 So, welcome to Didier Abou. He will talk about from Smaki to Kolobat, a history of software in Switzerland. Didier is a devian developer since some years and also a member of the DevCon team and he was quite involved in organizing here the whole event and he will tell you the rest. And yeah, come on. Thanks. So, as Gartens said, I will try to tell you a little about a partial history of software in Switzerland because most of you probably have never heard about anything that happened here and everyone thinks that Windows is the only and one solution. So, introduction, early days of computing, a little about EPSI tech and then Kolobat. About me, so I'm 27 years old, I was basically grown up with computers. I think I could use a computer when I was three. It was not a Windows, it was not a Mac, it was a Swiss computer, one of the 300 Swiss computers at that time. And now I'm working at Leap on e-learning. Towards Debian, I'm using GNU Linux since 2005. I haven't been maintaining packages since 2009. I'm now a developer since 2011 and as Gartens told, I co-organized this step conf and some of the packages you can see. So, as a first disclaimer, this talk intends you to show you a piece of our history that you probably haven't heard of, but it's also definitely non-exhaustive, focused, perhaps fun and definitely biased. So, I will tell you a little about the Laboratoire de Microinformatique, then from electric wires to computers and then from computers to humans. The main actor of all that was Jean-Daniel Nicou. He got a master in physics at EPFL in 1963 and then grew an interest in logic systems. And he became a professor in 1973 and was the founder of the Laboratoire de Microinformatique, which has been between 1970 and roughly 1990, the beating heart of computing in Switzerland, or as I haven't heard of many Swiss-German computing, at least in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. So, that was Informatics in 1967. And that was basically one calculator to do additions and subtractions. And it needed two people and a sheet load of cables and it was black and white. I don't know if they were wearing black and white, but they were black and white. That is a decimal calculator. So, you could do additions and subtractions, but no floating point. So, you can do divisions, but you only get the rounded result. And we don't really see the size, but it's probably something like a half meter in the two dimensions. And you see the seven-three up there, there are the results. So, they already had kind of displays, but it's not really useful yet. I mean, it was for them, but it's not really what we have now. And then, as they were working at the university and they were bored by calculating averages by hand, they started doing things more useful than something to calculate averages, which is just two kilograms or three kilograms needed power. You had like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven displays that could display one number at a time. And it was probably very slow, but it worked. And it was the beginning of starting to solve problems for people. And back then, as we will come to that at a later point, Jean-Daniel Nico already had an interest in education. What you can see is a logidule. It doesn't have really an English translation, but there are basically building blocks. So, you could have one transistor. You could have flip flops. You could have displays, another one there. And basically, you could teach people how electronic works without having to do soldering for three days, without having to understand how the currents work. But you could get an understanding of the logics. You could say, I have a one that comes out of that cable, and if I put that one there at the input of that transistor, then at the output, I maybe get the zero if the power is correct, without having to care about resistance and all of that. And you could build a lot of things with that. I also used some of these in my studies, and we could build calculators, shifters, lots of things. And then you had just a pile of cables and dozens of these logidule. But you could reach a result and have nice little LED blinking. But back then, interaction with computers wasn't exactly funny. What you see here is the beginning of perforated paper length. That was the way to input code into a computer, into its memory, basically. And then you had to do toggles to access memories and read beats and maybe change bits to see what was happening. So, I hope that works. If I click there. This perforated tape is the program that gives the computer the order to create an image on the screen. I'm sorry, it's French. What can we do with this program at the end? So, here, it's simply a drawing, quite passive on the screen, but I can load another program that, for example, will modify this drawing. It's another study that he's done. And that's it. So now, he will have it jumping. So now, he will have it jumping. It's a little longer. That's four images. So, that was really, really early computing, but people could already start doing calculations. And they started doing things like storing medical records in hospitals with stuff like that. And so, many people around here learn how to perforate paper and understand bits and shifts and registers and all that. Then, when you have sort of computers, as we see perforating paper isn't exactly rapid and useful, though, people starting thinking