While My Friends Were Playing Games, I Was Pressing BREAK

How a curious kid with a ZX Spectrum became an engineer who builds AI from scratch When I was a kid in the early '90s, every boy in my class dreamed about the same thing: getting a game console or a ZX Spectrum to play games. And when they finally got one — that was it. Hours of Dizzy, Boulder Dash, and Elite. Pure entertainment. I was different. Not because I was smarter or more disciplined — I just couldn't resist pressing the BREAK button. The moment everything changed I'd load a game from a cassette tape, wait through that awful screeching sound, and then — instead of playing — I'd hit BREAK. The screen would fill with cryptic BASIC code. And I felt something I can only describe as pure awe . This is what's inside? This is how it works? These strange words and numbers — they make the game? I was maybe 10 years old, and I was hooked. The book that started it all I found a book by Radionov and Larchenko — a Soviet-era programming manual for the ZX Spectrum. It was thick, technical, and absolutely not written for children. I didn't care. I read it cover to cover. First came BASIC. Simple loops, PRINT statements, drawing pixels on the screen. But BASIC was slow, and I wanted more. Then came assembly language . I still remember the thrill of typing my favorite line: ORG 40000 That was the starting address. From that point on, every byte was mine to control. No interpreter, no abstraction — just raw machine code talking directly to the Z80 processor. My classmates were still playing games. I was writing them. Building things nobody asked for I didn't stop at simple programs. I got my hands on a Yamaha sound processor expansion board, connected it to my Spectrum, and wrote an assembly routine to digitize audio from cassette tapes . At an age when most kids were trading game cartridges, I was sampling sound and playing it back through code I wrote myself. I created custom fonts — pixel by pixel, byte by byte, designing each character in a grid and encoding it into memory. Then I wrote my own game . A small one, sure — but it had sprite animation, collision detection, and a game loop. All in Z80 assembly. All by hand. And the feeling through all of this? It wasn't pride. It wasn't "look how smart I am for reading hard books at a young age." It was pure joy . The same joy I felt the first time I pressed BREAK. The joy of seeing how things work and making them do what I want. From solder to software That curiosity never went away — it just evolved. From the ZX Spectrum, I moved to PC hardware — soldering, modding, understanding every chip on the motherboard. I fell in love with microcontrollers and circuits . I dove deep into C++ and low-level systems programming, always chasing that same feeling: what's inside? How does it really work? This path led me to industrial automation — and it became my career for over 20 years . 20+ years in the field — and the fire never went out I started at the bottom. Operator at oil field pumping stations in the Russian Arctic — the Nenets Autonomous Okrug, shift work in -40°C, maintaining instruments and control systems with my own hands. Then I built an internet service provider from scratch . Got the licenses, installed base stations, deployed communication nodes at remote oil fields. I was the director, the engineer, and often the guy climbing the tower. But the big chapter was Rosneft . Twelve years. I grew from an automation engineer to acting head of the production automation group — managing 105 people across 14 oil fields in the Komi Republic and Yamal. SCADA systems, telemetry, instrumentation, fire suppression, communication networks. I personally commissioned control systems at 3 new oil fields from the ground up. I wrote software in C++, VBA, RAD Studio . I built monitoring dashboards in Wonderware InTouch . I designed databases in MySQL . When Flash was still a thing, I built interactive HMI panels in ActionScript . Whatever the problem needed — I learned it and built it. After Rosneft,