July 4, 2021 Anton Nosik would have turned 55 years old

We publish a fragment of the not yet published book by Mikhail Visel about a man who created the Russian Internet

In the winter of 2021-2022, the “AST” publishing house “AST” was preparing to exit the book of the first editor of the Lente.ru Culture Department Mikhail Visel “Anton Nosik as a mirror of the Russian Internet”. Its author, based on documents, interviews with participants in the described events and his own memories, restores the biography of one of the main characters of the Russian Internet - and the most outstanding person of the period of its formation. Medusa publishes a fragment of this book, dedicated to 1999-the time of the emergence of Russian Internet journalism.

Now we understand that the Internet is a backward ridge that carries a design, the main artery of the news stream. That it is primary in relation to print media, which are the essence of the files displayed, and to radio and television, which repeat at the beginning of each hour those videos that can be found at any time on the website of the television and radio companies. And this is even if you make a painful question about the ratio of newspapers and television companies with their accounts on social networks.

At the end of 1998, when the first rudiments of the future Gazeta.ru appeared, the very idea of ​​a professional Internet media with real-time updates, capable of “affecting offline”, seemed absurd. Who will it affect?! But this is the case when it turned out to be appropriate to recall Blessed Tertullian: Credo Quia Absurdum Est .

The Eden name formed according to the same “word -formation model”, according to which Adam in Paradise distributed names to all newly created creations, intensively hints that “Gazeta.ru” , the “zero number” of which appeared in the open access on the network on February 28, 1999, was the first Russian newspaper on the Internet.

This, of course, is far from the case.

You can draw an analogy. After the Beatles phenomenon became universal, meticulous journalists with tenacious musical memory dismantled in detail where, from which songs of what little -known groups are grabbed and not constrained by the stamps of the scores of the bitla bitla, - innovative timbres of electrihitarian and knocking off the drumber, rhythm, modulation, harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony, harmony Transitions. It was all well -known. And it would have no sense without the Beatles themselves.

The first news resource in Runet was the site created in the winter of 1994-1995 under the National News Service (NSN) already mentioned by the programmer Valery Bardin.

Unfortunately, Bardin, like a nose, did not survive 2017. Therefore, we will devote several paragraphs to him and his visionary.

Forbes responded to the death of Bardin on December 26, 2017 by a large necrologist written by Dmitry Zavvalishin - we have already read one fragment from it regarding the creation of Runet. And here is another one that is directly Internet media:

Bardin created the first electronic archive of the press and news information in the country. Partly relying on the successes of the Relagoma - even then the project of newsletter of the newspaper by e -mail was implemented. Partly from scratch - NSN received part of the sources immediately in electronic form, part scanned - newspapers passed through huge scanners and entered the search archive. Today, the opportunity to go to Yandex and find any article from any newspaper is banality, and then it was a face of fantasy.

Mikhail Lukin, today - deputy chief editor of TASS, - on Facebook on the same dayhe wrote much more emotionally about how Valera Bardin, “a strange person similar to actor Avilov ”, overcoming the misunderstanding of employees, began to do what is now obvious - to write news to the site:

We talked with newsmakers something like this: “We are from the Internet agency. The Internet is when computers are connected by wires, and the whole world can read your interview on our computer. For what? Well, this is a new technology, soon it will conquer the world. Do not give? Interfax already promised? Maybe then? Well, please ... "

By mid -1996, the salary delay reached 9 months. And here we came up with the idea of ​​illuminating the online election of the President of the Russian Federation. As a result, the whole world Internet broke to us - I don’t know what traffic was there, but it was measured in millions .

And it was, it seems, the peak of the existence of the NSN and his main luck. True, this did not affect the salary debt.

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And then it turned out that this brilliantly caught by Bardin was a simple idea - to write news on the site and change them to fresh ones - changed the whole world of media, and the life of each of us.

Who, besides him, knew it then?

And today Bardin is dead.

On Web.archive.org, the most long version of the NSN website is the end of 1996, but the site by this time has been working for about a year and a half. The grass of oblivion grows quickly.

The grass of oblivion grows rapidly, but lifes the soil. As we see, the NSN, in essence, became the prototype of “Lenta.ru”, “a newspaper on the Internet version 0.1”, speaking the language of software releases. But the emerging premature. The idea of ​​“laying out news on a web page” turned out to be too advanced for the time when the nose in his columns taught neophytes to configure access to the network, register in the mail and, most importantly, gradually accustomed readers to the very thought that the Internet is not just “computers connected by wires”, but a full-fledged world.

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Having received at the turn of 1998-1999 from Gleb Pavlovsky, impressed by the way his long-standing day after day is methodically and without reducing the quality, the innovative “evening Internet”, carte blanche and the first tranche, turned around-and began to act with the usual swiftness.

The only employee of Gazeta.ru, whose appointment had to be coordinated with FEP, was the Petersburg friend of the nose and Kudryavtseva, the same reemigrant Julia Minder - later the permanent, fearless and stress -resistant director of Lenti.ru until the dismissal of the entire team in 2014. As Minder herself told me, it was reasonable:

Anton called and said that he had a salary so that I would come to work. But the position of [responsible secretary], to which he calls me, is the only position that he cannot decide about himself, and I must come in an interview with Moscow. I come to the Fund for effective policy, where all such pathos, I go through an interview and go to work. And it turns out that we are doing Gazeta.ru.

