Song of Programmer Youth
0Original russian lyrics by: Yuri Nesterenko (comte@complife.net)
2:5020/1402@fidonet (August 2, 1996)
English Lyrics by: Zhuravliov
Music and Vocals by: SUNO.ai
Lyrics:
When few even knew what Ctrl-Alt-Del meant,
When a kid with a calc was a lavish event,
And "Pascal" was thought of as just a French thinker...
When punch cards were lying in dusty old drawers,
We walked through the bytes and we kicked down the doors,
Our minds always racing, our spirits much quicker.
[Guitar Solo]
We were young and we cared not for error or crash,
Where reboot would fail, we would just format slash.
If no backup existed, we’d change the whole mission:
We'd crawl through the disks in a desperate quest,
Recovering code from the fragments and mess,
Typing hex dumps by hand with a monk's true precision.
[Guitar Solo]
We would laugh at Copyright, never afraid,
Even 100K seemed like a rich promenade.
We learned Assembler with no MUL in existence.
No paper was wasted for printouts or logs,
Our first little viruses spread like young dogs,
And we thrilled as they ran with relentless persistence.
[Guitar Solo]
We had courage to spare, we had fire in our soul,
No bad sector or magnet could shatter our goal,
Even power loss never would trigger a panic.
We'd crash an entire SM with one key,
Our DVK served like a god on a spree,
And Yamaha’s tunes made our hearts beat mechanic.
[Guitar Solo]
Then progress arrived, and we followed its call,
Left our old XT friends, chased the speed over all,
We squeezed every drop from old DOS and its brothers.
We rewrote the opcodes and traced every INT,
Disassembled the BIOS with barely a hint,
And wrote to the ports things you’d never show others.
[Guitar Solo]
But those days are now gone, and the years took their toll,
Now we all have dull jobs and the deadlines control,
And our clients click pictures like they are true sages.
We now treat all this pirating deep as a sin,
And like trees clothed in moss, we’ve got shells deep within —
So secure, we forget our own passwords for ages.
[Guitar Solo]
Once we’d laugh at a virus, embrace it like kin,
Armed with just debug, we were sure we would win,
And boot-sector beasts were a thrill, not a terror.
Now the smallest glitch makes us slam on reset…
Everywhere you look — another RET,
And you pray that the stack didn't swallow the error.
[Guitar Solo]
Now we’re lazy to tweak or to optimize code,
Just UI for dummies — our permanent mode.
We’ve grown fat off the power, forgot how to hustle.
Forgotten the opcodes, the tricks we once knew,
And only our hatred for Windows shines through
Like the blinking red light on a hard drive's old muscle.