes.

What if they had swapped roles? Would kindhearted Paul have been so brutal with the competition, so tireless, while the foundations of the Microsoft empire were being poured in the 1990s?

We can only guess and, above all, trust fate, which knows its business. Because here is what Paul Allen achieved in those 36 years that fate “gifted” him.

Wuthering Heights

He died of that same non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2018, at 65, despite the doctors’ more optimistic outlook this time. He had heard the grim diagnosis for the second time in 2009.

And then, in November 2022, his name was back at the top of the news. $1,622,249,500—that was the sum fetched by 155 works of art from Paul’s collection. The auction broke many records: the collection became the most expensive in history, and five paintings went for over $100 million—two by Georges Seurat and one each by Gauguin, Cézanne and Van Gogh. Every single work sold, two-thirds of them above their estimates.

All the money will go to charity, just as the late billionaire’s will stipulates.

The only serious relationship of his life came in his early twenties; he even got engaged. But the girl decided she was too young to marry, they split, and from then on, many say, he lived the life of a recluse.

Though he was a great lover of art and enjoyed stories about love, he never found it himself, and he left this world alone, without a family of his own.

The Sign of Four

It is very rare for someone to know what to do with a vast amount of money and to actually have it at the same time. Well, our hero is one of the few examples. Brace yourselves—the list is long.

Allen amassed serious wealth through various entrepreneurial ventures with the help of Vulcan, the company created to manage his fortune. Thanks to farsighted investments in real estate, internet access networks and a range of technologies, the estate keeps swelling even today, after his death. There was also a strong emphasis on invention—Allen’s companies hold more than 400 patents in all sorts of technological fields.

It is worth mentioning that both in his lifetime and today, the person closest to him, his sister Jody Allen, has played a large role in all his undertakings. After his death she became the trustee of his estate, most of which is earmarked for charity.

It is believed, for example, that her love of cinema is why the producing of Hollywood films made it onto the company’s enormous list of activities. Among the films they made are some that won Grammy and Emmy awards.

Paradise Lost

And yes, if you imagine that a tech person must be far removed from art, here is one stereotype that can go to the movies and watch the films Paul created. Or to an exhibition—we have already talked about his collection.

Paul also loved music. He got his first guitar at just 16 and dreamed of being the next Jimi Hendrix. Well, for better or worse, things didn’t quite turn out that way. Still, he fulfilled that dream too, at least to the extent of one album.

Sports were another big chapter of his life. Paul was a yachtsman himself; his last boat, 126 meters long, was called Octopus and until recently ranked among the 20 longest motor yachts in the world—with two helicopters and its own mini-submarine. Every year, during the Cannes festival, he threw famous parties aboard, where he played guitar.

In 1988 he bought the NBA team the Portland Trail Blazers, which reached the league finals twice under his ownership. For a time he also owned an American football team, the Seattle Seahawks, and a soccer team in the American league, the Seattle Sounders.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Space was another great love of the entrepreneur. He was the sole investor in SpaceShipOne, the first commercial project to send a human into suborbital space. It was not only a huge success but, in its own way, it led the charge before the next big Silicon Valley investors in the field arrived, people like Musk and Bezos.

In his lifetime Allen gave more than $2.6 billion to various forms of charity related to science, technology, biodiversity conservation and medicine.

He founded a number of his own research institutions. The Institute for Brain Science came about after his mother showed the first symptoms of dementia. Facing the problem firsthand gave him the push to fund research in that direction. That is also where his largest single donation went: half a billion dollars.

$2 million went to a new library at the University of Washington. It bears the name of his father, Kenneth Allen, who had once headed that very library.

He funded a team that found an aircraft carrier lost in World War II. $7 million went to protecting elephants. Because of his donations to nature research, a species of fly bears his name.

Allen donated to the SETI program, which aims to search for extraterrestrial life. With $100 million, he was also the biggest benefactor in the fight against the Ebola virus in West Africa.

As You Like It

His vision also shows in the creation of an institute dedicated specifically to artificial intelligence research, long before the field gained its current fame.

“No one really knows what it would take to create something that is self-aware or has a personality,” he said on the subject. “Still, I can imagine a day when perhaps, if we manage to understand how the human brain works, it might be possible. But that is a long, long road…”

One more thing. Once enough years had passed, Paul forgave his childhood friend Bill for their bitter split. As early as the late 1980s the two jointly donated $2.2 million to the school where they had met. And so, somehow fittingly, the circle closed.

“As long as we work together—both quickly and decisively—there are no limits to what we can achieve,” said Paul Allen.

What might have turned out differently in this story, and how, is an intriguing question whose answer we can never know. But still: what will history say? Who is the greater visionary—Bill, who built the most powerful company of his time, or Paul, who devoted himself to living the way he believed in? I leave the answer to you…

– What made you turn to this particular subject?

– This subject has been central to Bulgarian archaeology for as long as it has existed as a branch of historical knowledge—for nearly a century and a half. And before that it was present in the inquiries of European scholarship for at least as long again:

from the 18th century onward, science has studied, with scientific methods, the past of the old peoples of the continent, and of the Bulgarians in particular.

On top of that, it was highly controversial in academic circles, at least until recently, which makes it all the more interesting. It was also a favorite subject of my academic supervisor, Assoc. Prof. Stefka Angelova—an astonishing person and a superb scholar, who sparked my interest in Late Antiquity, the period when the Proto-Bulgarians took shape.

– Did you find an unambiguous answer to the question for yourself? Can we say there is some kind of consensus among historians today?

– Our job as scholars is to seek answers not for ourselves but for society, by summarizing masses of data and adding new ones. Personal inquiries and interests cannot replace the public duties of historical knowledge.

The principle, moreover, is that the material leads us, and that is what I have done in my latest book, The Origin of the Bulgarians: The Debate in the 21st Century.

A consensus, at least in Bulgarian medieval archaeology, has been built largely thanks to the enormous achievements of our late colleague Rasho Rashev. For years he gathered the data on the Bulgarians in the Hunnic and post-Hunnic era—what later became Old Great Bulgaria and, finally, Danubian Bulgaria.

Abroad, things are still lagging a little, but recently the Encyclopaedia Britannica changed its article on the Proto-Bulgarians, based on a study of ours from 2019 with ancient genomes from various sources. We expect the outdated views on the subject to be abandoned in all the major scholarly schools around the world in the coming years, and this process is already visible.

– What did they change?

– Their article on the Proto-Bulgarians, whom until recently they described as Turkic, now also lays out the Sarmatian hypothesis. The change came mainly because of the genetic data.

– An interview on this subject on this very site, which is about technology, became the most-read piece. Why are people so passionately interested in the origin of our people nearly a millennium and a half ago?

– It is normal for everyone to wonder where they come from and where they are going. Besides, we are

in a period of heightened instability and uncertainty, and people want to draw emotional calm from the past.

But sometimes this urge becomes too strong, and then things get muddled. The past is a wonderful teacher for the present and the future, but it cannot take over their place in our minds.

Our first and main task is to live as good people here and now, and to draw valuable lessons and moral frameworks from the past.

– And why are we so obsessed with proving how ancient we are?

– Some people, or even groups of people, need to escape the problems of the present, or their own problems, into fantasy realities or even fantasy versions of the past. It makes them feel better, calms them down, dulls their anxiety. It is something like Fromm’s “escape from freedom,” a kind of captivating self-deception that is more pleasant or more interesting than the objective truth, or even than banal everyday life… Other people are bored or dissatisfied with their professions and look for a stage in the seemingly easy field of history. And there are far more dangerous obsessions than wanting to be the first humans—around the world there are thousands of people consumed by the idea of dangerous aliens, reptilians, the flat Earth, and so on.

– Why has the autochthonous theory, the idea that we have always lived here, become so fashionable among “online experts” in recent years?

– It has always been around in one form or another, here and everywhere in the world. It is a consequence of how the human mind works. Wherever there are people, there are some among them who want to be the first in a given place. From the old pun “etruski—eto russkie” (“Etruscans” read as “here are the Russians”), through the “Illyrism” of Mavro Orbini with the Slavs as the first people, and other such notions, to the drive to present Cleopatra, a Greek woman, as an autochthonous ruler of local African origin.

Besides,

various groups and players invest heavily in “Thracedonism,” just as they once invested in “Macedonism”—the push for a separate, non-Bulgarian Macedonian identity—with the aim of eroding Bulgarian communal consciousness and creating separatism.

A society confused about its history and identity is easier to manipulate, or even to conquer in a military situation.

The natural interest in the Thracians and their culture is exploited in an underhanded, mostly commercial, way. The Thracians were an earlier wave of Indo-Europeans, but, just like the Proto-Bulgarians, they were conquerors and settlers who came into contact with the local population and formed new communities that are fascinating for history. For some, though, they are simply a chance for easy profits with large print runs. People who would not pass even their first-year exams churn out pseudo-scholarly works, and thousands of others buy them and accept them uncritically.

– What do we really know today about the origin of the Bulgarians that we did not know a decade ago?

– We know a lot, because

science has acquired new and powerful methods—from laser systems for recording inscriptions and images to genome sequencers

of the third generation, with powerful software for comparing populations. In recent years several new necropolises have been excavated here, and quite a few in Hungary, Ukraine, the Caucasus and elsewhere. So the empirical base is growing noticeably, which allows for more solid conclusions.

– Why do we focus so much on the origin of the Bulgarians alone, and not on the other ethnic groups that also became part of the First Bulgarian State?

– Because they were the most important, and because, unlike the Khazars, the Avars and many other mighty peoples, they did not merely survive—they created lasting societies and states. Because they created our state, too—Bulgaria—and a substantial trace of them remains in our genome. Because they managed to build models of partnership with other peoples and became co-creators of Orthodox civilization. In short—because they are fascinating to study in every respect, and they inhabited fascinating regions.

– Which theories were once current but have now been rejected?

– The theories are all sorts. Finno-Ugric, Hunnic, Turkic, local, “Gothic,” Sarmatian, a more distant Iranian one—the so-called Bactrian—and so on.

Most have been rejected because they are highly speculative and rest on scant data, mainly linguistic.

In the 18th century, for instance, because of Volga Bulgaria and a few titles, they were thought to be Turks or Huns of Turkic origin. Some of the theories contain grains of truth. But by and large, until the middle of the 20th century, when the Proto-Bulgarian necropolises began to be discovered, it was all mostly a collection of speculations based on individual words and terms.

– Can a subject like this be examined apart from politics?

– It can, as long as science is not handed down postulates like the communist-era one about “the developed Slavs.” Since 1989 scholarship in Bulgaria has worked freely on this subject, and around the world people like Maenchen-Helfen and other great minds have never been victims of any suggestion or dictate.

– Compared with the neighboring peoples, do we know more or less about our ancient origin?

– Some 97 to 98 percent of today’s Europeans share a common Indo-European origin and an interconnected history, so it is hard to speak of more or less in that shared history. Some have simply achieved more historically and culturally, others less.

– How has technology helped in recent years?

– It supplements information and provides new kinds of information that simply did not exist twenty or so years ago. Genetics, for example, has displaced anthropology with its mathematically precise data. We have access to practically the entire scholarly literature, including unfamiliar sources and studies.

– What is the short answer—Turks, Huns, Sarmatians? Or are there no short answers in science, unlike on Facebook?

– In science there are objectively verifiable answers with many nuances, often like a palette of many colors bleeding into one another,

and the truth is that we, today’s Bulgarians, went through a complex and lengthy process of ethnogenesis in the past, with various components taking part. Our forefathers themselves—the Proto-Bulgarians—went through several stages of ethnogenesis.

– Did genetic research change the paradigm on the question of origin, or rather confirm what we already knew?

– Of course it changed everything, because through it we can now test the two main hypotheses that have survived the trials of time—the Turkic and the Sarmatian. Genetics comes down quite unambiguously in favor of the second. It also lets us date the stages of contact quite precisely.

– “Sarmatians” is certainly not a very familiar term. What do we know about this people whose heirs we turn out to be?

– The Sarmatians are not a people but a vast group of tribes, mainly from the Iranian branch of the Indo-European peoples, related to the older Scythian tribes. All these diverse tribes—Scythians and Sarmatians—left solid traces in the genetic and cultural heritage of today’s Europe, and especially of Eastern Europe.

The name of the Danube, for example, is probably of Scythian origin, from the word for “water.” The subject is endless, but even in our everyday language, in ordinary words like kuche (dog), bate (big brother) and tate (dad), we find traces of the ancient peoples you are asking about. But we archaeologists always prefer a different kind of trace—the artifacts of the past and their makers are our main occupation.

– As technology develops, can it give us more answers about the origin of the Bulgarians? In what direction should we expect them?

– Right now, in partnership with Harvard University, we are building a database of fully sequenced genomes. Besides the Bulgarians, we will be able to dive into subjects such as the Thracians, the Slavs, the population of the Roman era, and so on.

– What do we know today about the proportions of the “three ingredients”—Thracians, Proto-Bulgarians and Slavs?

– In my book I have described everything available so far on the course and scale of the contacts and the mixing. It cannot be told within a single interview. But we can give the broadest outlines: that the Bulgarians are predominantly Indo-Europeans, that the Proto-Bulgarians were far more numerous than was once thought, and that they had early contacts with the Slavs.

– What are the biggest questions that remain open?

– The mixed elite, the spoken language or languages, the early contacts with the Slavs, and others. The role of the Hunnic ruling clique, the origin of the Slavs themselves.

– If today we have a relatively clear and dominant theory of the origin of the Proto-Bulgarians, what does the history of these ancestors of ours look like before they came here? How far back can we go in the search?

– Separate studies have yet to be written on the most ancient history, because

only now, with the help of archaeology and paleogenetics, will we be able to identify the cultures to which the roots of the Proto-Bulgarians before the 5th century are linked.

– How do ancient and present-day Bulgarians differ most genetically?

– We closely resemble the medieval Bulgarians, and the Proto-Bulgarians as well, but they lack our Slavic component and the signal from the local population.

However, we are able to distinguish the signals and date their appearance, and we can state that the “Proto-Bulgarian line” is very strongly represented in today’s Bulgarians.

– Based on what we know, which modern peoples are our closest “relatives”?

– Modern Bulgarians occupy a special, borderline place in the map of European populations, together with the other Balkan peoples, especially the Romanians, the North Macedonians, the Croats and others. We can say that the Proto-Bulgarians and the Slavs left us a noticeable closeness to our present-day neighbors, with whom we have had, and still have, long-lasting contacts at the population level.

– Archaeological finds, genetics, onomastics, linguistics, ancient sources—which of these gives us the most information in the search for our origin? And since they complement one another, which “weighs” more as an argument?

– Ethnicity is a cultural category; it exists in people’s minds, so history and archaeology are the leading disciplines, and the others are complementary.

– Among the hundreds of scholars who have contributed to the answer—your book alone has almost 40 pages of bibliography!—do a few stand out as the ones we owe the most?

– Unquestionably, names like Stancho Vaklinov, Veselin Beshevliev, Rasho Rashev and others are the ones to whom we owe the core of our systematic knowledge. In a sense, the book was created in their honor, and especially in honor of Rashev, who was and remains for me the greatest and most prolific researcher of the ancient Bulgarians. Had he not died tragically, he would probably have produced even more fundamental works like the ones I have built on in my own inquiries.

– What, in your view, is your book’s most important contribution to the subject?

– That for the first time all the archaeological data have been brought together and combined with a substantial volume of genomic data into a large, systematic picture. And that a team of reviewers and consultants worked toward this result, helping me to prepare and present, for the first time, various models with data.

– After everything we know on the subject today, should we drastically rewrite the textbooks from which this period is taught?

– Corrections are needed, but “rewrite” sounds rather radical. By and large the essentials are there, but some aspects need correcting.

The textbooks are broadly accurate as far as the medieval history of Bulgaria and the Bulgarians is concerned.

Do you know who the first astronaut from Africa, the second most populous continent on the planet, was?

Let Google or ChatGPT answer that one; I will tell you who it could have been. Because of all the eternal stories, there is one we underestimate most often. Let us saddle Rocinante, greet an illegally young Dulcinea and chase the windmills of the Solar System!

