Veiko Herne

Living on a boat had been a long‑time dream of mine. Back when I still had a solid income around the millennium, I imagined owning a luxurious Chris‑Craft 36 motor yacht. Years later, as a single hitchhiker, almost any small sailboat would have done. Southern Europe was too expensive, so getting one from Sweden seemed like a smart idea. I wanted to make it happen before COVID, but had to wait out the lockdowns. My plan was to sail her through the German canals during the summer season — overly optimistic, as it turned out. I barely made it past Denmark. What I didn’t know was that in Scandinavia you can’t live aboard during winter, and without a local tax number you can’t even keep your boat there over the cold season.

A deep dive into how a homemade Z80‑based computer came to life in the Soviet era — built from loose memory chips, a smuggled processor, a suitcase‑TV display and a cassette‑driven operating system. This story explores hand‑coded windowing interfaces, animated GUI elements, scientific text editing, and the challenges of writing complex software in pure Z80 assembler at a time when Western hardware was inaccessible. A rare look at creativity, engineering and determination behind the Iron Curtain.

Life during Soviet Union era wasn’t boring at all and as a Young Person, I remember having much more democracy than we have currently in European Union. My involvement in “underground” music scene started with my teenager activity to build and run small pirate radio station. Later I built proper PA system for bands to gig, when such kind of technical capabilities where restricted and afterwards even had 8 track recording studio. Same time I spent my nights in “computing centres” to learn, why IBM programmers are writing such kind of bad code and optimised their products to run much faster and using much less memory.