about how could people really interact with computers? As you know, the mouse was developed by Douglas Engelbart in 1968. He's now dead. That was his first wooden version with two wheels. It had two potentiometers and basically transformed the movement into electricity. And then, out of that, you could have a moving something on something that looked like a screen. But Jean Daniel Nico went to the United States and visited Douglas Engelbart, and he came back with the idea in Switzerland, and then he developed the first Swiss mouse. That had three buttons already, and he moved from potentiometers to optical encoders. But you still had these two wheels, so it's not exactly practical to move the mouse around. But the idea back then, and maybe you've seen that in recent mouses, if you were born after these, was to use something like ping-pong balls. And instead of having the wheels directly on the floor, you have something that touches the ping-pong ball and the ping-pong ball touches the floor. So the movement is much sweeter. So that was Suri 2. Suri 1, I think, this one was in one exemplar and this one in probably ten. And then this was the fourth version that was used for a very long time, also in the machines that I will present afterwards. It had quite ergonomic shape. You could really have your hand on it and the clicks. You didn't have to weigh your fingers up. And that was the first Logitech mouse. So Logitech was created by someone that worked in that laboratory and that had worked on the mouse, and that was the first model that they commercialized. And this one got copied in 1992 by a Taiwanese X-Apsilon company, so the design must not have been that bad. And one other thing that they were doing was something glass. Maybe you recognize that design. Which year do you think that that was? Nadia for a year. 1972. And they already had a four-lines display to be wear on glasses. So Google hasn't really invented nothing. Maybe it was a little slower and couldn't speak to you, but you could see something. Then out of these experiments and computing, a spin-off of EPFL was created, which name was Epsitech and still exists today. So I will tell you a little about the Smaki Adventure, series business and games, because they have produced quite a lot of games, and I hope including a demo if that works. So the Swiss computer, the goal was it has to fit under a keyboard case. There were already some producers that could produce computers and keyboards, mostly keyboards. And the size goal was to fit in a suitcase. It hasn't worked from the start, but they finally managed after some years to produce that. That was Smaki 1. The screen was quite small, and this was also in one or two versions only. And it fit kind of in a suitcase, but it wasn't really powerful. So after three iterations, they came with Smaki 4, which had one Intel AT-AT, a Cobus network. No one ever knows what that is, but it was a network back then. It had a seven-inches screen and 256 by 10 pixels screen. And it looked like that, and you probably recognized the perforated paper reader, and it had just enough memory to read something, put that in memory, but it had no storage whatsoever. So every time you shut down the computer, you had to read lots of paper threads to actually do something useful. But it already had a display, and they also used something that we see here, that is a tape reader. Camcorder tapes to actually do what this does, but just faster, because you could drive that with a motor and then just read it, and in five minutes it's done. So yeah, that was it. And then some iterations after that, 1978, the Smaki 6 with a portable version. I mean, a transportable version. 256 by 120 pixels, Z-Logs at 80, 32K of memory, and they sold 450 units. And that was the first computer that was sold by Epsitec. And it looked like that, so it's just what we now have as Osioscope, but it used to be a somewhat useful computer. And I think what you see here is probably a floppy reader. If people remember big floppies, it could already read floppies. And then maybe you recognize that 68000 processor, M68K that we used to have in Debian, Smaki 8, 128 kilobytes of DRAM, and two processors already, but this wasn't really a success because that was just an expensive machine with incomplete software, so it didn't really succeed. It looked like that, which already looks like a computer that you probably have used with keyboards and these colored things that were quite the specific thing about Smaki, it had these very nice colored F02, F12, that were then taken by others. And you also see the toggles around the screen because you could change the contrast and intensity of the electron beam directly. And then some years after that, together with the first Macintosh, the 68000 processor 8 megahertz, 3 megabytes of DRAM and monochrome displays, and these were already deployed in Swiss schools. So many of the children back then have used Smaki 100 and the other versions after that to do word processing. That was already graphical, maybe not in colors, but it was graphical. You could have games, spreadsheets, preview for printing, lots of that. I will do a demo after that. But that was why the first Macintosh had a blinking cursor. So it looked like that, it was already a little smaller, and you recognized the mouse that we saw before. Then as the available processors went on and on, the people behind the Smaki