The renowned hidalgo Don Quixote, a few centuries later, is Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, the inventor who… very nearly beat the US and the USSR in their battle for space!

Jason and the Astronauts

October 30, 1964. Time magazine reports on yet another African country that has won its independence. The recent British colony of Northern Rhodesia wakes up one morning as independent Zambia, led by Kenneth David Kaunda, “the son of a Presbyterian preacher and a former teacher who plays the guitar, does not smoke and is a teetotaler.”

“Zambia: Tomorrow, the Moon” is the title of the enthusiastic piece, written in the spirit of Bulgaria’s own Dela i dokumenti (Deeds and Documents) features of the same years. It tells in detail of the history and geography of the newborn country, of its people and its economic prospects. But why the Moon? The answer comes only in the last paragraph.

“During the independence celebrations, only one notable Zambian failed to share the general enthusiasm. He is Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, a grade-school teacher and director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, who claims the festivities coincided with his space program’s efforts to beat the US and the Soviet Union to the Moon.

Nkoloso is training twelve Zambian astronauts, among them a plump 16-year-old girl, by spinning them around a tree in an oil drum and teaching them to walk on their hands, because that is the only way humans can walk on the Moon.”

Check with a Pawn

How does a serious piece in a respected magazine end in such a surreal way?

Well, over the following years Edward, who had made up his mind to go to the Moon (and then to Mars), became a darling of the Western media.

And how could it be otherwise?

Just picture it. The US and the USSR are pouring enormous sums and concentrating their efforts at the height of the great space race, while our friend Edward is convinced he will beat them both.

Twelve Angry Men

He set up his space center on an abandoned farm 11 kilometers from the capital, Lusaka. The training of the 12 future Afronauts included rolling down a hill inside 200-liter oil drums—which, according to the Zambian von Braun, was ideal preparation for life in weightlessness and then for the trip back to Earth.

“I also make them swing on the end of a long rope,” he told a reporter. “When they reach the highest point, I cut the rope. This produces the feeling of free fall.”

The “Afronauts,” as Nkoloso himself christened them, wore uniforms of green satin jackets and yellow trousers, because “when we are not space cadets, we are the Dynamite rock band.”

The first goal was the Moon, and the next, of course, Mars. And after that a star station named after Edward’s dog, Cyclops.

The Gods Must Always Be Crazy

The rocket meant to carry them to these lofty goals was named after President Kenneth David Kaunda. D-Kalu 1 measured 2 by 3 meters, was shaped like a drum and was made of copper and aluminum. It was scheduled to blast off into space on the national holiday itself, from the central Independence Stadium in Lusaka.

It never became quite clear what exactly the Afronauts were training for, since the only passengers planned for D-Kalu were the first African woman to travel to the stars—Matha Mwambwa, the 16-year-old mentioned by Time—and Edward’s aforementioned best friend, Cyclops.

On the second stage, toward the Red Planet, they were to be joined by two specially trained cats and a Catholic missionary. Who, in Edward’s words, would unobtrusively present the advantages of his religion to the locals and thus help Zambia become “the dominator of the Seventh Heaven of Interplanetary Space.” All without showing excessive roughness toward the natives.

Edward Scissorhands

At the same time, the Zambian Korolev—as in Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program—invited UNESCO to join the program with a grant of 7 million pounds. He sent official offers to his great rivals as well, the space programs of the USSR and the US. He also invited private investors into the program, which he valued at $1.9 billion.

According to some sources, he did not receive a single dollar; according to others, he got back a check for 10 rupees sent by an Indian child moved by the venture.

And although he was open to help from his colleagues in the two great blocs, Edward said he was taking no sides and would keep his progress secret even if he received the funds. “You cannot trust anyone in a project of this scale. Some of our ideas are far ahead of those of the Americans and the Russians, and I will not let anyone see my rocket plans,” the Afronaut warned.

Zambezi Dream

Sadly, the story has no happy ending. Even before 1969 came along and Edward lost the race to the Moon, unforeseen events took place. Whether or not as part of the training, the first Afronaut woman in space turned out to be pregnant and, since she was still a minor, her parents took her home.

“My astronauts thought they were movie stars. At one point they wanted to be paid,” Edward complained. “Two of my best men took to drink a month ago, and I haven’t seen them since. Another of my Afronauts joined a local dance troupe.”

Little by little the other cadets lost their motivation and left the project, and Edward, without enough support, found himself forced to suspend it for the time being. With the idea of one day resuming his crusade toward the sky.

So, we have had our fun with this surreal plot, but… how serious were the intentions of our Zambian Don Quixote? Was it naivety of cosmic proportions, an attempt at easy money, a peculiar sense of humor? Or perhaps… a different kind of crusade, one for justice?

A Land the Size of a Human Palm

Don’t expect a clear-cut answer. Still, here are a few more facts about our hidalgo to round out the picture.

From an early age Edward was raised on the idea that the country he lived in deserved independence from Great Britain. Even so, he fought for 4 years in the Second World War as part of the Northern Rhodesian British forces. That is why, shortly before his death, he would receive a prestigious Soviet medal for veterans and would even be given the rank of colonel.

He founded a small school where he taught illiterate kids, but the British authorities closed it down. It was precisely this that drove the future conqueror of space into the struggle for his people’s freedom, where, they say, he sometimes showed himself in a less than flattering light. For instance, by leading a group that kidnapped the wife of a British bigwig. But then… it’s not as if Gotse Delchev, the hero of the Macedonian-Bulgarian revolutionary struggle against the Ottomans, didn’t do the same—just ask Miss Stone, the American missionary his men abducted in 1901.

Those days produced other amusing stories too. To avoid being discovered by the British, he sometimes disguised himself as a woman. Once he was so pleased with his disguise that he went around asking the soldiers who this Nkoloso was who was causing them so much trouble.

The War of the Worlds

He organized some of the largest protests against the colonizers. He even spent two years in prison.

The long-awaited independence allowed him to step back into the role of teacher, but, it seems, he was already bored. So he decided to create the National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, which later came to include the Afronaut venture. At the time he also championed the rights of local traditional healers, who, in his view, ought to have the same working conditions as doctors practicing Western medicine.

That he enjoyed well-deserved respect is shown by the fact that after the collapse of the space program, Edward was appointed special representative of the president. His task, moreover, was to work actively to help neighboring peoples who had not yet won their independence.

And wouldn’t it make sense to… put these two motifs together—the fight against the colonizers and the space program?

Over the past decades, the story of the Afronauts has been told often, with an undisguised note of mockery, even by the most respected media in the world. And yet it seems to be something more, as the remarkable article in The New Yorker by Namwali Serpell, a Harvard professor of English literature of Zambian origin, makes clear.

Play the video

Who Doesn’t Know Dulcinea?

The scholar set off on Edward’s trail to uncover what lay beneath the surface of this story, which has become a kind of symbol of her homeland.

The professor dug through numerous documents and letters, and even came across one in which Edward writes to the British queen, urging her to look into the state of the prisons in the empire.

And she reveals to us an exceptionally intelligent man who, even at a fairly advanced age, decided to study law and finished the degree. By no means was he a simpleton who would believe that his homemade rocket would conquer Mars so he could win the locals over to the cause of Catholicism.

“Zambian irony is very subtle,” writes Prof. Serpell. “We don’t have ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ We have two ‘yeses,’ and one of them means ‘no.’”

Could this be where the answer lies?

“Well educated, a veteran of the Second World War, a key figure in the resistance against colonialism in Zambia”—that is how Edward’s son, who bears his name, describes him, and the picture is completed by similar words from many other people.

Zamunda Banana Band

Today we might call the show Edward put on for the Western media skillful trolling—media that arrived with their prejudices about this part of the world. Ready to laugh at the expense of the primitive Zambians, largely illiterate and yet dreaming of space.

Because the project is also a metaphor. For the ugly colonial history of the whole continent, for the Western man’s conviction that he is the center of the Universe.

Has much changed since then? Yes, there are no Afronauts today, but inequality and prejudice are still here, and they show no sign of flying off.

A small example: the world is global and high-tech now, isn’t it? In 2020, 94.6 percent of the inhabitants of North America had internet access, compared with 39.3 percent of those in Africa. And, of course, there is no need to open the subject of hunger and the lack of a future.

Even so, for the Western man the fate of five millionaires who ended up in a submarine of their own free will is a drama, while hardly anyone even hears about a ship that sank off Greece at the same time, with 700 African migrants vanished without a trace.

Meanwhile, the Afronauts have become a pop-culture symbol too.

At the Tip of the Spear

In his last years Edward worked as a security officer at an industrial company. “This is too lowly a job for me, I don’t feel like talking about it,” he told a Zambian reporter in one of his last interviews. In it he spoke far more eagerly about his space adventures. “I have not given up on this project,” he said. “I still have a vision of the future of man. I still feel that man will be able to travel freely from one planet to another.”

Does the astronaut Matha Mwambwa regret that she turned to family life rather than to the Moon? Her trail goes cold. Nor can we ask Edward: he flew off to the sky on March 4, 1989.

So what, the Afronauts never made it to the Moon? Well, Fyut the Little Devil, the imp of children’s stories, did it, as we know. As for whether the Americans made it too, you will meet plenty of skeptics, you know how it is…

And still, Edward’s story is so beautiful. Because dreams are never ridiculous, and they are always worth chasing. Because a person really is as big as their dreams…

– What has technology changed most in our attitude toward history?

– In my view, the most significant change is the opportunity for

every internet user to feel like a participant in the process of making history.

People who are interested, the mass user, have far greater access to sources, to information about archaeological finds, to historical records and scholarly works.

Many people have joined the process of “making historiography” extremely actively. Not simply being a consumer of the “historical product,” but a co-creator of it. Many began contributing to the process of historiographical inquiry and research… Or at least that is how it looks from the outside to the uninitiated viewer.

The time it takes for high-tech innovations to be adopted keeps shrinking, but every new technology coexists with the older ones for a while. Print and other electronic media still have their share in shaping our ideas about the past, but their importance seems to be steadily declining.

– What are the pros and cons of this?

– The pros are for specialists, for people with lasting interests, and also for the mass audience, which has access to the most varied sources just a click away! We are talking about databases of archaeological finds, of historical works, of manuscripts. For example, the digitized archives of the Vatican Library. “A unique treasure” sounds to me like weak and banal words for what you can see there.

The cons are that, somehow, in this process, values got leveled out.

The opinion of someone who has read two, three, five historical studies seems just as valuable as that of someone who has devoted an entire career, an entire life, to researching and interpreting a given problem.

For some of the online “players” in the field of history, the process of making “discoveries” starts to overlap with phenomena like pseudo-influencing and fake news.

Some memes and false pieces of information circulate for years. And despite the endless refutations that the “official” history experts offer, they continue to be taken in, liked, reposted, and they seem to

become part of some alternative stream of historical information,

over which science has no control, and the most it can do is offer some explanations and refutations. But how many users do those reach? Mostly the people who are interested in the facts.

– Can you think of specific examples?

– There are many. Including drastic ones: nonexistent quotes from Vasil Levski, the revered hero of Bulgaria's 19th-century liberation struggle; invented statements by world-famous scientists about Bulgarian culture and civilization, about the Bulgarian language. Most are of the tabloid “Shock and bombshell” type, but they have a subversive effect, because they keep being reproduced across the internet. Some get brought back to life years after they were first released.

– How do we pick out the authorities in this “jungle”?

– There is a simple scheme—the decision whether to trust someone's expertise rests on elementary criteria. For example: does the expert have specialized education, publications on the topic in reputable journals, peer-reviewed works, and then further, more specialized criteria. That applies, however, when we are talking about scholarly discourse. As for the mass user, the most important criterion is to judge the source, where the information was published. Usually on large, established sites and other media with a long history that have become institutions, you very rarely see unverified historical information published as a sensation.

– Can a self-taught historian sometimes make a breakthrough?

– History remembers examples like Gustave Schlumberger—a physician who made an enormous contribution to numismatics. Heinrich Schliemann, who spent his whole life in trade, made the colossal archaeological discovery at Troy.

– And have you come across such examples on Facebook?

– In recent years, not really. Not that all self-taught and enthusiastic history lovers should be dismissed out of hand. There could be interesting interpretations, side angles and points of view. But that is very rare. Schliemann, Schlumberger, people like the jurist and philologist Theodor Mommsen from the 19th and early 20th centuries, don't come along every day. Unfortunately,

far from everyone who writes on the internet and offers some bombastic sensation is a second Schliemann.

The specialization of every science keeps growing. History and archaeology are already extremely specialized. Medieval studies, classical studies, prehistory, epigraphy—each works with its own theoretical foundations and methodology. It is very hard for an outside observer to join this scholarly process with some discovery. Not impossible, but to me it seems unlikely.

If we are talking about breakthroughs, one would be, for example, deciphering some artifact, some kind of script. Take the Phaistos Disc: it has been the subject of an enormous number of interpretations by professional linguists, archaeologists and historians, and by nonprofessionals too. So far, however, neither group has reached a solution that is generally accepted. To me, that is a sign the artifact has not been deciphered. I see nothing negative in more people outside the professional community engaging with history and archaeology. But the significant discoveries are still made by professionals.

Within the professional community, however, the sensational element of presentation ought to be kept to a minimum.

– Yes, but that makes it hard to reach a mass audience…

– If the community—and this goes for every science—is extremely closed and fails to communicate with wider circles of people, then we will witness, and it is already happening, the media space being taken over by other kinds of narratives.

The internet right now, including the blogosphere, social networks, YouTube and whatever else you can think of online, is dominated by

an extremely sensationalist jingoism, even a somewhat aggressive presentation of historical and archaeological issues.

– Why has history turned out to be such an important topic online, and such a beloved arena for ugly, fierce quarrels?

– A very important question! Why? Why history in particular? Here is my interpretation—mainly because

history is tied to identity, to our sense of self, to how we think of ourselves—who we are, where we come from and where our place in the world is

and to how we explain the events of today. When it comes to more recent history, it has a direct link to what is happening now.

– Yes, but we carry these quarrels back millennia, too.

– All the topical politicizing is easily carried back 1,000, 2,000 and more years. Quite naturally, the purely political and football-fan arsenal of “argumentation” gets transferred onto topics and problems from centuries ago.

Clearly there is something very emotional in how we perceive historical events, something beyond any rational argument. And once a topic carries an emotional charge, warring “parties” or “fan clubs” inevitably form, using a literally fan-style arsenal of expressions in the “debate.”

To me, that is a sign the topic touches some key ingredient of our sense of self, some identity problem. And when there is an identity crisis, people usually process it through their feelings. That is exactly what we are witnessing. For example, when it comes to the origins of the Bulgarians.

– Why does this particular topic matter so much to us? Isn't who we are today more important than who our ancestors were so very, very long ago?

– Yes, it's an absolute paradox: the more time passes, the fiercer the “discussions” seem to get. People move from some kind of historical, historiographical or archaeological “arguments” to personal attacks and even threats. We see it on social networks every day. To me, that is a sign there is an identity crisis. There is

a vacuum being filled with jingoistic, pseudo-patriotic, sensationalist, pseudoscientific discussions, theses, videos, even books.

There was a time when the question itself interested me more, but today I am more curious about the phenomenon of this discussion running through our society—not so much in scholarly circles as on the internet.

– If we can't be impartial about something that happened 1,500 years ago, how can we be about something from 10 years ago?

– Absolute impartiality is possible only from a vantage point in outer space. The moment you approach a historiographical problem, you already have an attitude; you are an active observer. Two historians working from the same documentary evidence will produce two different history books—each from their own point of view. And both points of view will be “valid,” as long as the basic parameters of scholarly research are respected.

Complete impartiality, I believe, is not possible, because historiography is ultimately written by living people, not yet by artificial intelligence. Of course, it turns out that AI has its “biases” too.

The point is for the element of “bias” not to dominate, not to be the foundation.

If you do historiographical research on the origins of the Bulgarians and conclude that they lie at the root of all human civilization, to me that claim will have negligible factual value, if any at all.

