What programming language was used to make the 1st Tetris.

RHLinuxGUY · 04-17-2007, 10:27 PM

On wikipedia.org, it just says it was made on a Electronika 60. But it doesn't say what language.

And while we are on that, what programming languages were used in the Soviet Union?

GrapefruiTgirl · 04-17-2007, 10:50 PM

Good question.. The Elektronika 60 was a clone of DEC's PDP-11 which later became the VAX foundation. You probably know this if you're interested, but these machines had a large assembly instruction set, supported well over a dozen operating systems, and close to 30 programming languages.
My guess would be that the original Tetris was written in assembly or ANSI C.
Please do let us know if you find out exactly; I'm curious now

GrapefruiTgirl · 04-17-2007, 11:16 PM

Quote:

The legend of Russian game programmers is, certainly, Alexey Pazhitnov, the author of the Tetris. The legend says, that the ordinary Russian programmer has created ingenious game which has spreaded all over the world, having been copied in millions, but brought the founder not a stiver. It would be wrong to say that it is not true. Really: as well tetris has become unbelievably popular, as Pazhitnov has not completely received his profit. Moreover, the history of tetris is full of peculiarities which few people know about.

A research assistant of computer center of Russian Academy of Sciences Alexey Pazhitnov wrote from time to time simple games. As it often happens, tetris was born accidently - Alexey was programming the classical puzzle Pentamino, where the falling figures had to rotate around its center of gravity. However, Electronika-60 had not enough performance for computations of this kind, and the decision was made to simplify the original Pentaminos - to remove the fifth element from each block. And tetris was born - the program written in two weeks in russian national programming language Pascal.

From: http://www.mobile-mir.com/en/tetris.php

RHLinuxGUY · 04-18-2007, 01:05 AM

Aw... I was hoping some super secret KGB language, like ... 'the Ж++ language'. But that doesn't mean it isn't interesting.

Thanks Grapefruit girl.

GrapefruiTgirl · 04-18-2007, 09:53 AM

I find it interesting too, as a matter of fact. I already have an interest in Russian history and culture, and speak a little tiny bit of Russian. As for official "Russian Programming Languages" there are a few which were used exclusively in the Soviet Union in the 60's - 80's, Glogol being one of them, and which were implemented in cyrillic and not English. The site I linked to above (or maybe another one, I can't recall) has a sample of the 'Hello World' program written in Cyrillic/Glogol and was about 6 lines long

And to the detriment of any 'intrigue' to be had, Ж++ in English would be pronounced as 'Kha++', and our English 'C++' if it were to sound the same, would be spelled 'Сйи ++'

Доблы Дун,
Саша Алихандр

BaltikaTroika · 05-20-2007, 10:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GrapefruiTgirl

And to the detriment of any 'intrigue' to be had, Ж++ in English would be pronounced as 'Kha++', and our English 'C++' if it were to sound the same, would be spelled ''Сйи ++'

Доблы Дун,

Саша Алихандр

Unless your cyrillic encoding somehow messed that up, that's no kha (X), but zhe (Ж).

GrapefruiTgirl · 05-20-2007, 10:18 AM

Woo hoo, I love it when someone notices such typos! Thanks for the correction -- If I had to guess based on your name 'BaltikaTroika', I'd maybe say "Hey! A real Russian; very cool"

~ Sasha

BaltikaTroika · 05-20-2007, 10:27 AM

No, Canadian, like you.

But I lived over there for a few years.

GrapefruiTgirl · 05-20-2007, 10:32 AM

Fascinating! I would love to do that

Without further revival & hijacking of this thread, I would very much enjoy if you would email me sometime and tell me a bit about what it was like living there, both as a Canadian, and just in general. I don't know what it is about the culture, language, history etc., but I do find it all VERY interesting. If I ever suspected I'd had a 'past life' I think I would have been a Russian. .. Maybe in the next life, who knows..

ECRocker · 05-21-2007, 10:38 AM

I enjoyed the history lesson. Thanks!

I'm pretty good with PASCAL... maybe I could give it a shot.

dasy2k1 · 05-21-2007, 05:48 PM

i allwasy thought that tetres was hardcoded in machine code at first and burned on a ROM

diddnt it first come out on the atari coin operated shortly after asteroids and breakout

oscaringolilingo · 01-21-2011, 11:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GrapefruiTgirl

From: http://www.mobile-mir.com/en/tetris.php

Well, I belive that...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vadim Gerasimov

The first MS DOS version of Tetris was implemented a few days after Alexey put together his first prototype of the game for the Electronica 60. All three of us - Dmitry, Alexey, and I - were fans of Pascal and structured programming despite then-recently-published text "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal". We used various flavors of Pascal to implement our game ideas. Under MS DOS the development system of choice was Borland's Turbo Pascal. I started learning programming with v1.0. In fact, I still enjoy programming in the descendant of Turbo Pascal - Borland Delphi. The last version of Tetris, we worked on together, was compiled with Turbo Pascal 4. That last version of the game had number 3.12. Although 3.12 is pretty much an arbitrary number as we did not have a strict versioning policy. By the way, this version has an Easter Egg. Although not a sophisticated one. I wonder if anyone can discover it.

From http://vadim.oversigma.com/Tetris.htm

...is a much better reference, since the guy actually helped in writing the game.

As a side note: he never does say which programming language Alexey used to write the very first version of tetris in the Electronica 60, he only talks about the version they made for MS DOS in Pascal, and that was after Alexey wrote the prototype. BTW, you can download this MS DOS version from the website linked above.

The mistery remains: which computer language did Alexey Pajitnov use to write the very first version of tetris?

I understand the GOST/ГОСТ-27974-88 standard of the soviet union stated ALGOL 68 as it's official computer programmng language. Perhaps this is what Alexey used? Who knows? These are only my assumptions.

P.S. I know this thread is OLD but I only just found it on google. I just wanted to make my contribution to the historic accuracy of the replies posted here. Sorry for being skeptic about GrapefruiTgirl's answer, my intention was only to verify her findings.

lupusarcanus · 01-21-2011, 05:49 PM

The Russian language is so beautiful. It's always been the first 'non-native' language I would want to learn, followed by Hebrew. Despite my adoration of those languages, I do'nt even know one word!

Anywho, that's pretty interesting about Tetris.