kind of looked around to see which processors they could use, and they tried most of the time to use the same mechanical casing so that they could sell partial upgrades to the schools instead of rebuying the whole screen, keyboard and stuff that was very expensive back then. Just reuse the same mechanical casing so that you could just resell a partial card and you just bought that and you could do the upgrade yourself. So this one had also two processors, and it was seven times more efficient and just faster. And the interesting thing of that is that it had up to two screens, but you could put them vertically, which when you think of it is quite useful when you try to prepare an A4 paper. That was unique back then, and I don't think many people are using their desktops with rotated screens, but if you try, sometimes it can be very useful if you prepare something that then goes to paper. So that version was sold in 300 units, which might make you think that it's impossible to survive by selling so few units, but when you see the price, 12,000 francs per unit, then it expires the thing a little. So it looked like that. That's without the casing, and you recognize the logic tools and a bus, because these computers were used in schools, so you could use the computer to drive external electronics using buses. So you could drive bits directly from the computer at a certain speed, instead of toggling bits at your limited speed and then drive external electronics to do other things. I think that's the 324 board, and I have no clue what this circuit is doing, but that's the building blocks that I showed earlier on that students could build things on. You could have register shifts, displays, basically one transistor or one logical element, the D gates and stuff like that. And then I will go a little faster with the next ones, because the technical details for all of the versions are not overly interesting, but the Smaki 300 in the 1990 had a colored screen already, and there's a very cool, super modern design. And then they did another upgrade in 1992, the upgrade of the Smaki 100 with a 25 MHz processor, and that kind of went with the upgrades that you could get on the Motorola 68000. But this was also one of the first pluggable computers, so you could just buy other options, like graphic boards, floating point units, Ethernet interface, video capture, etc. And of these 2000s were sold, and Epsitec tracked the people that had still working Smaki 130 units, and there were still 500 that had perfectly working computers for their use. They certainly look old, but they were still functioning. And that was also a different business model from them, because Epsitec had a list of their clients, because you couldn't just go and shop and buy something. You had to order that to them, so they kept your address and sent you upgrades by mail, by post mail, of course. And yeah, that was that version with color. As you can see already quite some graphical performances. This software was named PAGE. They had very Frenchy names like PAGE, and was it FISH for database, and other things like that, but you could already graphical processing, change the sizes of the things, and have images, colored images to painting in 1992. I don't know if you remember the state of Windows or Linux back then, but it was not that. But in 1995, there was kind of a breakdown, because the team behind Epsitec and the Smaki was something like 10 to 15 people at most. All that was coded in basic. It was working, but the problem is that the PC's price went down, and down, and down, and down. So it was quite hard to keep competing with something Swiss specific, only sold to Swiss schools and Swiss individuals, or small corporations. And there was also the rise of Internet that created new needs, which were hard to cope with a small development team, like just coded TCP IP over Internet is just not trivial. And the other problem is that there are long-term users with clear uses. So I think there is someone that is still using a very old Smaki to keep track of his pictures. He just enters them in that database thing that works on this thing that he has at home, and it's still valid for him, it just works. And it will continue working, because the electronics are robust. So they kind of didn't want to leave these users out in the cold. So they had a discussion to know if the idea would be to put a PC in a Smaki, or a Smaki in a PC. And what was decided was Smaki in a PC, after some tries, which was a PCI card with two processors, some memory, and you could launch an executable from Windows that accessed that PCI card, that had its own memory, so it was kind of a gateway to access this. But this card also had the connectors for the Smaki network, the Smaki peripherals. So at EPFL, while they had Smaki before us, they could just use their Windows NT machines, put that card in too, and continue with the experiences that they had with the Smaki software. So they sold 200 units of these, mostly at universities or schools that already had these hardware. And I think I could use one. So, yeah, showing a picture of a card is not overly interesting, but that was it. And then in 1998, software had evolved enough so that the hardware was not needed anymore. So they used a modified version of Motorola emulator, itself based off an Namiga emulator, to just have something software that would boot the system that was on the card