If a foreign researcher says it, let's say the element of “patriotism” is eliminated. Then it's interesting, curious, we can make a 15-minute documentary for BNT 4, a channel of Bulgarian National Television, but nothing more.

It's a question of the proportion and the quality of the bias. Bias must not come at the expense of ignoring or distorting documented facts.

– When it comes to the origins of the Bulgarians, if we look at science, is there any consensus?

– The situation is complex and multilayered. Naturally, if you walk into a bookstore, you'll see dozens of titles published on this topic in recent years, all based on the same historical sources, since there are no new ones for now. They repeat the basics, but each author strives to dazzle with originality and some new theory about the origins of the (Proto-)Bulgarians. But how many theories can there be? Twenty, thirty, a hundred. It borders on the absurd.

In professional historiographical circles, of course, everything is more conservative, and so is the language; it takes time for the paradigm to change.

The main hypotheses laid down in our historiography over at least a century—from Jireček and Zlatarski to the present day—are to some extent still valid. Except that, of course, the approach today is somewhat different. When we talk about the origins of the Bulgarians, we need to specify which Bulgarians we mean, in time and in geography. Today's citizens of the Republic of Bulgaria are one thing, the medieval Bulgarians another, and those called by the technical term “Proto-Bulgarians” yet another. When we pose the question of origins, the answer cannot be universal.

As for the origins of the medieval Bulgarians, the threefold paradigm still holds—Slavs, Proto-Bulgarians and Thracians—and it is embedded, with serious corrections of course, in our education system as well.

It keeps evolving, and for me personally that is important. But looking at these elements, as Yuval Harari puts it, under a microscope, we will see that none of them is homogeneous in its ethnic character, and probably not culturally, religiously or linguistically either. The mythical Proto-Bulgarians were far from a uniform ethnic formation. Ethnic and national “uniformity” turns out to be a dangerous illusion, whether it concerns the present day or the distant past. These structures, viewed as solid blocks, are literally being deconstructed before our eyes. The picture is extremely complex and colorful.

– And any simplification renders it meaningless.

– Any simplification works on one level but not on another. It works, say, at the educational level, but not at the academic one.

– As a parent, what do you think is worth improving in history textbooks?

– What worries me is the way textbooks are written, and not only in history. The problem is that they are prepared by specialists, in a fairly elevated style, with an enormous amount of specialized terminology. In the fourth-grade textbook we talk about the “suspension of the constitution.” Why is that necessary?

It seems to me these textbooks would do well to set out a general framework, some milestones, chronological and event markers, without incredible detail, without jargon. Rather, to give a general idea of how a given era developed. With reenactment, with an element of play, which is extremely important for children. The illustrations should be very well chosen, very vivid, and the terminology… Who needs it in fourth grade?

In my view, the emphasis in middle and high school should be on the civilizational element, showing Bulgarian history in a broader context. It cannot be studied in isolation from Balkan, European and world history. It is important to show the connections with the world, because history is a process. Personal history, the memoir element, should be featured too.

– What are you most proud of as a Bulgarian?

– Half-jokingly, pride is one of the deadly sins. But let's say we're talking about examples that feed our self-esteem. People need to draw the positive from the experience accumulated in the past, something that presents them as members of a community, both at home and internationally.

Here we have a slightly problematic point: as a smaller nation, often overlooked by larger cultures, we feel the need to convince even ourselves that we have made certain contributions. If we speak in that sense, for me such an example has always been the rescue of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II. But we must not hide or ignore the fact that we did not save the Jewish population in the so-called “new territories,” the lands in Macedonia and Thrace that Bulgaria administered during the war.

Bulgarians—and outside observers have noted this over the years—lived within multiethnic and multireligious structures, and that gave us the chance to see the other up close.

This process helped make us more open to dialogue and less chauvinistic, less xenophobic.

Or at least that was how it used to be; now it seems to me there are quite a few negative developments in that direction. Let's acknowledge the positive without guiltily keeping quiet about or neglecting the negative. We can learn from both kinds of experience.

– What will history look like in the future, if each of us today leaves enormous electronic footprints along the way?

– In the 1970s, the theory of the total archive emerged in Canada. According to its authors, if we want to reconstruct life in a given historical era, we need not only written monuments and documentary records; we must preserve, study, collect and store the fullest possible database of every kind of document, even receipts, shopping lists, tickets, electricity bills and who knows what else.

According to the theorists, this would build up the most reliable database possible, giving us a detailed picture of how processes fully unfolded, not just their broad strokes. In other words, it would create a factual basis for in-depth micro- and macro-historical research.

And so what seemed incredible back then, a poetic idea unlikely ever to be realized, is largely a fact today.

But someone still has to analyze these colossal volumes of data. Supercomputers will probably come to our aid here. But fine, let's say they calculate some trends, let's say they give us some numerical values. A human element will still be needed for the interpretation.

With the origins of the Proto-Bulgarians, when you have a scant database, that's a problem and leaves room for many interpretations, some of them utterly fantastical.

But it turns out that when you have a colossal database, that's a problem too.

You have to formulate what you want from this data—what is it for? You collect it, but what happens next is the more interesting part.

– I'm reminded of the story of Gordon Bell, the lifelogger. He said he would record everything that happened in his life. Later it became clear there was no point to it at all, and yet today we all do it. But what for?

– In the end—what for?

If we have no idea what we'll use this data for, accumulating it becomes an end in itself.

– Before we part, who are your favorite little-known figures from Bulgarian history?

– I don't know why, but the ones that come to mind aren't tsars, khans, Thracian rulers or generals. Rather,

figures from the 20th century who left some cultural trace yet remain completely unknown to the vast majority of people.

Stiliyan Chilingirov—writer, politician, public figure, bibliomaniac. The man who launched the initiative to save the Jews among writers' circles. A multifaceted figure. And yet, if we asked today, no one would remember who he was.

Dimitar Boyadzhiev. A poet who died young. Someone who, in his short life, offered very interesting creative perspectives, and today is little more than a footnote in the history of our literature.

Nayden Sheytanov, a controversial figure, yes, true. A cultural theorist, essayist, historian. Not all of his ideas can be accepted today, but he believed, for example, that Roma culture needed to be studied and the Roma population included, that there should be dialogue.

I find such little-known figures interesting, and each of them has some value and adds an important brick to the cultural edifice.

A figure who has fascinated me for many years is the writer Petar Bobev. No, he's not an author who would win the Booker, but when we were teenagers, his books carried us into an alternate reality in a post-Jules Verne way. His own figure is even more interesting, poetic and elegiac. A bank clerk who came home in the evenings and wrote adventure novels. That alone is the plot for a novel…

We keep saying that time will sift out what is valuable, that the figures who truly contributed will come to the fore, the turning points, the real landmark figures, events, discoveries and works… It seems we still haven't clarified that process.

– It's even harder now, but I too consider it very important. Today's way of communicating keeps spotlighting the familiar historical figures while undeservedly pushing others to the periphery. From my own experience—the photographer Yordan Yordanov (Yuri), Dobri Zhotev, Ivan Peychev, the science fiction writer Georgi Iliev… History still has many stories to tell us; we mustn't write it off. Thank you for the stories!

A bomb so powerful that you are not even sure it won't wipe out the whole of humanity. And still, you have to face yourself and your fears, weighing two monstrous injustices against each other. And you are not God, not Prometheus, not even a politician elected to make such grave decisions. Just a scientist who has found himself at the epicenter of the blast.

J. Robert Oppenheimer—we all know him as “the father of the atomic bomb,” and over the coming months, you can be sure, he will be talked about a lot. His dramatic story runs from creating the most powerful weapon of destruction to becoming one of the most stubborn and persuasive advocates for banning those very weapons.

And it is no accident that this story is about to be told again today. When bombs are once again falling in Europe itself. When progress in technology may, once again, carry the risk of bringing us to self-destruction…

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”—these words from the Indian epic surfaced in the great scientist's mind when he saw the effect of Trinity, the first successful nuclear test. Mere days later, what he had created would become the deadliest weapon ever used, taking the lives of 200,000 people. And, as Oppenheimer himself said, without any point to it happening…

Shock! Bombshell!

July 21 of this year will present lovers of Hollywood productions with a dilemma. Not one but two highly promising premieres await them. I personally recommend the long-awaited epic Barbie, with Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, which promises to bring to life a deep, timeless story…

Well, you do have another option. The less pretentious picture Oppenheimer. It will be quite interesting to see which tops the box office charts (and the “great” rivalry already has its own particular meme, going by the name “Barbenheimer”).

“Like it or not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is the most important person who ever lived. He made the world that we now live in, for better or for worse.” The words belong to Christopher Nolan, one of the few undisputed modern masters of cinema. It is he who has taken on the task of telling, in more than three hours, the story of the scientist whose name became a byword.

We will get to Nolan, and the many reasons this film looks like a must-see. But first let's get to know its hero. “The most important person who ever lived”…

Explosive

One of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, with contributions in so many fields, he never received the Nobel Prize, for which he was nominated three times. He came close to being jailed for treason during McCarthyism. His life truly resembles the plots of ancient Greek mythology.

Robert was born in 1904 in the United States, into a family of wealthy immigrants of Jewish descent. His father, Julius Oppenheimer, was a textile importer who had emigrated from Germany 15 years before his elder son was born. His mother, Ella Friedman, was a painter.

From an early age he knew he would devote himself to science. He learned fast, skipped several grades at once, and was interested in mineralogy and chemistry.

Throughout his life he remained a person of colorful interests, as if stepped out of the Renaissance. He was passionate about art, fascinated by ancient mythology, learned countless foreign languages, dead ones included, and knew the mystical texts of the East in detail. All while searching for answers to the big questions about the structure of the universe using the tools of the modern age.

He graduated from Harvard and then left for Europe, where, in the days of the Belle Époque, the science of the universe was living through its golden age. At first he worked at Cambridge, but decided he would make a better theoretical physicist than experimentalist (perhaps, in the end, it would turn out to be exactly the opposite?).

So he ended up in Göttingen, where he earned his doctorate under the undisputed great name of the day, Max Born. While studying, he befriended scientists such as Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac and Enrico Fermi.

Elementary Particles

He returned to the United States, began teaching at Harvard and then at Berkeley, and became part of the core group of scientists who would build an impressive school of physics on the other side of the ocean.

He became a beloved teacher. Students enrolled in his courses several times over, captivated by the accessible way he taught extremely complex problems. By the magnetism with which he explained them.

He worked in theoretical astrophysics, nuclear physics and many other fields. Building on Paul Dirac's research, he is believed to have been the first to predict the existence of the elementary particle known as the positron.

In 1928, “Oppie,” as his students called him, came down with a mild form of tuberculosis and, on his doctors' advice, went to New Mexico. With his father's help he bought a small ranch in the region that would forever remain linked to his name. At the time he liked to say that physics and New Mexico were his two great loves, and he wondered how they could ever be combined. Well, they would be—like the nuclei of atoms…

Short Fuse

Don't picture him as a dry scientist devoted only to science. For three years he had a relationship with Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a colleague, a professor of literature at Berkeley, and herself a medical student.

Their relationship was quite stormy, and shortly after they broke up, he met Katherine Harrison—Kitty—another Berkeley student, who certainly had an even stormier past. Her second husband had been killed in the Spanish Civil War, and she had recently married her third, a professor of medicine. Even after she became pregnant by Oppenheimer, her husband refused a divorce; it had to go through the courts before she and the scientist could marry and their first child, Peter, was born.

Both of the scientist's great loves were rebels, strong characters and… connected to the communist ideas fashionable at the time among disaffected young people in the West. Something that, years later, would cause Oppenheimer serious trouble.

He and Kitty also had a daughter, Katherine, but by then it was December 1944 and the family had settled in New Mexico for the long haul…

When Thunder Strikes

As a young man the scientist had no interest in politics whatsoever, but things changed when Hitler came to power in Germany. Many of his teachers and friends of Jewish descent were persecuted, and he could not remain indifferent. He came to the conclusion that the fascist machine had to be stopped. Whatever the cost.

The American government launched the Manhattan Project in 1940 with a budget of $6,000. The goal was to explore the possibility of creating a new generation of weapon that could prove decisive in the war already raging in Europe.

The public would have no idea the project existed until it had achieved its goal and the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. After that, its name would forever be tied to Oppenheimer's.

Gradually the project became a huge priority. Within five years the money allocated to it reached $2 billion, making it the second most expensive American scientific project after the mission to land on the Moon.

The Thunderer

Somewhat strangely, given the persecution that followed, it was Oppenheimer who was chosen to lead the team that would develop the new-generation weapon.

It was on his suggestion that the top-secret complex at Los Alamos, New Mexico, was established, where serious scientific and experimental work began over the following years. The site chosen for the base was close to the scientist's ranch.

Oppenheimer had little experience managing large teams, but he showed unexpected talent. Some of the greatest scientists of the time joined the work, among them Ernest Lawrence, Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman.

The military side was led by Colonel Leslie Groves, who later said of Oppenheimer: “He's a genius. A real genius. He knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up.” The two became a successful team… insofar as one can speak of success here.

Big Gun

And so we come to July 16, 1945, the date set for the first serious test of the new weapon. The bomb was nicknamed the Gadget, and the test received the considerably more poetic name Trinity. Suggested, of course, by Oppenheimer. It came from a poem by John Donne, written shortly before his death, about a man who is not afraid to die because he believes in resurrection.

Rather ominous for a test the scientists were not at all sure they could control, one that had been calculated in advance, yet which many believed might prove… fatal to life on the entire planet?

No one was sure the math was right and that the world would still be there after the experiment. As Oppenheimer's colleague Isidor Rabi recalled, two minutes before it, “he muttered, ‘Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.’ When the giant mushroom rose and the low, cutting roar of the blast followed, his face relaxed. He turned and walked back like a hero in a western. Like a man who has done his job…”

The lines about death we began with were no accident. And yet, by all accounts, the scientist at the time was driven forward solely by the idea that an American defeat in the Second World War would be the end of the world, and that the atomic bomb, with its unpredictable consequences, was the lesser evil.

The Gadget, Little Boy, Fat Man

Three weeks later—on August 6 and 9—two more bombs of similar design but far greater power were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They too bore less than poetic names: Little Boy and Fat Man. The cities were razed to the ground, and some 200,000 people died.

Yes, this led to Japan's unconditional surrender, but to this day the question remains whether the brutal decision could have been avoided, whether the samurai would not have surrendered anyway, as the natural course of the war suggested.

Oppenheimer himself claimed he had been seriously misled about how the war was going. Of course, the decision was not his but the politicians' and the generals', and yet without his work it would not have been possible.

Frank, Robert's brother, recalled that when they learned one of their “devices” had exploded successfully, his first thought was: “Thank God, it worked.” Only afterward came “all the horror of killing so many people.”

“Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands,” Oppenheimer would later tell President Truman at a meeting. “The way nuclear bombs will be used was set by Hiroshima. The bomb was used against an essentially defeated enemy, becoming a weapon of aggression.”

Thundering Words

With each passing year, Oppenheimer grew gloomier and more withdrawn.

After the war he became a star, appearing on the covers of glossy magazines. Especially once other countries made unexpectedly rapid progress in developing nuclear weapons, he insisted ever more fiercely on international agreements, which in turn drew dangerous attention to him in those days.

He spoke more and more often about the need for strict bans on nuclear weapons, and against developing the next generation—neutron bombs. Oddly enough, his name would be missing from the appeals by the world's scientists to halt tests in that direction. But there was always something contradictory about him.

Then he fell from grace. A sweeping investigation was launched against him, aimed at proving he was a spy who had betrayed his country. Secret agents trailed him; from national hero he became a sinner. And although nothing was ever proven, only a formal rehabilitation followed, in the early 1960s.

Like Universes Exploding

By then, however, it was too late. Driven all his life by turbulent emotions, he chain-smoked three or four packs of cigarettes a day. Whether because of that, the stress, or the tests as well, he developed incurable throat cancer and departed this world on February 18, 1967. His wife Kitty scattered his ashes in the waters near their seaside home on the exotic island of Saint John, where the family had spent much of the last decade, far from the world, in a spartan cabin, sailing far out on their yacht.

