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Comment by dzink | Hacker News Reader

I posted it here because I enjoy this community and I want to reduce the awkwardness of the many recent "women and tech" discussions here. I hope other female founders on HN can chime in as well.

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TBH I find the "rural Bulgaria" bit to be far more interesting :-) Did you have any exposure to Soviet computers? Like their clone of the Sinclair Spectrum say? Did you learn trinary in school? Do you say "reverse Polish notation" or know it by a different name?

I love these questions! Yes, I started on "Pravets" 8 and 16 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravetz_computers ) with BASIC and Pascal. We also had these robot hands you could maneuver with the Pravets machines. I would travel 250 miles to get the huge sheet-sized disk with a plumber game on it from my cousin in Sofia to show it off to classmates in Tutrakan. Karateka was also huge. For reference, my hometown had no traffic lights or english teachers (I started learning English from Cartoon Network because I could only study German, French or Russian at school until 8th grade.)

I was 8 years old when I started dabbling with Pravetz in the school lab and the 16 year old "Informatics TA" pulled me aside one day to show me a picture of two people kissing to tell me in the most awkward possible way that he wanted to kiss me. Who does that to an 8-year-old? I just ran back into the lab.

I think Reverse Polish Notation is called the same in Bulgaria (CS after the age of the internet is taught mostly in English back there I think).

Learning English from Cartoon Network? What sort of vocabulary does that result in?

It develops the ears mostly. I could see so many friends getting the same basic understanding as well. When I went to an English Language School for High School I failed my first written test, because I wrote a letter in Germish (English words, German spelling). I worked for Cartoon Network briefly a decade afterwards and the CMO told me they hear that story often. I think few things did more for the spread of English as an international language than good movies and cartoons. German was my second language because RTL had the best american movies at the time cable TV came to my hometown (and English wasn't an option).

I knew a lot of people who learned English from watching fan translated anime. They had perfect written English, but I don't know about spoken.

I remember the local "pioneers home" (what's the translation of "пионерски дом" actaully?) not having floppy disc controllers for their Pravetz 82 machines. So we had to type small BASIC games found in magazines in order to play. Typing to play ratio was usually 1/1.

Good luck with the project!

Small world, isn't it? I grew up right across the street from the one in my hometown (twin story house with a grey garage fence).

Can't help recalling this pic http://xkcd.com/645/

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