before. So now you can have Smaki 400, which is now Smaki Anthony, on your Windows machine. So if you see that, we have an emulator working on Windows that launches another system. The luck is it works under one. I think it even has sound. So that's basically what you had on a Smaki. So you have a mouse, you have a green and black thing that after using for two hours you're just stunned. And then you can... you can navigate to various things, like launch this database software in which you can input things and add entries in your database, and you have a multitasking, you have different screens, and that's basically the state of the software back then. I don't know if you see enough. Maybe I can do something bigger. And launch, for example, PAGE. So that was the state of the software back then, so you could write... I don't remember how it works. You could add text, you could link text boxes between them, you could move text, change how you wanted things to be displayed, to be uppercase, you could preview things, you could have various pages, graphical things. It's been a very long time, so I don't remember exactly how it works, but that was basically it. You had some stuff like graphical programming, so you had an input-outputs code and you can add decision blocks. So you could have defining screens, for example, one screen, full screen, that, and then you could, I think, do another thing, yes or no, and then draw things. So that was quite... The focus of that corporation was always we want to bring something to people so that they learn something, and it's useful for them. I think they made a lot of money with that, but it worked for them. One thing that was constant in that user interface is the blocks that you see below, that are always there to remember you, the F1 to F12 things, shortcuts. So in that case, if I type F1, it should do... So you can save. No, I don't want to do that. Okay? So yeah, that was basically it. And I think I can probably launch the normal color thing for you to see a later version, something like Picasso, where you could have a drawing and circles and, yeah, I mean, it's a drawing thing, but it's coded in basic and works on Motorola 68000 and worked almost like that 15 years ago. So we haven't gone very far with GIMP. So that was it for the Smaki. I hope you enjoyed the flashback, kind of. And then the EPSI tech still... I mean, had to survive, and they had clients that were using their software on Smaki, such as database softwares and finance software. And now this company creates finance software mostly for Windows clients. Salaries accounting and voicing, and it's not too bold to say that they're between the two leaders in that market in Switzerland, mostly because Switzerland has ever-changing, ever-local, geographical changes, and that only a local company can do that. So that's why it works. Database softwares, they have done quite some... and it's not exactly SQL, it's mostly graphical, how do I handle my collection of CDs type of things. Also graphical software, I don't think they made much money out of it, but they recreated on Windows the idea habits behind Pash, so that their old users that were using that software in kind of how they liked to work. And they did quite a lot of educational games. That was, I think, a third of the programs on the Smaki's, and they ported some of them and then they started to code on their free time for doing 3D versions and all that. I didn't find a whole list, but I can probably lead you through the list afterwards, but that was, for example, DoFan simulator. DoFan was a small system that had a small CPU with toggles and LEDs that was produced back in the 70s for educational purposes and for the 30 years of that company they produced a version that you could use to test how it works to read from a register and the fun to toggle bits and such things. They had Blippi Mania and with this funny little thing, it's not a boy, it's not a girl, it's a thing, named Toto initially and then Blippi that was there for a very, very long time in the early days of Smaki and that had educational games again for small children and that was like logic games, how do I move this person here with this material that he had caught there and how do I go from there to there without pumping out my energy and stuff like that. I don't have a demo of that one yet. Then they worked on 3D things, buzzing cars, that was a car game very funny where your car would lose pieces if you hit things, you had a ghost mode where you could fight yourself to try to be faster than being and stuff like that. I have the CD here if someone wants to try and we don't see it very good on that but they then they tried to get children to program so you could have a bot that had standard like the turtle you probably know it that had go to and turn and advance and motors and draw, pen down, pen up, instructions change color and stuff like that and you could basically go through exercises to learn how you can program but in a 3D environment. That leads me to Colobot which means colonize with bots and the goal of that was to learn programming in a fun way. Demo. So the first mission I will just go through it so that you see how it goes. You have a 3D environment in which you have bots in which you have you and you can move around. So yeah, that mission is really boring so I will abort that mission and I don't have the cheat codes but you can