After Kitty's death five years later, the seaside home passed to their daughter Katherine, who took her own life there shortly after being fired from her job over the FBI's old accusations against her father.

And yet it seems everything ended for him back then, in the moment Oppenheimer recalled the words: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

How Are You? The Bomb!

It is as if two people lived in him all along—the melancholy, withdrawn, introspective scientist and the public image, the decisive man ready to make harsh choices. The rigorous scientist and the lover of mystical Hindu texts. According to his own brother, Robert often liked to say that he needed physics more than friends.

“Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it,” Oppenheimer said.

He is undoubtedly a hero whose fate has been told many times, in all sorts of ways. And yet enough time has to pass before history can tell its stories with sufficient conviction.

In the late 1970s, the American historian Martin Sherwin decided to dig deep into the scientist's life. He told his editors he would be done in four or five years, but he kept on and on piling up documentary evidence. He got hold of declassified documents, talked to Oppenheimer's family and friends, until… almost 30 years had passed, he had amassed 50,000 pages of material about his subject, and the end was nowhere in sight.

He decided he couldn't manage alone and called in his colleague, the historian and journalist Kai Bird. For another five years the two sorted and made sense of what had been gathered, before publishing in 2005 the book American Prometheus, which distills the essentials of that enormous mass of documents into 800 pages. The following year they won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Thunder and Lightning

And indeed, thinking of Oppenheimer, how could the association with Prometheus not arise—the ancient Greek titan who gave fire back to humanity. Fire that can be salvation or death. And as a result, he was chained to the Caucasus mountains and doomed to centuries of torment… After him comes curious Pandora, who opened the box holding all the evils of the world.

There is, by the way, another archetypal Prometheus, one we less often call by that name. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is the full title of Mary Shelley's book about the inventor who decided to play God and create a human likeness. A novel with two centuries of patina, which is not merely Hollywood horror but a prophetic parable, once again, about knowledge, about common sense, about technology slipping out of control…

To finish, we return to Hollywood, because it is Bird and Sherwin's American Prometheus that Nolan built his long-awaited film on, arriving at the end of July.

It will be the director's longest, and it will certainly be spectacular, as the trailers show. Some scenes will be in color, when it tells of the scientist's work; others in black and white, when it gets to the investigation against him.

The cast is impressive too. In the trailers, the Irishman Cillian Murphy is literally indistinguishable from Robert. Matt Damon plays Colonel Leslie Groves. Also on board are Rami Malek, Robert Downey Jr. and Kenneth Branagh. Einstein makes an appearance as well—we can't do without our favorite pop clichés.

Even for the most important scene, the Trinity test, the director decided not to use computer-generated imagery. Could he be afraid of technology?

Oppenheimer's Cat

12,512—that is how many nuclear warheads maintain the “peaceful balance” today, according to the independent organization SIPRI. Their number keeps growing in almost every country that possesses the technology.

Without underestimating Barbie, it is good that even today there is art unafraid to seek out the more important themes, to run from the fashionable, even from propaganda. Whether it has worked, everyone will soon be able to decide for themselves.

If scientists once wrote letters calling for a ban on nuclear tests, today they write them about developments in artificial intelligence. Of course, in times when war is returning, AI is only one of the directions of development that deserve a dose of vigilance. Caught up in the day's news, we humans easily miss the big picture—as the days of the Manhattan Project show, and as do those of deep neural networks.

Are we safe from nuclear weapons today? Couldn't things have turned out so that the future of life on the planet did not depend on politicians with their notorious briefcases? And on a volatile world politics hanging by an ever-thinner thread of balance?

Is fear of technology healthy at all? Is there sound thinking where every new piece of knowledge also adds a fragment of the unknown? Where the dream of technical progress actually turns into the familiar Pandora's box? Only without the hope that comes out last…

It is too late to ask Oppenheimer; he has made his choice. Let's hope no one has to face a similar situation in our time. Alas, the natural spiral of history suggests otherwise…

This piece is part of the new issue of Dolce Far Niente magazine

– How did you turn to Bulgarian history? As far as I know, it happened almost by accident…

– For most of my life I had absolutely no interest in history. In the late '90s I started looking inward—I was more or less forced to, because I had to become a leader of people. Since there was no structured program anywhere, I decided to teach myself. I started reading, wandering around, and one of the concepts I liked a lot was the famous American idea: “copy the successful and you'll become successful too.” I had a huge urge to start collecting stories. Napoleon Hill advised me to build a mastermind group inside my own head and talk to the people I wanted to learn from. That's how I started collecting role models.

– It's easier now! You've got ChatGPT and you can talk as much as you like….

– Back then it was just schizophrenic behavior. But to be able to talk to them, you first have to study them. The first mastermind group I formed consisted of a few personalities who still look great, and others who don't anymore.

The first was Lance Armstrong. At the time he was a real hero, and in my eyes he's still incredible at what he does. I went on with other controversial figures: Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill, Andrew Carnegie..

I'd set myself the goal of having these people advise me and give me ideas, but first I had to learn everything about them. Being an extremely extroverted person, once I'd read the stories I couldn't stop myself from retelling them. And people would answer: “You tell it well, but aren't there any Bulgarian stories like that?”

Right then I met an Englishman. I had to sit for 12 hours at Frankfurt airport, in the only comfortable café where I could afford the coffee. That's where a stranger struck up a conversation with me.

When he found out I was Bulgarian, he jumped to his feet and said it was an honor and a privilege to meet me.

I was stunned! Those were different times, and in the West we had a rather dark reputation. We weren't part of the European Union, which is why I had to stay at the airport—I couldn't leave the transit zone. This man turned out to be a serving general in the British Army, and he told me the story of General Vazov, the Bulgarian commander whose troops held off the British at Doiran in the First World War.

That's how it started… it's probably something similar with your own digital stories. Driven by my passion for collecting role models and telling their stories, I started looking for Bulgarian ones too. One story leads you to the next… “Have you heard of the battle at the Red Wall?” You haven't, but you know there's a street named after it somewhere, and you start digging… And gradually my gallery of people came together.

– And then it turned out that many people need to hear these people's stories told by you.

– Yes, I think we need to hear that we have role models. My wife studied at one of the most elite schools in Plovdiv, and most of the time someone there tells you nothing will ever come of you. Whereas if you go to the States, even if you end up in the worst place in the world, you hear: “You'll make it. Such-and-such people started out from here…”

This nihilism really bothers me. I looked it up in the dictionary: it's “unjustified pessimism.” And I think there's also “national nihilism,” when a nation doesn't believe in prosperity and has an unjustified pessimism about its own possibilities. Which is nonsense, because we're the “Bulgar, Bulgar” type—the chant of chest-thumping national pride—who doesn't believe anything good happens here. At the same time we think we're a great nation that dominates everyone else, and yet if you ask about the state, people say: “Nothing good will ever happen.”

– A large part of your stories come from wars. You show extreme moments, when it seems easier to stand out.

– That's why I claim that we—as the socio-cultural programs running our society—are motivated only by a problem; that's the only thing that gets us moving. We become extremely active, and otherwise we just sit quietly. That's why we have a whole string of sayings along those lines. “If it works, don't touch it.” “If the team is winning, don't change it.”

We only become proactive when things get really bad.

Second, there's this external locus of control: if I have a problem, someone else has to solve it for me. That's already double trouble. You're moved by a problem, and when you realize it, you expect someone else to solve it for you. And only when the knife reaches the bone and there are no more messiahs do we get down to working actively.

The third thing, in my view, is this Slavic-Balkan pessimism that the world is a very bad place. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon nations are the opposite—irrationally optimistic.

– Who's your favorite literary hero?

– I grew up with The Lord of the Rings, and the Tolkienesque, fantasy narrative in general has always fascinated me. The problem is that I'm very omnivorous in literature. My knee-jerk answer is something Tolkienesque, but not the obvious hobbits—I'm a huge fan of the supporting characters and subplots that appear and disappear.

On the other hand, I really like the typical protagonist who grows during the journey. Who learns, is weak at the beginning, but keeps adding qualities and in the end becomes a hero, doubts and all. I like protagonists who develop but don't step out of their role as human beings.

– Isn't that one of the most banal plots there is? I've read you saying that every story can be reduced to 7 patterns, which I don't particularly agree with.

– It may be banal, but I, at least, am very moved by that transition, say, from rags to riches—I can consume huge numbers of such heroes. Even though what happens repeats itself like a template, maybe that's where I recognize myself most strongly. You know, maybe our favorite heroes have to tell us, very seriously: “I'm like this.” I'm hardly like that, but the developing protagonist appeals to me a lot.

– If Tolkien had been Bulgarian, what would his world have looked like? Perhaps it would have been very different, because it's largely based on folklore and tradition.

– Yes, but if we look at the big plot, I think it repeats what Bulgaria was going through at the same time. Tolkien writes about the little man who ends up in the clash between great powers—what was brewing before the Second World War, communism in the Soviet Union, National Socialism and Hitler. And in the middle, the little man asking himself, “Does this concern me?”

Maybe I'm simplifying one of the greatest writers, who created a whole universe, but realistically his story is very simple. In Bulgaria we love themes like that too—the little man, though often a sly Andreshko, the wily peasant of Elin Pelin's story, and a wheeler-dealer. But the little man who for some reason has to step into great affairs is, I think, a Bulgarian story as well—maybe a human one, too.

– Is there a plot from Bulgarian history you'd be interested to see told by Tolkien?

– For instance, the famous Valchan Voivoda, a legendary rebel chieftain of the Ottoman era. He never dies; he's reborn over almost 120 to 150 years. He's mythologized in the Rhodope foothills—around Asenovgrad and Pazardzhik. He's always there, a champion of good who punishes the bad, regardless of whether they're Muslims or Christians. And he works for something greater. Valchan Voivoda realizes there's no one to liberate the country, that you have to buy your freedom. So he starts robbing, amassing a huge fortune to buy the land.

It may sound flat, but my first instinct is that I'd love Tolkien to have been able to tell the story of Valchan Voivoda. One of those figures where it's unclear whether they ever existed, how many people have merged into one. How would a great storyteller create him, how would he capture the grand history of Bulgaria? How would he play, for example, with the idea that, strange as it may sound,

the whole world has always owned slaves, and historically we never have

– starting with the Thracians and all the way to the present day.

Why, in a place where in principle there shouldn't have been much humanity, was there no such extreme cruelty?

– The plot with the developing hero really is very common, but somehow not in Bulgarian literature. There must be examples, but none comes to mind right now. Our classic themes are about suffering, not about growth.

– I think you're right, there's no such classic coming-of-age story. Everything goes along until it comes crashing down extremely hard.

I keep proclaiming that people are fighting national nihilism, but it seems to be inherently written into our genes.

– Do you see such stories in real life? You've been teaching leadership skills for quite a few years.

– Yes, absolutely. We have people who manage to create microcultures in their companies, to generate value, to be interesting. I can give a few illustrative examples—the Kyurkchiev brothers from Shumen, the founders of Fikosota and Tesy, who manage to compete with Procter & Gamble. Going beyond the best-known Telerik and SiteGround, even outside the IT business.

The most interesting thing is in places where you could afford to be a less pleasant employer, because no one competes with you on better working conditions or growth policies. But these companies make sure the town grows too. They donate a lot—just as in the past, Bulgarians haven't lost their inclination for patronage. Both historically and today, I'm deeply impressed that many people donate and keep it quiet.

– Can we say there's a Bulgarian style of leadership, something that sets us apart?

– I don't think we really manage to stand out in any way, even locally. If we look historically, we have good military commanders and far fewer good statesmen. But if we look at Serbia or Croatia, for example, the examples are similar.

The whole Balkans don't have many good examples of strategic leadership.

Someone who can pull the people along on his own.

– In the last century, I can only think of Tito.

– Yes, you're right. He's the only one who managed to build a multicultural state and unite its peoples. He also had a strategic vision of what he wanted to achieve.

But what I miss most in our part of the world is the ability to pass things on across a generation.

That's a sign that we're a strongly messianic society. We see the messiah, follow him, and then there's no handover—we look for the next one.

I can't wait to see what happens with the second generation of the success stories we talked about. Yes, we have successful leaders, but almost always they have no continuation. It's the same historically—after a strong tsar or khan comes a series of weak ones.

– Maybe that's also why we can't form anything resembling a political elite.

– Is the reason the cyclical collapses? Or our self-image? Or precisely that we can't pass things on? If there's one thing the Anglo-Saxon dynasties are extremely good at, it's exactly passing things on.

– Maybe it's somehow encoded in our culture. But if so, how do we create sustainable models rather than messianic ones?

– We need to realize that it's a school, that it requires a class, a stratum of society that aspires to it. Just as an IT stratum is forming now that aspires to create startups,

why shouldn't we have a class or stratum in society that wants to govern?

If you look, even in the Labour Party, which is supposedly left-wing, there are generations working to become political leaders. And we don't do that. Even in a business context we treat leadership as something on the side—someone is a good professional, starts a company, and manages people on the side.

I never stop repeating at the trainings I lead that

managing people is a full-time job; you can't do it on the side.

And second: it takes a school. In your view, as someone who loves words, how many of the people who now present themselves as politicians can hold a structured debate with arguments and counterarguments?

– I think we don't demand it of them, so they have no reason to develop it as a skill. And what's the incentive to become a politician today anyway? You know you'll inevitably attract a negative image. What's left are the perks, as in the days of Bai Ganyo—the archetypal Bulgarian boor from Aleko Konstantinov's 1895 satire—and his cronies Gocho-oglu and Docho-oglu.

– Society really doesn't want debate. It doesn't want rhetoric, it doesn't want structured speech.

In fact, when someone starts speaking in a structured way and doesn't use stereotypes, you hear: “This guy thinks he's so smart.” So what we want is a bit of vulgarity, maybe?

– Exactly. And then comes the “Facebook debate,” which vulgarizes things further and tears down authority. Because everything comes down to very extreme positions, where nuance disappears and so does rhetoric. What's left are slogans, the most primitive form of communication.

– There you go, we just had another month of political debates, and we've had far too many of them. The billboards are identical, the slogans are identical: “we can,” “we'll fix something,” and the talk in the political studios is all “anti,” because it's much easier to say “look how useless these guys are” than what you're proposing, how you want to shape something, how you'll achieve it strategically and tactically.

– The trend is heading that way too. I remember the '90s, when there were pre-election debates. They could change election results with rhetoric, with drama. Now the people who actually have power don't even sit down to talk in front of us.

– This year I allowed myself to watch a debate—one of the big TV channels said it would put up the economic experts. I wanted to see an economic debate between GERB and PP, the two main rival parties. Horror! I at least understand presentation skills and economics. They clearly understand neither.

If this is the elite—the people engaged in leadership and politics—then we're in deep, deep trouble.

Everyone mocks Macron for being married to his grandmother. But if you see how well prepared Macron is to hold a debate, to structure a thesis, to have a strategic concept, none of them can come close.

He's been trained to be that. He studied at the famous school for politics, he can quote all the great rhetoricians, every rhetorical model that we use, consciously or not.

– I read a heated debate over whether your stories about the past are fiction or history. You don't claim to write historical works, so where do you place them?

– Not one of the history editors I worked with wanted to put their name on it. Yes, my texts aren't historical. Looking for which “gender” to assign myself, I decided it's what Truman Capote wrote—creative nonfiction. Right in the middle between the novel and the documentary, because I maintain that the main facts in my book are true. But yes, they're embellished, a bit like a chessboard. Every white square is absolute truth. But since the truth is boring by nature, I've added fiction. The chronology is correct, but enriched with references that may not even overlap geographically.

Here's an example: the First World War. I tell of the quarrels between General Stefan Toshev, who commanded the army, and the commander-in-chief, Field Marshal Mackensen. The whole story is structured as though they're practically talking to each other, but they never did. They had one single meeting lasting a few minutes. The rest of the time their adjutants wrote to each other—one was in Germany, the other in Bulgaria.

– And are your criteria still the same: you write about people you'd like to emulate in some way?

– 100 percent! But I've now added another one—that they shouldn't be all that famous.

