CHAT

Терминал связи

My own, 2026. Nothing like it exists in the corpus.

Not a game. Twenty-five lines that take a typed question, switch the output to device 015, send it down the line, then read back what comes in, one line at a time, until a line that is nothing but a period. The Iskra-226 cannot answer a question by itself. It can ask one, and it can print what it gets.

sectors

20-22

source lines

25

device

015, not attested

statements used

SELECT, PRINT, INPUT, IF, GOTO

The terminal writes a question to line 015 and prints what comes back. Nothing is listening on that line here, so the answer is that the connection was never made.

Run this disk · The image, 256,256 bytes

015 is an invention of this project

Said plainly, because it is the one thing on this page that could be mistaken for a finding: device address 015 is mine. It is not a historical fact, it is not in the recovered corpus, and a real Iskra-226 would have found nothing at that address. What is attested is the statement around it. The dialect knows SELECT PRINT with a device number, and the corpus uses 005 for the screen at 80 columns and 012 for the line printer at 132. 015 appears nowhere, which is exactly why it was free to take: an unused address inside a proven statement.

How the exchange runs

The program prints the question with 015 selected, switches back to 005 so the screen belongs to it again, and then reads replies with INPUT until a line consisting of a single period arrives. That period is the end of transmission marker. A reply that happens to be just a period therefore gets a space appended before it goes out, or the answer would be cut off at that line and nobody would know why. The whole program is SELECT, PRINT, INPUT, IF and GOTO. Nothing in it needs a statement I have not proven against the recovered programs.

The machine knows no hyperlinks, so it prints a URL as text and the page around it makes the text clickable. Replies are folded to 78 columns without breaking a URL across the fold, because a torn URL is not a link any more, and a full stop at the end of a sentence stays outside the anchor so the link does not point into nothing. Those are decisions about a 24 line screen, not about the web: the terminal was always going to print plain characters, and everything else had to be arranged around that.

On this page it is wired up

Here the line runs into my own chat, which makes the fiction and the fact meet in the middle: an office terminal from 1984 asking a question, and getting an answer back in Russian, in uppercase, at 78 columns. Without that connection the disk still runs. It answers from a small fact table about the Iskra, the stipend program, the BAM suite and the games, so the image is demonstrable on its own, without a key and without anything on the far end. The program cannot tell the difference, and neither can the screen.

Not a find

This disk was written in 2026. There is no historical terminal program behind it, no recovered communications disk, and 015 never carried anything at all. What is old is everything around the invention: the disk layout, the catalog entry, the token encoding of the program body, all taken from the six sides that were actually recovered and read. If you remember one thing from this page, make it the address.

What I checked

*** ИСКРА-226 - ТЕРМИНАЛ СВЯЗИ *** and ЛИНИЯ 015 - СПРАВОЧНАЯ СИСТЕМА, then --- ЗАПРОС1 with ОТВЕТ: and a reply carrying two URLs that survive the fold to 78 columns intact, then an empty question at --- ЗАПРОС2 and *** СВЯЗЬ ЗАВЕРШЕНА ***.

What this does not show

Where to read more

• The chat disk, both ends The BASIC program and the host that collects lines on 015, written out side by side.
• CHAT.bas, the source Twenty-five lines of SELECT, PRINT, INPUT, IF and GOTO, and nothing in it that the recovered programs do not also use.
• Where this BASIC comes from A short account of the Wang 2200 interpreter in ROM that this dialect is a work-alike of, and of the BASIC-2 that followed it.

The source

CHAT.bas, 24 lines, assembled onto the image with iskra_asm.py

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10 REM CHAT TERMINAL
20 PRINT "*** ИСКРА-226 - ТЕРМИНАЛ СВЯЗИ ***"
30 PRINT "ЛИНИЯ 015 - СПРАВОЧНАЯ СИСТЕМА"
40 PRINT "ПРОЕКТ: ЭМУЛЯЦИЯ ИСКРЫ-226"
50 PRINT "ВВЕДИТЕ ВОПРОС. ПУСТАЯ СТРОКА - КОНЕЦ."
60 PRINT
100 V10 = V10 + 1
110 PRINT "--- ЗАПРОС";V10
120 INPUT V01
130 IF V01 = "" GOTO 900
140 IF V01 = "КОНЕЦ" GOTO 900
150 SELECT PRINT 015
160 PRINT V01
170 SELECT PRINT 005
180 PRINT
190 PRINT "ОТВЕТ:"
200 INPUT V02
210 IF V02 = "." GOTO 300
220 PRINT V02
230 GOTO 200
300 PRINT
310 GOTO 100
900 PRINT "*** СВЯЗЬ ЗАВЕРШЕНА ***"
910 END

I wrote about this at the time

2026-05-19Nobody has written one

Back to Iskra-226