go through exercises and for example you can try to kill spiders so then you're in that moon on that planet somehow and you have instructions so you can see what is going on and you have an objective so write a small program to kill three spiders you have to select the bot and then you have instructions on how you write the function to drive the bots, you can fire for some time, you can turn the bot etc etc Usually you can also find in other instructions if you go in the book, you can search for how does the if instruction work and read through that. So it's quite a good search first enter in programming because it teaches you that there is documentation that you should really read it so as you see we have spiders there and if I approach the spiders then they kind of hurt me or they should anyway let's not try otherwise the game is over. So in that case it's a robot that I can't drive in the missions you have hundreds of missions that lead you from planet to planet and in all the missions you can succeed all missions by driving the bots yourself so you can go through the game without ever programming but for tasks like changing a battery, going to search for titanium ore for an hour and just bring titanium ore back you kind of understand why it can be useful to program so in that case I will just cheat and use the solution you can aim so you just change the direction in which you're turning fire for some time, turn fire again and turn and fire again and if you do that it just doesn't mission accomplished but you have more complicated things like fighter jets so it becomes a little more complicated because you have to think about hate about aiming the cannon in two directions about the wealth of your battery every time you shoot you're losing a little battery you have to use your radar to find flying ants wasps and then the program becomes a little more complicated so you can use objects in which you can use positions you can determine the angle in in in degrees to things you can turn you can use your motor right or left motors to like do things in a smooth way instead of moving then turning then turning then moving so you can like drive your motors in a little more complex way or just use go to and the nice thing is that you can also have step by step and see what the bot will do and you can just so then it aims, uses to chat wait for some time, yeah that's really boring so yeah let's just go through that and at all times you can stop the execution and see what the status of the variables are you can always have the one-off documentation, click on it and get a more extensive documentation and the most fun part of that is probably see how the program goes so it search for a wasp and if it finds one yeah in that case it's an ant ant fatally wounded and then search for another one you see the radar down there and really you have lots of different activities you have a whole set of exercise starting from what is a variable to what is a function to how do I interact within classes and how do I contact another bot to communicate instructions to him so yeah if you want I can show you a little more but we're soon running out of time so we have as I said variables, motors mover, you can use functions, classes etc of course you can save your programs, edit them in another editor outside you can exchange them between you at the moment in time there was quite a community around that, that was like exchanging the best ever shooting program to hunt wasps while you were doing something else and the design is just wonderful so good news although it was closed source it has been open source at the beginning of 2012 and it's full gpl version 3 for both code and data you can find that on github and I filed an ITP I just couldn't upload it yet because of the appconf organization but that's a game that will most probably soon be in Debian so that was the link between the other thing that I didn't mention because I'm almost done the other thing is that although it wasn't open source back then because people didn't know what open source was about people and as everything was written in basic you could basically change what you had in your computer and there was quite a lot of work in making sure that everyone could change their software and then integrating more things and stuff like that but it was definitely not free software based but for the 30 years of the project of that company they decided to release the full sources of the smaki operating system in basic so if you have an interest go on smaki.ch and eventually run that somewhere somehow and if you want to try it there is an executable version that works on wine on jesse you can also go around the interface and see how it works if you have an interest basically there is absolutely no development on smaki anymore obviously that company has moved to making sure everyone can spend their tax declarations to the states of switzerland but I think no one from that company ever regretted that story and making sure that people in schools could get early access to computing these are the sources that I used for that presentation I have a CD-ROM full of these funny very old videos if you want to take a look at them people explaining in french I'm sorry what this all was about you can find some stuff I think a little of it in english on smaki.ch and on opacch.ch slash smaki which was kind of the parallel homepage thank you that was all