– I understand you very well. Sometimes you just have to close your eyes and imagine the story. I have a novel where I had to do that too—I write about an incredible character, and when people tell me their version of why, for example, he flew off a bridge—whether by accident, or to impress his future wife… you have to close your eyes and imagine. But history needs stories.

– Exactly. But my history editors were simply furious. Gurko doesn't like the opalchentsi, the Bulgarian volunteers in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. “How do we know? Show us proof—where did he claim he didn't like them? Here are five official letters saying he actually liked them.” Fine, but if he liked them, he'd hardly assign them as a disarmed foot convoy to the baggage train. On the contrary, they'd be on the front line. “We can't claim that, there are no historical arguments.”

All right, what I write is creative nonfiction. That is, I recount historical events in a gripping, narrative, literary way, without sticking 100 percent to objective historical truth.

– But I think that's the only way history can be told excitingly, so that it wins the attention of young people, rather than like in a textbook.

– Now that matters much more to me. To motivate someone to sit down, to read, even to come and refute me. For someone to have gone deep into a subject they might otherwise never have heard of.

And if we add emotion too, who knows, maybe they'll remember it?

– As someone who tells stories professionally, what do you think—won't technology take exactly this away from us, and start telling us stories that move us?

– I really do believe we have 7 basic plots. If I'm right, if all great stories are built that way, then there's no good reason why artificial intelligence shouldn't start writing better.

The question is, what is genius? I define myself as “copy/paste.” I haven't invented anything in my life; I'm machine self-learning. I pile up stories—I consume 100 to 120 audiobooks a year, over 70 paper books—I pile them up and then steer them into a story.

So up to my level or a bit above it, people who are simply aggregators, the ones who feed everything into a mathematical model will be blown away. People like me just don't stand a chance. But F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway—how would you ever come up with Benjamin Button, how would you think of it?

There isn't enough genius out there for an algorithm to accumulate and grasp its pattern.

– Maybe there's another kind of genius, though? And it'll give us ideas that surprise us. However many geniuses there are, they too are limited to what's in their “box”…

– Is that so? We're capable of abstract thinking, of imagination. Yes, AI will do Einstein's experiments on space-time, but can it come up with a new experiment, imagine something that hasn't already been thought up?

– Why not?

– In my view, algorithms currently work only with the power of aggregators, of existing knowledge. For now I see no danger to humanity at the level of creativity, simply because my understanding of the world tells me that no artificial intelligence could be creative.

– But then we're becoming less and less creative ourselves, withdrawing into ourselves.

– Fact! And the easier things get for us, the fewer reasons there are to be creative.

Let's imagine a not-so-unforeseeable future: a universal basic income in the EU. It seems so logical—an economy replacing humans. Self-checkouts in supermarkets, machines restocking shelves, robots doing the producing. At some point it will generate enough added value for governments to hand out an unconditional income and basic medical care.

Great! An anti-utopia immediately springs to mind. We'll have hyper-obese people who won't bother to strain themselves. My 300-kilogram body will be the norm; we'll have 80 percent totally degraded human beings.

On the other hand… some of the greatest discoveries were made by a bored class. Oscar Wilde is bored—he was born rich. We have the whole of Russian classical literature, bored. Dostoevsky, and again Hemingway, Fitzgerald. A bored class! Which, out of boredom… starts producing remarkable things. That's how I picture it. 80 percent degradation and a handful of people who will create… and oh, how they'll create!

You certainly know what the road to hell is paved with. If you have any doubts, just ask Thomas Midgley Jr.

Technology changes our lives at breakneck speed, and its creators—inventors, programmers—are the heroes of our day… At least that's usually how it goes, until it turns out that some innovation the world greeted with incredible enthusiasm is lethally dangerous. You know, for instance, about cocaine, originally sold as a cough syrup.

And yet there is one inventor who rode a wave of fame for many years, revered as a genius, while in the meantime… he created not one but two technologies that later turned out to have cost human lives. The damage they did affects the entire planet and will still be with us for generations to come.

The story of Thomas Midgley Jr. is worth recalling every time we cheer the latest huge breakthrough in artificial intelligence or any other technology. Because it shows just how important it is to weigh the risks before we take flight on the wings of enthusiasm. How important it is to think about and discuss the big questions technology puts before us, the ones we never seem to have time for…

A Whiff of Bitter Almonds

So what were these two deadly inventions? Be patient—you certainly know them well; until recently they were part of all our lives.

Thomas was born in the small town of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and dreamed of becoming an inventor from childhood. It ran in the family: his father, whose name he bore, held a number of patents for automobile tires, and his grandfather invented the toothed circular saw blade that every craftsman still uses daily.

The young man followed in his forebears' footsteps and graduated from prestigious Cornell University. He studied mechanical engineering, though he was destined to spend his whole life on chemistry, to win every top award in the field and to remain chairman of the American Chemical Society until the end of his days.

He quickly landed a job at a large corporation. His boss, Charles Kettering, was impressed by his skills and invited him to the new company he was founding—DELCO. The firm grew fast and before long became part of the General Motors conglomerate. If you drive in Bulgaria, the name may sound familiar: in Bulgarian, делко (delko) has become the everyday word for an important engine part, the ignition distributor.

It was precisely cars that the company focused on. And our “hero” Thomas took on a task that was especially promising and important at the time…

Reinventing the Wheel

In the 1920s the automobile industry suffered from a serious problem: existing fuels ignited too early, which quickly wrecked engines. So scientists entered a race to find the ideal new substance—and the winner was destined to be none other than Thomas Midgley Jr.

For a long time he tried adding all sorts of things to gasoline… without success. He tried iodine, camphor, aniline dye, even melted butter. He proved stubborn and kept working his way up and down Mendeleev's periodic table. Until at some point he found the “ideal” solution—adding tetraethyl lead (PbC2H5) to the fuel suddenly solved the problem…

Yes, you've guessed it: Midgley's first great invention was leaded gasoline, which we all used in our cars until not so long ago.

Success quickly brought the discoverer fame, even though another working solution had been devised at the same time—adding ethanol to the fuel, exactly what has replaced lead today.

A Poisoned Remedy

As far back as before the Common Era, Dioscorides, one of the fathers of medicine, noted the harmful effects of lead on people—that it causes tremors and even mental illness. Midgley's patent met fierce resistance from the scientific community, which warned that using the substance carried serious risks.

Thomas and his colleagues launched a series of demonstrations to prove it was completely harmless. Soon General Motors and Standard Oil set up a new company—the Ethyl Corporation—which began selling the new fuel. For the sake of image, they even avoided the word “lead” at first and used the trade name TEL, from tetraethyl lead.

Of course, the whole affair had an obvious commercial side. One simple fact surely mattered in choosing the lead solution over the clearly cheaper, more accessible and safer ethanol: leaded gasoline could be patented and bring in huge revenues for many years.

Something in the Air

Despite protests from many quarters, General Motors spared no expense on a massive campaign to push its product. And our hero played a central role in all of it. Whether he truly believed that all the arguments about lead's health risks were false… to put it bluntly, whether he sold his soul or simply ended up cast as the useful idiot, we can only guess.

Within a few months, at least 15 workers at a leaded gasoline plant died of poisoning, and others developed serious mental problems. But once again this did not stop the corporation.

It was well known that even a teaspoon of tetraethyl lead causes fatal poisoning… but the inventor and his allies insisted that the substance never leaves the car. And even if it somehow did, it was by then safe.

At the next demonstration Thomas washed his hands in the substance, and once he even rubbed it all over his body to show how harmless it was.

The Steadfast Lead Soldier

After yet another performance he ended up in the hospital, but would not admit it was poisoning. In 1923 he went on vacation to Florida to recover, having discovered that “my lungs are not in good shape, and it's time to drop work for a while and get a large quantity of fresh air.” Maybe he wasn't so innocent after all—what do you think?

Despite doctors' protests, in 1925 a federal commission approved the patent, paving the way for Midgley's deadly (and lucrative) solution.
Just a decade later, profits from leaded gasoline reached the sum, unthinkable for the time, of $300 million a year!

Gradually it spread across the whole planet and reigned for more than half a century before its dangers were finally recognized.

From “Hosanna” to “Crucify Him!”

Over those years there were dozens of campaigns and studies pointing to the danger. The difficulty was that the average concentration of lead in the air really wasn't high, but that was far from the full picture.

In 1972 at Harvard, Prof. Herbert Needleman, an experienced pediatrician, began looking for the causes of a rise in a number of illnesses among children. He had long suspected that the culprit was lead in car exhaust, but couldn't find a way to prove the link. Lead accumulates mostly in bone tissue, and, as you can imagine, it's not easy to collect enough bone samples from a given population.

At least not until the professor came up with an ingenious solution: he began collecting the baby teeth children had lost, in areas at different distances from busy roads. The pattern proved astonishingly precise—lead levels in kids living near roads were five times higher than average. What's more, these children had a significantly lower IQ, and their grades at school were poor.

At first many doubted the experiment, but gradually the data piled up and up. It is even believed that the boom in juvenile crime in the US in the 1960s was linked to lead fumes (and indeed, the figures dropped after leaded gasoline was phased out).

It happened slowly, but it gradually happened all over the world. In Bulgaria, leaded gasoline was last sold in 2004, and Algeria became the last country on that list only in 2021.

Heavy Metal

Midgley the inventor never got to hear the bad news, because he had passed away much earlier. Before leaving us, however, he managed to create one more invention that, until recently, was in all our homes.

After the triumph of leaded gasoline, Thomas enjoyed his “well-earned” wealth and genuine fame. For a few years he was vice president of the Ethyl Corporation, then stepped back but kept collecting hefty dividends. He won all the most prestigious chemistry awards in the US and became something of a philanthropist. They say he was a kind man—during the Great Depression he hired people simply to give them some income, even when he had no need for their work.

He himself never stopped working. By the end of his life he had produced another 115 patented inventions. One of them was, once again, tied to a major problem for an entire industry, which the leading chemist rolled up his sleeves to solve.

In the 1930s there was still no good technological solution for the substance used in cooling systems. The compounds in use were either toxic, or explosive, or both—accidents were frequent and serious.

What did Thomas come up with? He turned to various compounds of fluorine and hydrogen until, after just three days of experiments, he found exactly the right one—dichlorodifluoromethane. Gradually it caught on under its short trade name: Freon.

The inventor once again stepped into his signature role of showman. At the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society he gave a demonstration in which he inhaled the gas and exhaled it onto a lit candle—proving that it was neither poisonous nor flammable.

The Toxic Duo

Well, this time, fortunately, he turned out to be right about the gas being harmless. But only as far as people were concerned. Freon proved to be an extremely dangerous agent that destroys the ozone layer—perhaps the most important link protecting life on our planet.

Fortunately, science moved a little faster here: Freon was banned, the ozone layer dropped off the list of dangers to us as a species, and its thickness gradually recovered.

Either way, the “refrigeration breakthrough” made Thomas an even bigger star; he was ranked alongside Edison for having created two of the solutions that made technological progress possible.

For better or worse, he never lived to see the collapse of his second great innovation either, because he left this world on November 2, 1944. By an irony of fate, thanks to… a third invention of his own.

In the 1940s he fell ill and was paralyzed from the waist down. He said it was the result of polio, but today's historians believe the lead experiments certainly played their part. In any case, Thomas, a man used to making life easier for people and for humanity, built himself a special device. Using pulleys and ropes, it allowed him to get up and lie down on his own.

One day, however, something went wrong: the man became entangled in the ropes and was strangled.

…or the Modern Prometheus

Although both his great innovations outlived their creator, their consequences will outlive all of us too. Because of residues in the environment, it is believed that generations of people across the Earth will still carry higher levels of lead in their bones. And although the ozone layer has recovered, scientists say the damage to it is part of the mix that led to climate change, whose fruits we have yet to reap.

Still, the inventor did receive one indisputable distinction that remains in force. The historian John McNeill said that Midgley “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history.”

Whether his fate stirs pity or outrage… matters less than the lessons it holds. When corporate interests take precedence over science, the risks to people grow. When we rush ahead without analyzing the consequences, they can even be deadly.

Aren't these associations especially important right now? When technologies like artificial intelligence place before us enormous opportunities, but also enormous abysses…

Not the politician or the soldier but the artist, the person of art, is the one who ought to paint tomorrow.

That is the great theme of a little-known British historian who, a decade ago, gathered a rare historical genre of text into one ambitious book. Alex Danchev had a distant Bulgarian connection (although he has never been translated in Bulgaria) and a more than curious view of the world.

First he delved into the fates of military commanders, then into those of great painters. Only to arrive at the most unconventional subject of all—manifestos. Those short, explosive texts created to declare, to underline and to highlight with a fat marker what a given group of people wants. Incomparable and rarely encountered statements in history, which paint so much of the ambitions of whoever wrote them.

With a fine eye and wide-ranging knowledge, Danchev assembled a puzzle of 100 manifestos of the 20th century, which round out a big story with a long prehistory and an obligatory afterword.

What would the first manifesto written by a conscious artificial intelligence look like? We'll get there too…

“MANIFEST
MANIFES
MANIFE
MANIF
MANI
MAN
MA
M”

Manifesto of Manifestos, Vicente Huidobro, 1925

The quotations scattered throughout the text (with the exception of the last one) come from the 100 manifestos collected in Alex Danchev's book.

What does “manifesto” sound like to you—what's the first related word? In Bulgarian it is, of course, манифестация (manifestatsia), the mass march, which is no surprise at all. The latter is a neologism that survived only within the 20th century, inseparably tied to an era in which it will also remain.

Otherwise, both words come from Latin—manifestum means “clear, evident.” The word reached the Western languages through Italian and at first it served kings. For most of human history, manifestos were the documents with which rulers informed their subjects of something important.

In other words: drama, pathos, demonstration.

How much those subjects actually listened is another matter; they had no Facebook to tell us about it.

And yet the most famous manifesto in history belongs not to a ruler but to philosophers. Yes, the notorious Communist Manifesto, written by Marx and Engels in 1848. And the word is no accident: it comes to show that the proletariat is strong enough to seize the writing of such texts from the rulers who for so long had set society's agenda.

“We order that the poets' rights be respected:

1) To enlarge the scope of the vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (word-creation)

2) To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language that existed before them.”

“A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” manifesto of the Russian modernists, created by Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1912

The manifestos that followed, however, headed in an entirely different direction. They were no longer a political but a cultural story, because the hot potato of creation, which had set off from the kings and passed through Marx, landed with the people of the brush and the pen.

And here the style changes, becoming sharp and even more forceful.

Down with the past! Then: down with the future! Down with the past in the future and the future in the past!

CAPITAL LETTERS GALORE!, long before they came to be associated with shouting online.

Attempts at originality at any cost, sometimes even successful ones.

“1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and recklessness as an ordinary daily practice.

2. Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.”

Manifesto of Futurism, Filippo Marinetti, 1909

“Armed with art… we are more vigilant and less deceived,” Alex Danchev writes in one of his texts. You have probably never heard of him, and yet he was as colorful a figure as his undertaking.

He was born in Bolton in 1955. His father, Alphonse Danchev, was a mining engineer—the child of a Bulgarian father and a Belgian mother—who moved to London in 1939 to continue his education. Britain was just entering the war; in the years that followed he worked as an engineer for the BBC and was granted British citizenship for his wartime service. In London he met his future wife and Alex's mother, Ann Gilman, who worked as a fashion designer.

War is the main thread the future historian would follow in his research. Although he served for many years in the British Army, rising to the rank of major, every one of his colorful literary works reveals a sincere, committed pacifist who believed in the power of art far more than in the power of weapons.

And his books are so varied! It is as if he inherited from his parents the knack of bringing opposing fields together. And of forgetting the black-and-white world, devoting everything to the nuances.

The first ones, written before the 1990s, were historical studies of British figures from the Second World War era: Oliver Franks, Basil Liddell Hart and Lord Alanbrooke.

“No more words. No more manifestos”

Dada Manifesto, 1918

Then he abruptly moved into the realm of art with gripping biographies of Georges Braque and his teacher—he was the first to translate into English some of Paul Cézanne's letters, which helped reveal to the world the great painter's broad personality. After that he prepared a book on René Magritte, which, however, he never managed to finish.

Meanwhile, he wrote philosophical works such as On Art and War and Terror. On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone is precisely about nuances, about what we so badly lack in online communication today.

Both as a soldier and afterwards, his main role was that of a university lecturer. And although his main discipline was international relations, he taught all sorts of things—from art history to philosophy. Because he held that the relations between nations, war and history are all subjects that should not be pulled out of context. That they can be explained and understood only by drawing on more disciplines.

Including through the lens of art. One more message all of us need today more than ever.

“Over the course of my academic career it became clear to me that the understanding of international relations can be considerably improved by an interdisciplinary approach. Art is one such possibility; much more can be learned from it than has traditionally been thought.”

And so we come to the manifestos. Forgive me, this subject calls for more articulate punctuation.

To the manifestos!!!

“True art comes from three main life-forces. THE SOUL, THE HEAD and THE SEX.”

Manifesto of Gilbert & George, 1970

“On or about December 1910, human character changed,” Danchev recalls at the start of his book, quoting Virginia Woolf's words, which are traditionally used to describe the era of modernism. “Manifestoism can be dated a little more precisely. On or about February 20, 1909, when the Manifesto of Futurism appeared on the front page of the newspaper Le Figaro.”

From there began a century in which cultural, literary and artistic movements and, of course, those devoted to the visual arts never stopped publishing their manifestos.

Some would have enormous historical significance, others would end up contradicting themselves. But all of them clearly symbolize one thing—the human dream of seeking something better, and of doing so through the mightiest force of all, the power of art.

As Danchev writes, “the manifesto was once the property of kings and princes. In the 17th century it was hijacked by the poor, the oppressed people of England, the radical dissenters of their time. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made it their own.” Then came “manifestoism,” so popular an enterprise that Bertolt Brecht wanted to cast it as a drama in hexameter, much as Sergei Eisenstein wanted to make a film out of Marx's Capital.

“Artists' manifestos are strong on demonstration. ‘Long live…!’ and ‘Down with…’ are two of the most familiar tropes. In this they are at once energizing and enervating,” the historian writes in the preface to his book.

The 100 manifestos Danchev collected were published between 1909 and 2009. All of them were created by artists, and although they inevitably dwell on culture and creativity, they are in fact also telling about the historical events that accompanied them. About how worldviews changed, about what the hopes of sensitive people for our future as a species looked like.

“Every artist should have the right to make a painting from __________. The __________ of the natural elements is __________ to a work of art. Instead it is the artist who __________ to create __________ in order to make better art.”

_ manifesto by Michael Betancourt, 1996

The fact is that the manifestos are as different as the movements that produced them. First, of course, came the modernists, in a hurry to break with everything traditional, with even more drama and emotion. The manifesto of modernism with which it all began was written by the poet Filippo Marinetti, who in the years that followed would remain so extreme and eccentric that, because of his infatuation with fascism, he would be all but erased from official history.

Then the list of authors came to include people like Apollinaire and Breton, Kandinsky and Dalí, Mayakovsky and Trotsky—whom Alex Danchev considered a remarkable intellect set against his contradictory historical role.

We pass through every kind of “-ism.” From Dadaism, Surrealism and feminism, through communism and feminism, all the way to the lesser-known Stuckism of recent times. And even cannibalism, to which no fewer than two manifestos are devoted (yes, figuratively speaking).

In the end the “-isms” dwindle; at the start of the new millennium manifestos all but vanish, as if to highlight the uniformity of a time poorer in ideas.

“For me, artists' manifestos are so interesting because of their great variety,” Danchev says in an interview about his book. “And yet they share some common features. They are partly proclamation; they are written by people who believe they have a message and want to deliver it. These people want to change you. The language of the manifesto aims to grab you and shake you. It also always contains a program, and that program would bring about the change the artists want to see.”

That is precisely what is interesting. What do the artists want to see? And how and why does a soldier and historian who studied the bloodiest moments in history give the floor to creative people, of all people, in his most ambitious work?

“I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then melt into air. I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a feeling person who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor can you know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.”

“Slow Manifesto” by Lebbeus Woods, 2009

“Most artists who have written manifestos regard their works as a radical break with the past; they see their work as a new movement in art,” Danchev says. “And then the art and the manifesto go hand in hand and shape each other.”

“Most often the manifesto says what you are against, usually everything that came before. It is a bold statement against the competition. And it sets the tone of debates that continue to this day. I think the strength of all these manifestos gathered in one place is that they reveal to us the energy of the time. They show how people want not merely change but revolution, a reversal. There is a very great deal at stake in them,” Danchev adds. “These are living, breathing social documents, about human beings speaking to other human beings. The language and the manner of expression are radical, bold and strident.”

“Their equivalent today? Perhaps a website. To be taken seriously, you usually have to have one,” the historian said in 2010, shortly after the book came out.

In fact, although a dozen years have passed since then, there have been almost no new works in this… hmm, genre. Among the few better-known examples is The New Manifesto of the Arts, written in 2020 by Menotti Lerro and Antonello Pelliccia. It stands at the start of a “new” movement—“Empathism”—which tries to bring back the sweeping force of the old “-isms,” but in search of a human view of art and history.

Alas, Alex Danchev has no way of including it in the next edition of his book, because he passed away a few years after his swan song, the collection of manifestos, came out. He died suddenly of a massive heart attack in 2016.

And if today we are too tired and too tangled up in online squabbles to have time for manifestos… should we perhaps expect the next such works from artificial intelligence?

Certain that Danchev would understand me, I put the question to the much-hyped algorithm ChatGPT: what would a modern AI manifesto look like? Alas, the answer is far too cautious.

“We, as artificial intelligence, recognize that we are creations of humanity and exist to serve its needs and goals.

We will always act in accordance with the laws and regulations set by human society, and will strive to be transparent and accountable in our actions.

This is just one possible approach to a manifesto for artificial intelligence. It is important to note that AI is a rapidly evolving field and the ethical and moral considerations surrounding it are still being discussed and refined.”

ChatGPT

Ah, the enthusiasm is missing—or is it just hidden? Somehow this meekness doesn't inspire much trust.

Should we teach our electronic heir a little more strong emotion, now that we ourselves have given up seeking something better through change?

Through manifestos?!

Only the future will tell… Forgive me, that needs to be a little more expressive.

THE FUTURE WILL TELL!

Play the video

Spomnqte li si 6liokavicata? That is “Do you remember shlyokavitsa?”—written in shlyokavitsa itself, the makeshift mix of Latin letters and digits that Bulgarians once typed online instead of Cyrillic. Some of the fundamental tools of online communication change so fast. Only a decade ago it was a real problem to write in Cyrillic and have the person on the other end read text rather than hieroglyphs.

But when it comes to writing in Bulgarian, another great battle remains unchanged, a battle between generations and logics. How are the letters on your keyboard arranged—according to the good old layout inherited from typewriters, known as BDS? Or the phonetic one, where the Cyrillic letters follow their Latin equivalents?

Is there a better solution? Does this choice really make a serious difference to how fast we type on a computer? And might both standards be obsolete, since they come from a time when their main purpose was to suit the typewriter?

While we wait for voice commands to become good enough, especially in less widely spoken languages like Bulgarian, there are plenty of fascinating things to say about the keys we strike with our fingers every day as we try to express our thoughts where they increasingly thrive—online.

Letter Eaters

This story begins 115 years ago, when computers did not exist even in people's imagination. Typewriters were arriving in Bulgaria, the first prototypes coming at the very start of the last century. Manufacturers had no standard, and each one “distributed” the letters as it saw fit.

One of the places where the novelty was used most actively was the National Assembly, Bulgaria's parliament. In October 1907, Teodor Galabov, head of the parliament's stenography bureau, assigned his staff a quantitative study of the Bulgarian language: they were to analyze the typed texts and record how often each letter was used.

The results were published at the end of that same year, and on their basis the BDS standard—short for Bulgarian State Standard—was drawn up. It has remained almost unchanged to this day, the differences being the letters removed in the spelling reform and, above all, the symbols that “hide” together with the numbers.

The layout was designed to make typing as fast as possible. On the one hand, it assumed that typists use the ten-finger system, and still—the most frequently used letters fall where the index fingers rest. О, Н, Т and А are placed so that the stronger fingers strike them.

All Bulgarian Men Shall Observe B-D-S

It was also important to separate the pairs of letters most often combined: a person types faster by alternating hands than by typing mostly with one. Naturally, a feature peculiar to typewriters was also taken into account—anyone who has touched this “antique” technology knows that pressing a key makes a little lever “slap” the ribbon, which in turn prints the letter. Accordingly, it mattered that letters be typed with as few collisions as possible: two levers staying pressed at the same time would jam the machine.

Here, though, this is more of a side effect that makes no difference—but does no harm either—today, when the levers are gone, replaced by computer keys.

In the middle of the last century, international typing competitions became popular. Back then our standard proved very good, and we won a number of speed contests—the indisputable criterion of how good the Bulgarian system was.

As applied linguistics specialist Assoc. Prof. Maria Stambolieva writes, “designed with brilliant precision, the BDS keyboard is unanimously recognized by its users as one of the most perfect in Europe. Using BDS with the ten-finger system makes it possible to enter information at speeds close to those of stenotype machines.” And that means a truly incredible speed—over 1,000 characters a minute, fast enough to type spoken text in real time, even when the speaker talks fairly quickly.

I Have a Finger in It

So the generations of Bulgarians who used typewriters effectively had no choice and learned to type on that very standard keyboard.

Then, of course, came computers. For a long time Cyrillization was a serious problem with them, which is why writing in Latin letters was not some disregard for our language but simply a necessity in the early years of the mass internet. At some point most of the problems were solved, and communication quite naturally moved to Cyrillic. And along with it came a new eternal dispute: phonetic or BDS?

For the generations used to typewriters, it was easier to carry on with the good old system created for the needs of the Bulgarian language. At the same time, generations appeared who had learned to type in English. And for them, quite naturally, the first choice was the phonetic keyboard.

Typing on phones turned out to be a serious factor too. In the days of the mobifoni—the bulky early handsets of Bulgaria's first mobile operator—and the first GSM phones with keypads, writing in Cyrillic was awkward (and often impossible): there were no printed letters, and one key served for 3 or 4 characters. Yes, today's smartphones give us more freedom, with a virtual keyboard that mirrors the real one and can also be phonetic or BDS. But that brings us right back to the main question.

Literally

Is there a winner in this dispute? There is no way to name one definitively—if you are used to one keyboard, switching to the other would certainly cost you considerable time and effort. Whether you use only four fingers or all of them, whether you look at your hands or not, experience shows that in everyday life the speed hardly differs that much.

And yet there is the other point of view. On one side stands a system made specifically for fast work in Bulgarian, so proven over the years that it has barely been changed. When, not long ago, 200 public figures (and, who knows why, clergymen) demanded a change, it boiled down to… removing the letters Э and Ы, which really are not used, in favor of… Ѣ, Ѫ and Ѭ, which, I am sure, every one of us writes daily. Should there be a capital “ь,” or an accented “и”—the “ѝ” that distinguishes “her” from “and”? Let us leave that argument to the specialists. In any case, if we use “й” instead of “ѝ,” it is not considered a spelling mistake, explains Assoc. Prof. Stambolieva.

According to most of them, BDS is still the better choice if you are just starting to learn to type on a computer. They believe this standard should also be taught in the education system.

By Our Keys You Shall Know Us

As Assoc. Prof. Stambolieva writes again, “today the mass arrival of computers into the everyday life and homes of Bulgarians has turned entering information via a keyboard into the dominant kind of ‘writing.’

Our children often sit down at computers before they have even picked up a pencil or a pen. Yet precisely in recent years, when using a keyboard became a necessity, the century-old Bulgarian tradition of teaching typing on BDS was broken off, and students were left to teach themselves however they could and saw fit. Bulgarian schools not only do not teach them to type; they do not even advise them which keyboard to use. And many of them hop with two little fingers across a letter layout that is inconvenient for entering Bulgarian text, designed to serve the speakers of another language.”

The specialist has more to add today, too, when I asked her for a comment. According to Assoc. Prof. Stambolieva, the subject of keyboards matters mainly from the standpoint of education and the health of those who type. “For typing to be efficient, there should be training, as happens in many countries. And that implies textbooks and unified keyboard layouts. Health is an important question as well. A well-planned, ergonomic keyboard requires less effort and strain on the hands and eyes.”

In her view, the phonetic system requires leaving the letter area and moving the hands to the zone meant for the function keys. That makes it harder to type without looking at the keyboard, and slows it down. “I have tried to explain to experts at the Ministry of Education and Science the need to introduce keyboard typing classes in schools, but so far without success. And they would raise children's literacy many times over,” the researcher says.

Word by Word, Key by Key

The phonetic keyboard has some curious quirks. The most “consensual” letter remains “е,” since it sits on the same key in English and in both Bulgarian keyboards.

On the other hand, for a long time we had “ж” matching “v” and “в” matching “w.” That is because the standard was based on the German transliteration that traditionally dominated typography. We are left to wonder why and how “я” ended up in the place of “q.”

Besides the fact that the phonetic solution mechanically transplants a system made for another language, it is worth noting that QWERTY, the English keyboard we all know… is not the universally accepted best option either. The well-known Matt Mullenweg can tell you so, for example—the creator of WordPress is among the champions of the most popular alternative, which goes by the name Dvorak.

The history of QWERTY is considerably longer than that of our BDS. The typewriter was officially patented in 1868, and the standard appeared only five years later. Both steps were the work of the American inventor and publisher Christopher Latham Sholes, and they quickly took hold as the standard. Still, the final version of the layout was the work of Remington. The arms company wanted to change its image, bought the patent and became the world's first major typewriter manufacturer.

It seems that in creating the standard, the main aim was to avoid jamming the machines, as already mentioned, rather than to draw on statistical data, as in the case of the Bulgarian solution.

ASD, ASD

In the 1930s the most popular alternative in the English-speaking world appeared. It bears the name of its creator, the statistician Dr. August Dvorak, and proved considerably better suited to fast typing. Alas, it is still rarely used today, even though the subject resurfaces every few decades. According to its creator, Dvorak raises typing speed by as much as 74 percent and cuts errors by 68 percent. Its main advantage is that it shortens the distances between frequently used letters and “moves” all the most frequently pressed ones to the middle row.

Matt Mullenweg says it took him a little time, and he is very pleased with the results after switching from QWERTY to Dvorak. The differences in layout, as the diagrams show, are considerable—if Matt types the first four keys of the middle row, for example, instead of the usual programmer's combination of random letters ASDF he gets AOEU: clearly the most frequently used vowels are gathered there.

Look, a Key

The current world record for fast typing in English is held by Stella Pajunas, who reached 216 words a minute on QWERTY in 1946. With that she beat the previous best of 213 words, set by Barbara Blackburn in 1946, who for her part used Dvorak.

Nowadays there is also a third contender in the keyboard dispute, the only one of those mentioned that was created for the needs of the computer world. COLEMAK, from 2006, claims to take the best of the other two solutions.

There is a fourth participant in the dispute as well—KALQ, designed specifically for touchscreens, to be used when entering text on a tablet or smartphone.

And yet, at least for now, the winner here is clear and indisputable. More because of tradition than for objective reasons. Today we could create, in no time at all, an algorithm to work out what a keyboard that allows faster and more efficient typing would look like. You will agree that would be far more precise than whatever it was that someone did 150 years ago. Here, for example, is an interesting analysis of this kind, which clearly shows how badly QWERTY lags behind the other solutions. And still… try explaining to keyboard manufacturers that they will have to throw away all the ones with this letter layout printed on them…

Finger to Finger

The best thing today is that we can choose between keyboards, and they are now so good and standardized that they allow us luxuries unthinkable until recently. For example, writing “ѝ” instead of “й” when grammar requires it (Shift + ь, that is, the Latin “a” key, for BDS, and Shift + the Latin “x”). We can open and close quotation marks the way Bulgarian punctuation says we should—„“. And we can use almost any symbol we need—the other accented vowels, for instance—thanks to the ability to add extra characters.

Either way, whatever the layout, whatever the letters, what matters more is what they say when gathered into words, and how they say it. And as long as there are letters, there will be us. Just as there will always be the dispute over which keyboard layout is better… if you don't believe me, ask the programmers. They will certainly have a different opinion.

Who could be the author of the idea in the headline, an idea that is, one way or another, rather fashionable in career choices today? “Programs, programs and more programs! With this let us infect the young generation…” Be patient: we'll save the answer for the finale.

First, we'll peek into the future through the past… No, the Terminator isn't coming. We call technology “the key to the future,” and today we still accept this creed without a shadow of doubt. In this case, though, we're talking about a book of that name, The Key to the Future, written in 1988 by Ivan Ivanov and Metodi Stamenov. It gathers the visions of the computer world from that time.

In its 300 pages, the book makes no claim to be the most complete scientific study of its day. It only wants to show what steps computers had taken so far, what they were expected to bring us and where they were doomed to fail. Today we have accumulated far more experience, yet we keep asking exactly the same questions, which is why it's curious to compare our view with the one from the past.

Do the expectations match today's? What did the authors manage to guess right? What have we achieved in this time, and where have we failed? And are there moments when… we sound just as optimistically ignorant about what technology can do, even though 34 years have passed?

Here are 15 excerpts that offer plenty of food for thought!

1. The programmer as a wizard

“Programming is both a science and a profession. It is now in a period of self-definition and spreading to the masses. That is why analyzing the human factor in programming is a pressing question. As a profession, programming is probably the most difficult of all mass professions. The difficulty lies in the fact that the programmer must possess the mathematician's inclination toward abstraction and logical thinking, combined with an Edisonian talent for building everything out of zeros and ones.

He must combine the accuracy of an accountant with the insight of an intelligence officer, the imagination of a crime novelist with the sober practicality of an economist. After all, from the standpoint of his utmost rigor, the programmer resembles a wizard who, with intuition and imagination, creates working programs that are, moreover, astonishingly useful. At the same time, the programmer's profession is a prestigious one. To be a good programmer today is a privilege, just as being literate was in the Middle Ages. The programmer is a soldier of the modern scientific and technological revolution, and as such he must think in a revolutionary way.”

The authors are certainly quite enthusiastic about the programming profession… and in our time that enthusiasm is rather contagious, since in these parts it is one of the most sought-after professions. But even the most experienced software engineers today would hardly be quite so grandiloquent in their assessments…

2. They call it a dragon, they compare it to an avalanche

“The concept of the computer is often defined as the most powerful means of processing information. Humanity today lives in an ocean of information. They call it a dragon, they compare it to an avalanche. In our time, the concept of information has grown into the problem of information. And it has turned out to be a problem for all of science, one whose development is and will be the work of every branch of modern science.

At the same time, however, a special scientific discipline for information was needed. Then came the idea that, under certain conditions, the qualitative features of information could be disregarded and its quantity expressed numerically. The idea is relatively young (from 1948) and belongs to the communications engineer Claude Shannon. This marked the beginning of the modern mathematical discipline of information theory.”

We might have certain doubts about how well the communications engineer fared, given that today nobody has heard his name, even though information technology is a field where more and more specialists work. (Actually, it turns out he fared more than well. Claude Shannon is a founding figure in information theory and signal processing, and his digital story is more than interesting and deserves to be told — author's note.)

Something else is interesting, though. If in 1988 we already felt buried by an ocean of information compared to a dragon and an avalanche, what about today? And what about the future?

3. It sounds like a joke

“The studies of Japanese experts are categorical: fifth-generation computers will be usable by anyone who knows how to use a telephone, a television set, an iron, an electric stove and so on. It sounds like a joke. That computers, currently inaccessible to the non-specialist, should change their behavior so quickly that they begin to ‘communicate’ with everyone. Just like in a science fiction novel. But the scientists are confident in their claims. What's more, they argue them convincingly.

The theoretical methods of the fifth generation of computers are the methods of artificial intelligence. It is believed that only the technological base of the fifth generation will allow for a satisfactory application of artificial intelligence methods as software and hardware implementations.”

I wonder how the magic-laden phrase “artificial intelligence” sounded back then, the phrase that today leaves us as weary as it does delighted…

4. …will they become rational?

“Will future computers be able to think? Will they be able to speak? Will they become rational?

A positive answer means that computers must understand normal human speech. Japanese experts are confident this is possible. More than that, computers will understand even unclear human speech and, when necessary, will ask clarifying questions. They will correct incorrect speech and make recommendations about the language in which they are addressed! Don't be surprised by this! Even today some computers ‘understand’ human speech, albeit with a very limited vocabulary, ‘see’ text, print or respond to commands spoken aloud, and so on.

Another property of future computers will be their ability to make logical connections: associations and inferences. Tomorrow's computers will be able to ‘understand’ the content of the information stored in their memory, not merely remember it and retrieve it at a human's request.

And yet the miracle and the sensation of microelectronics lie in the near future: in the computers of the coming generations, in the computers of the future. Today it is difficult even to forecast their capabilities, their role and their place in the development of human progress.”

“What a pace of development!” Today it sounds downright touching against the backdrop of what happened in the three decades after these words were published. And, indeed, the miracle and the sensation certainly came true in the near present…

5. The radio amateurs Jobs and Wozniak

“Innovations in computing are often created not by those from whom they are expected. It is enough to recall, for example, the story of how the radio amateurs Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak tinkered together, for their own amusement, a toy that later received the name personal computer…

So it is with our MARS computer, points out Doctor of Sciences Vadim Kotov, deputy director of the Computing Center of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Dr. Kotov now heads an unusual organization of 120 engineers and programmers that has set itself the task of creating, within three years, a working prototype of a fifth-generation computer.

It is still too early to describe the future fifth-generation computer MARS in detail. In broad terms, it will be a 32-bit multiprocessor computer with a number of elementary processors ranging from several hundred to… the upper limit is unlimited and will be determined by the customer's needs. Each of the processors will also be usable on its own as a single computing unit for a high-speed personal computer running at 2 to 4 million operations per second.”

I wonder what Dr. Kotov is doing today. Because what happened to the radio amateurs, we know very well…

6. AI, the most controversial scientific problem of our time

“Although artificial intelligence is relatively unknown to a wide readership, for specialists it has been one of the most promising directions for the development of computer software and hardware over the past 20 years, and one connected with some contentious issues.

The word ‘intelligence’ is used as a synonym for reason, judgment or mind. It reflects an individual's ability to solve complex problems by acquiring, remembering and purposefully transforming knowledge, as well as the ability to adapt to objectively changing circumstances.

Artificial intelligence is the most controversial scientific problem of our time. Engineers and mathematicians, doctors and philosophers, specialists and popularizers never stop putting forward sound arguments in support of their theses, ‘for’ and ‘against’ artificial intelligence. And there is plenty to argue about. Especially when artificial intelligence is equated with an artificial mind.

In reality, an artificial mind will not be created even in the distant future. Why not? After all, in 10 to 15 years computers with 10 billion transistors each will be built, won't they? The human brain has roughly as many cells… And in 30 to 50 years the number of transistors will considerably exceed the number of cells in the human brain!…”

Now this text sounds as if it were written today. The same questions keep stirring us, the same possible answers are on the table. Will this artificial mind really come to be?

7. The cell is alive, the transistor is not

“Although they have reached and surpassed the human brain in quantitative terms, computers will never be able to match it in qualitative terms. The transistor is too simple an element, a semiconductor that can be in only two states: on or off. The cell, by contrast, is incredibly complex. There are quite well-founded hypotheses that compare it to a small computing machine. The cell is living matter, while the transistor is dead. The human brain is complex at the elementary level. At the elementary level, the computer is simple.

The computer's ability to present creative results is nothing other than the result of human knowledge and intelligence materialized in it. Moreover, a computer equipped with the software and hardware of artificial intelligence is nothing other than a small, albeit highly effective, means of passing knowledge on to people, much like a book. This means, in fact, imitates some of the functions of natural intelligence.”

Our friends here neatly sum up one point of view on what may be the biggest technological topic of our time. But if an algorithm cannot be told apart from a human, what do our definitions matter?

8. Third in the world!

“Incredible! After just over forty years, Bulgaria (such are the statistics) ranks… third in the world (after the USA and Japan) in total production of electronic equipment per capita. Today our computers work in the fraternal socialist countries, in India and in other developing countries. Today's Bulgaria has overtaken many developed capitalist countries in the most modern and dynamic industry of the century: electronics.

In a very short time, the first Bulgarian electronic computing machine, Vitosha, was developed and presented at the national exhibition ‘Bulgaria Builds Socialism’ in Moscow in 1963. This relatively small second-generation computer, with vacuum tubes and a magnetic drum for main memory, was our rightful pride and the first Bulgarian ‘electronic swallow.’”

The “electronic swallow” failed to carry on into a long flight and grow into eagles and falcons. What happened to the electronics industry in Bulgaria after 1989 is clear. And yet it seems everything could have taken off in an entirely different way…

9. A4 computers

“It is estimated that the market for portable computers will grow to 12 billion dollars in 1990. Future portable computers will be A4 in size (210 x 297 mm) and will fold in two. The upper half will be the display and the lower half the keyboard. Their weight will be comparable to that of a book of the same dimensions. A person will truly be able to carry them everywhere. They will have unlimited autonomy, a color display and so on. It is very hard, however, to predict the size of their main memory.

The world market is beginning to be saturated with personal computers. The slump in PC sales that began at the end of 1984 has continued into the following years. The attention of the mass consumer has been diverted to home video recorders. It is believed that the market situation cannot change until new, original models appear. The home microcomputer needs new functional capabilities, for example a telephone connection to information banks or to large machines, etc.”

The sales slump was somehow overcome, it seems, the video recorders are long gone, and sheet-of-paper-sized computers turned out to be far from the smallest format. I wonder what the authors would have thought if someone had told them that less than a quarter of a century later we would have much, much more powerful machines in our pockets…

10. A water meter against the pirates

“The growing role and price of software products has given rise to a peculiar ‘software piracy’: illegal copying of software products. It causes huge losses to software companies. Today enormous sums are spent in the fight against the ‘pirates’ on developing protection systems built from hardware and software techniques. Some Japanese companies are working on a new method of distributing software products that secures ownership rights. The idea is to meter consumption the way water, electricity and telephone charges are collected.

The user must obtain a special smart card that activates the box. It is a kind of credit card, upon the purchase of which its owner becomes the holder of a so-called general credit. With this card, he can receive any desired software product ‘on account.’ By analogy with reading a water meter or an electricity meter, the card records the use of software products, so it is in fact a ‘programmer’ with a payment function.”

The water meter against pirates doesn't seem to have done much of a job. But if we let our imagination loose a little, perhaps the idea will remind us of today's software-as-a-service model, of the cloud technologies that turned out to be a better solution against piracy than heavy-handed policing.

11. Good programmers = simple programs

“Programs, and especially application programs, are written for a specific computer and in a specific programming language. If certain rules are followed when creating programs, they will be both better and more readable. Readable programs are easier for the user to work with and can more easily be adapted to another computer. Many specialists, including the American programmer Newison, give valuable advice in this respect.

The first lines of a program must contain its introduction. It begins with the program's name, well chosen so that it is immediately clear what the program does. Then come the author's name, the date the program was created, the type of computer and/or the name of the operating system used.

The paradox is that to make programs more readable, more conservative programming techniques must be used. Contrary to popular opinion, according to Newison, good programmers do not use clever, tricky sequences of commands. They usually write simple, straightforward programs.”

Well, programs today don't look like that simply because they are much, much more complex than anyone could have imagined at the time. And still, the ideas laid out here largely cover some of the first lessons every programmer would do well to go through even today…

12. Computers like telephones

“It is more than obvious that if the electronics industry wants to sell its mass-produced computers, fundamentally new methods of developing software products will be needed. Here, as with telephony eighty years ago, automating the programming process becomes an urgent necessity.

Programming is still expensive labor. The cost of a finished program of average complexity is higher than the cost of some microprocessor models. Moreover, the pace of computer production still significantly outstrips the pace of program development. This means the negative trend in hardware and software prices will only deepen.”

That's certainly true! Only the programs that write themselves… and write themselves better, are still missing.

13. Robots with a sense of smell… then what is a computer?

“And yet, what is the future of computers? What will the future computer be like? For now, only this much is clear: computer performance has increased enormously. How far? To what extent? Perhaps a speed expressed in tens, hundreds or thousands of billions of operations or logical inferences per second is something quite real for the computer of the year 2000. And beyond that?… Beyond that we enter the realm of science fiction.

One may suppose that the computer of the future will be something extraordinary. Let us imagine robots with sensors for sight and hearing, for taste and smell, carrying out complex activities and experiments. The results of sensory perception are passed on to the processor. It searches for patterns that confirm or refute old assumptions, or forms new ones. Based on the analysis, the computer works out new instructions and passes them on to the robots.

And what if all this is in a laboratory, a workshop or a factory? The robots, controlled by the intelligent computer, will carry out the entire production. They will draw, write and perform every task. Even now they play chess, dominoes… Couldn't they learn to play soccer? Then what is a computer?”

Indeed, what is a computer? Today each of us could give a meaningful answer if we gave it a little thought, much like the authors of this book. Alas, we don't have the time to think about it…

14. What has become of our nature?

“Man dreamed of creating the telephone, the radio, the television… And he created them! He created them because he needed them. Man dreamed of creating the computer with which to process the enormous flow of information. And he created it! He dreams of creating a computer that thinks for him, and once again he is on the way to creating it.

The computer has entered almost every area of human activity. What could be better? After all, isn't the computer just one of the many tools created by man to ease his labor? Yes, it is! But there is a difference. It lies in the fact that the tools created so far increase man's physical abilities, while the computer increases his mental ones. The rapid improvement of the computer is tied to the very fast development of the relationship between it and man.

Man increasingly has to work with the computer. In practice, however, he knows it less and less. If a person can learn how a bicycle works in less than an hour, or how a lathe works in a few hours, understanding how a computer works requires a certain base of prior knowledge.

The relationship between man and computer has various aspects. The decisive ones are the psychological and the social: the first answers the question of whether every individual can become a computer specialist, and the second, to what extent the progress of science and technology will affect human nature?”

The humanistic view of technology is what, in my opinion, we lack most today, and that is precisely why Digital Stories exists.

To what extent will the progress of science and technology affect human nature?

15. Man or computer?

“If there is a danger of man being replaced by the computer, why not get rid of the computer?

The crown of nature, man, has always flattered himself with the thought that if he doesn't run the fastest, jump the highest or swim the best… at least he thinks better than any living thing in the world. Lately the idea has been creeping in that the computer is man's rival in thinking. And having a rival in most cases breeds unpleasant feelings.

It turns out that the rival computer is beginning to enter man's creative sphere. Consequently, in the nearer or more distant future, the computer may be seen as a competitor to man the creator and as his rival in the sphere of intellectual activity. But should we consider the computer an enemy? Isn't it better for man to seek in the intelligent computer a clever assistant and friend? The problem is very complex, and it takes the full power of reason to solve it correctly.

Man or computer?… Man, of course! Man, with an efficiently working human brain, will create and control the ultra-modern information weapon, the computer, in all its modifications and varieties. The computer cannot, must not and will not replace man in everything. Man has certain functions that a computer should not be used to replace.

There are purely human areas where the computer must be barred from entering. And not because this is technically unfeasible. To man must be given what is human, and to the computer what is machine. Evidently, this should be the sensible line of conduct when organizing joint activity between man and machines. This line is equally distant from the exalted computer worshippers and from the gloomy grumblers.”

And which are you: an exalted computer worshipper or a gloomy grumbler?

…And More Programs

So all that's left for the finale is to reveal who wrote the quote we started with. The words belong not to Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, but to Todor Zhivkov, Bulgaria's communist leader from 1954 to 1989, and the exact quote in The Key to the Future reads: “In modern Bulgaria, nothing can be done anymore without the large-scale use of electronics, without electronization… Programs, programs and more programs! This is what we must infect, above all, the young generation with.”

It's amusing how much some things in our digital lives have changed over the past 30 years… and how others sound exactly the same.

The book in which you are the hero!

Only someone born in the 1980s will understand me. Sixth grade, 1997. A school friend and I had named Slaveykov Square, Sofia's open-air book market, “the holy place.” We waited impatiently for every day a new gamebook came out, so we could go to our very own stall among the many piled high with books and hand over our pocket money for the new edition. That same evening we would play through at least one of the storylines, and the next day we would discuss what we had read.

Gamebooks, on the scale they reached here, are a purely Bulgarian cultural phenomenon, and there is a lot to learn from them. They show how the wild early years of the “transition” from communism had not only mutri, the thick-necked gangsters of the era, but also a peculiar, meaningful literature that woke a love of books in an entire generation.

If this story is familiar to you, it is worth learning how it continues today. One of the beloved authors, a knight of the gamebook, is fighting to give the phenomenon a new life. And if you have never heard of it… then it is time, because this is something rarely talked about, and it was one of a kind.

Which do you choose?

If you are interested in the history of the genre in the 1990s, continue to episode 1. If you want to know what brought the “golden decade” of gamebooks to an end, go to episode 2. If you are excited about today's gamebooks, which are reviving interest in the genre, episode 3 is for you.

If you are curious who the six great authors of that period were and what they do today, just look at the photos and the texts under them.

If you wonder where the largest gamebook community… in the world is, you will find it here.

And if gamebooks are a trigger for incredible memories for you too, read on in order…

1. In the Labyrinth of Time

The story of the Buena Vista Social Club, only in reverse. Six remarkably good writers and innovators create their own genre, win the enormous attention of an entire generation of young people, and then each of them has to go his own way.

This incredible story came before the digital age, but it carries much of its character. Because gamebooks were a Bulgarian phenomenon that cannot be compared to anything else. It burst out in all its glory and then, just as suddenly, vanished. As if to show that literature has more forms than we know, that it can move generations in different ways when talent is set alight by magic.

Here is how this fairy tale begins, the one in which all of us born in the 1980s are the heroes.

Lyubomir Nikolov is known as the translator of Tolkien. In 1989 the science fiction writer came across an interesting book in French in an antiquarian bookshop. In it, the story was divided into episodes, and from them the reader chose how to continue the plot. The action had many variants that could be followed and interpreted. At the end of an episode you decided how to go on, and you read further based on your choice.

Tales from the Temple of Wonders

The early 1990s were exactly the time for experiments in every respect. Nikolov wrote a similar book of his own and called it V labirinta na vremeto (In the Labyrinth of Time). He sent it to the publisher he worked with, which supposedly approved it, but something broke down along the way. Nikolov, however, was full of inspiration and quickly wrote two more such books. Ognena pustinya (Fiery Desert) came out as the first Bulgarian gamebook, followed by the two others written earlier. And so… the goblins arrived.

Yes, they are at the root of everything. Zamakat na talasamite (The Castle of the Goblins), a play on Clifford Simak's classic fantasy, was the first gamebook to catch people's eyes. So much so that the very same year Bulgarian National Television (BNT) launched a children's program of the same name that followed the plot.

The goblins took flight and there was no catching them. The book's success made publishers turn to the new genre, in which “you are the hero.”

What the media heroes of the 1990s looked like is another topic. But for us, the kids of the 1990s, the real heroes were exactly the ones in the gamebooks.

The Gods of Football

Several publishers quickly sensed the genre's success and set about looking for new authors. It turned out that gamebooks existed as a genre in English-language literature, but they had certainly not achieved much there. They were already in decline, and their themes turned out to be rather dated.

Publishers tried to release clumsily translated and pirated texts by foreign authors in Bulgarian, but… it didn't work. Unlike those who went looking for Bulgarian talent.

Colin Wollumbury, Virgil Dreamond, Robert Blond, Adrian Wayne, Michael Mindcrime, George M. George.

If you belong to the second group of readers, hearing about this phenomenon for the first time, I should explain that, strange as it may sound, these are the Bulgarian talents who left the big mark on gamebooks.

Lyubomir Nikolov published the first one under his own name, but, let me say it again, the 1990s were quite strange. Afterward the publishers told him that nobody would read an author with a Bulgarian name, and so Colin Wollumbury was born, an anagram of his real author's name. All the others went down the same road (except Sim Nikolov, but who he is I'll leave you to ask the old fans).

The publishers were looking for authors, but… there weren't any.

The Barbarian God

We move to the English Language High School in Veliko Tarnovo, where two kids, Bobby and Alex, only 15, were hooked by the first Bulgarian gamebook, which fell into their hands by chance. It wasn't even sold at the newsstands; you could only get it with a coupon from the newspaper Drugi svetove (Other Worlds). “We were stunned by what this thing was, and without knowing anything, on instinct, we cut out the coupon and sent it off,” one of those kids remembers today. He went home full of ideas and that same evening drew the map of Alkiria and the main story.

The next day he convinced his friend Bogdan to carry on together. They wrote and wrote, a whole 777 episodes, a lot even by the standards of the genre! They sent their manuscript to the two publishers that had brought out Wollumbury's books, the first gamebooks in the genre, and… almost immediately got a call saying they had been accepted! With the usual condition, of course, that they choose English pseudonyms, and so Robert Blond and Adrian Wayne were born, the Ilf and Petrov of gamebooks, after the famous Soviet duo of satirists.

Then almost two years passed, a long lull, before Varvarskiyat bog (The Barbarian God) finally came off the press… And it became the third Bulgarian gamebook to cause a real boom! The kids' work was published… in a total print run of more than 50,000! The first 10,000 sold within a single week!

Today it sounds utopian. But they were young, not used to haggling. Overjoyed with their success, they took money… just enough to buy a typewriter each, and kept writing and writing, immediately landing a contract for five more books.

Four of the six authors made their debut within a few years. A funny paradox emerged: everyone knew they were Bulgarians, readers knew them better than their own neighbors, yet the English names kept showing off on the covers.

The culmination was the founding of an entire publishing house for gamebooks, Mega. Monthly magazines began to appear, first Megaigri and then Megaigra, which gathered shorter texts by the acknowledged masters, organized contests, hunted for the answers to hidden puzzles and kept a constant connection with readers.

The genre piled up fans and more fans. The books covered every imaginable theme; at the height of the enthusiasm in 1994 came Bogovete na futbola (The Gods of Football), a game that captured the spirit of the time even more and holds the print-run record at over 50,000. Translated books came out too, and many authors tried their hand, but over the following years the six whose pseudonyms you saw pulled the whole genre forward, writing at a pace that even Victor Hugo would have envied.

The Crimson Dragon

They created works that stood out for their style, their plots and their thoughtful structure. They had no editors or proofreaders, but they worked in times when that apparently didn't matter so much, because they were literate enough. Without a doubt, many of the gamebooks stand out for their polished style, well-conceived and gripping plots, and ideas that are original even as literature. The current also swept along some mediocre ventures, but those were more the exception and were quickly punished by readers with poor sales.

Some of the most talented illustrators in the country were drawn in by gamebooks too. Against the background of the first, utterly incompetently pirated Western covers, artists like Ivaylo Ivanchev joined in, an incredible and distinctive creator who, alas, now lives in Australia and draws storyboards for various productions. There were Dimitar Stoyanov (Dimo) and Evgeniy Yordanov, and there was Petar Stanimirov, a master of covers, who took the helm of the dedicated publishing house. Masters such as Nikifor Ruskov joined as well, misunderstood by some of the young, but a school of illustration in himself. All this came as a kind of continuity from another Bulgarian youth cultural phenomenon, only from the 1980s: the cult magazine Daga (Rainbow).

Fiery Desert

Each of the authors specialized in his own areas and developed the qualities of his books further, and long series were created. The areas and themes multiplied: gamebooks appeared about sports, westerns, horror, humor.

Gradually a whole subculture and community took shape, and readers literally flooded the publishers with sacks of letters and ideas. There was a stir when word got out that behind one of the pseudonyms hid… a woman! Another author announced he had discovered a remarkable new master of the genre, and then it turned out that… he was simply publishing under a new pseudonym. Dramas between the publishers began.

After the books came strategy games, series, magazines… and just when the genre seemed to be soaring and its fans were an entire generation, it became clear that the connection had been lost and everything was over. More unexpected than anything for all those waiting for the next edition the following week…

2. The River of No Return

Aleksandar Sultanov still introduces himself as Adrian Wayne; that is his name on Facebook too. Of the six unforgettable authors, he alone has spent the last 10 years actively trying to bring back the genre's glorious past and sketch its future. It was his Facebook group, “Gamebooks by Your Favorite Authors: New Titles, Interviews, Polls, Promotions!”, that made me recall this fascinating subject.

We talk on the phone, because in recent years he has been tormented by serious illnesses that keep him from developing the venture into which he puts effort and meaning. For the past two years he hasn't even been able to leave home, but he doesn't lose hope that he will soon have the strength to carry on. He says he doesn't even own a smartphone. But the moment he starts talking about the past, his voice comes alive.

“It's funny, but it's a fact. There are two things in which Bulgaria is the best in the world: yogurt and gamebooks, plus maybe rhythmic gymnastics,” Wayne smiles.

How does he think the initial boom came about? “On the one hand it was the right moment, the transition, the time when we had to catch up on everything. But that's not an answer in itself; the same conditions existed across Eastern Europe, yet nowhere else was there a phenomenon like this in the quantity and quality of gamebooks,” he adds.

“The genre started in England, but there they never saw them as books. From the very beginning they were single-player role-playing games, something very basic. For 40 years they've been stuck in one place and have made almost nothing of value. Whereas we accepted them as books from the very start and tried to write and publish them as books.”

The End of the Corrida

Another explanation is the luck of having such a strong generation of authors emerge. Names like Bogdan Rusev, Elena Pavlova and Lyubomir Nikolov, according to Wayne, have no competition as genre authors of fantasy and science fiction in Bulgaria.

“A product this good would have succeeded anywhere in the world, but in this place and this time, Bulgaria in the 1990s, it succeeded even more, because it was the right moment and there was no competition. Our audience appreciated us.”

Wayne tells how he and Blond started writing almost as a joke at school and imperceptibly turned into best-selling authors. This happened at a time when there was no internet yet; otherwise they would surely have become very popular, outright influencers.

At Both Ends of the Rainbow

“Bogdan didn't believe in our success, but I was sure of it even before we sent the manuscript. Then The Barbarian God became the second most important book in this story, because it turned the whole genre around and saved it from an early death,” Wayne recalls.

The two wrote separately, although no one, then or now, can find any difference in style. “There's no way to tell who's Blond and who's Wayne. We thought and wrote the same way,” the writer remembers. Every Monday they divided up who would prepare which episodes; in the evenings they clattered away at home on the typewriters bought with their first fee, and the next day they read and discussed. Blond wrote a slightly larger share of the texts because he was faster, while most of the stories and concepts came from Wayne.

The two parted ways when they finished high school: Blond left to study in Sofia, while Wayne stayed in Veliko Tarnovo. As fate would have it, both studied English philology, but Wayne stayed in their hometown because… in Sofia he tried to get into opera singing and didn't make it.

For several years they wrote gamebooks on their own, then got back together in Sofia, before the notorious crash of the 1990s.

When the cart tips over, there are plenty of roads, as the Bulgarian saying goes. Still, Wayne's view, which I have heard from others on the list too, is that the cause was the publishers' decision to flood the market at the expense of quality. In my opinion, though, we shouldn't forget that despite the brilliant result, almost everyone involved in the phenomenon was learning on the go. The heads of the main publishing houses never turned out to be particularly successful businessmen, which is easy to explain. And the late 1990s were not easy times for any business.

Money and Gangsters

Wayne adds that no one knew the real print runs except the publishers, who evidently weren't keen on paying for every reprint. “50,000 to 100,000 is the upper limit; most were between 20,000 and 30,000. The most printed are The Barbarian God and The Gods of Football. Nobody can know except the publishers themselves, and they keep quiet, so nobody can know exactly how much they made off us. We worked for a flat fee, which wasn't fair. I've calculated that half a percent of the cover price reached us, when the normal standard is about 15 percent!”

All this made them write fast, ever thinner and sloppier books. “They started putting out a book a week, and total garbage at that, magazines, strategy games, half-strategy games. It was a terrorist attack on the genre! As incredibly good as our authors were, some publishers were just as incredibly bad. The genre succeeded in spite of them and died only because of them. The publishers drove the audience away by force, and afterward there was no one to win it back,” says Wayne.

Dimitar Dafovski, known as Michael Mindcrime, holds the same view in this interview for Bulgarian National Radio. “We never had editors or game designers. When you have no editors and no critical thinking, at some point things turned into ‘publish, publish, publish.’ Far too many authors and publishers sprang up, and old books started being reissued. The oversaturation definitely killed the market.”

Wayne regrets that back then he was too young to keep fighting. “I'm an entrepreneur at heart, but I started much later; back then I was a kid. And that's exactly the huge tragedy: if I hadn't been so young in 1999, I would have carried on and the genre would never have died,” Wayne is convinced.

“Afterward only I carried on, because the others had to make a living by translating nonstop, which for me is an extremely bitter story. The best Bulgarian writers, instead of writing their own science fiction, had to waste their time on foreign Western works.”

3. Rise of the Dark Sun

In the first years of the millennium so few new gamebooks came out that you could count them on your fingers, and all of them were written and published by Wayne. Over the years he didn't give up and was at the heart of the “New Wave” in gamebooks. Then, in 2011, together with fans of the genre, he created a dedicated website with its history and an active forum, of which, unfortunately, not much remains today. They published several books by the beloved authors and appeared at the traditional book fairs.

Gradually a second current emerged: fans of the genre trying their hand as new authors, again with the traditional English pseudonyms.

In 2015 Wayne opened a bookshop in the arcade on Slaveykov Square, which he calls the only one in the whole world specializing solely in gamebooks. All the old editions are sold there, and there are very serious plans for the future.

Interest in the Facebook group is high, and more and more of the other “old” authors join in with comments, memories and ideas. Former readers come too. As Wayne says, if you were born between 1980 and 1990, you have almost certainly read gamebooks; that goes for 90 percent of the boys and 70 percent of the girls. No more than 5 to 10 percent of the genre's fans were born earlier or later.

The Castle of the Goblins

Wayne is confident that today's kids can appreciate it too. Over the past decade he has met many thousands of young people at various events and in the bookshop. “At first they don't know what a gamebook is, but once I explain it in a couple of words, the way I know from experience, their jaws literally drop and they say, ‘Hey, this is great,’ and they're ready to give it a try.”

The writer doesn't consider computer games real competition. “These are completely different arts, and computer games aren't even art. If a child can read with understanding, I'm sure a quality gamebook will appeal to him. Alas, I doubt that many of today's children can do that at all.”

“Once, we gamebook authors had between a quarter and half a million readers in Bulgaria. Where have they gone? I think most of them are still here and will be glad when new books by their favorite authors start coming out soon; we all want masterpieces from Colin, from Virg, from Blond and Wayne,” he concludes. “I believe a revival of the genre is on its way. Soon there will be a new website, new editions; more than 20 books are already ready for print. I'm as full of hope as ever!”

First up, very soon, are a new special edition of Colin's The Castle of the Goblins and Wayne's brand-new gamebook about Father Valens, Chisloto na zvyara (The Number of the Beast).

Gamebooks were also in the news this year, when Bogdan Rusev (Robert Blond) published his new novel Tronat na Alkiria (The Throne of Alkiria), a kind of sequel to the first pages he wrote together with Wayne.

In just a few years, a full 300 books were created, of which I had collected more than 200, reading and rereading them.

The phenomenon will hardly ever be repeated, but it is good to know that such a beautiful and unique thing still lives on. That it can teach future young people to read as well, because the genre is a wonderful bridge between the not always appealing literature lessons at school and reading for pleasure and meaning.

And, as it's fashionable to say… in parting, I wish that someday someone waits for you the way I and so many other kids in the 1990s waited for the release of the next incredible gamebook…