- That is, you first go to work, and then it turns out what to do?

Well, almost yes. At that moment I understood why they did not let Anton hire me. Anton, of course, completely made all the decisions, did everything that he wanted, but they wanted some sane person who would understand them who would communicate with them and translate from the language of Anton to the language of effective policy, to the language of people who are engaged in politics, communicate with customers and go in jackets. Because Anton, sitting there around the clock ... He had a huge ashtray with cigarette butts, he covered his face into the keyboard, and when someone from FEP approached him and said: “Anton, tell me, we must write the deadlines of our project,” Anton pulled his head off the keyboard, took the calendar, and spat on the calendar in red and plused back in the calendar. Keyboard.

By the way, we note here that the sleep of the nose “face in the keyboard” (followed by the presentation of corrugated squares on the unshaven cheek) quickly became - not least with the presentation of the correspondent of the “Result” of Yegor Bykovsky, who introduced this colorful detail in his report - the same “trademark” as it sticking towards the shocked visitors of the bale.

Anton decided the question of the technical side of the matter also decisively and uncompromisingly - having asked the matrix for all his further projects. Of course, the site of Gazeta.ru was made by Artemy Lebedev, with whom the nose was already working in Cityine, and Maxim Moshkov, famous by the time as the Librarian of All Runet, also attracted by Gushchin to create a database for the Open Society and received non -illusory $ 4,200 for the purchase of “iron” for his library. The nose, as befits a startup, delved into the process from the very beginning. In the same interview with Runetology, where he talked about the creation of Sharat, he described the launch of the “newspaper”:

I was doing everything. Who else could this be entrusted? I hired Lebedev’s theme to draw a design, Maxim Moshkov - to write a engine, and for Maxim Moshkov, as I understand it, this was the first experience of writing a publishing engine, not counting the script of the Moshkov library. I was engaged in TK for design, TK for the engine, description of the engine, a description of the layout language that should be used there, teaching employees to this layout language. All employees had to own the basics of HTML.

I can confirm as a direct participant: despite the fact that by the time of employment at Latu.ru, I and the aplomb discussed about literary hypertexts, I poured my first file in www from the tape computer, surrounded by benevolent colleagues who quickly showed me how it, and most importantly, emitted confidence that this was very simple. So it, by the way, is.

But this was a little later, in August 1999, when the news process was already established and launched. And in January-February of the same year there was no clarity for anyone. So Moshkov and Lebedev under the sensitive guidance of a nose had to not only raise a non -fingered field, but this field itself was to marry. But the “brainstorming” did not go through as shown in films about IT startups. No one was sitting, moving smart heads, with coffee tables. Or even, with (Hollywood) amendments to our realities, with bottles of vodka. And the words “I was engaged in TK for design, TK for the engine” should also be understood in a special Nosikovsky sense.

Taking an interview with Lebedev, I talked to face with him for the first time in my life. With Moshkov, on the contrary, I personally have been familiar for a long time. But Lebedev and Moshkov, independently from each other, told me the same thing: the nose “on the fingers” explained to each of them what he needed to get from them - and then they acted completely independently. And the nose instantly agreed with their proposals and “the brains are not caulkit”, according to Lebedev. Moreover, the designer and programmer did not even communicate with each other in the course of work on the Nosikov projects! This, obviously, was not necessary: ​​the “coincidence of discourses” was much more important than personal communication, which Vadim Gushchin recalls with admiration.

At the same time, the nose immediately laid Moshkov, without any preliminary conditions on his part, $ 1,000. What doubled or even tripled his then income - and transferred from Soviet engineers to a new economic reality. Lebedev in this new reality was originally. But he also recalls cooperation with the nose like this:

Now, after so many years, I recall which of my customers was so easy to communicate. And I probably can't remember anyone. And he came very often with orders, was very generous, never bargained, never greedy and always trusted all the decisions. That is, in this sense, he was simply an ideal customer.

We draw attention to the fact that with admiration-or, in any case, with warmth, recalling a comrade, Artemy Lebedev still does not forget to clarify: he was an ideal customer. Not only because it is generous, but also because he agreed with all the ficchers and, most importantly, "the brains are not hemp." Lebedev himself was also an ideal performer. Also because he never asked, "where did the money come from. This was a fundamental position: according to his assurances, he only learned from me in 2018 that the nose agreed with Pavlovsky about Gazeta.ru!

Not inclined to the verbal shocking of Moshkov expresses approval differently. But equally unconditionally:

- And could Anton speak to you in the technical language? Was he competent?

He was competent at the HTML level, and this was completely enough for me. I think that he was quite good at the end of the foreign news sites. He watched them ideologically arranged. But the source codes of HTML of any newsletter interested him insofar as a half ... I do not think that he was looking at HTML. This was my task.

But the main achievement is nevertheless-to take people who can simply wave the direction approximately, and then they all steam themselves. I saw very few such people and organizations where it was so arranged in my life, although where I worked or worked, I always have it. The nose was one of those who work as it should. But there are no such places. To hope for this, I think, is difficult, and the fact that I got such places is my personal problems and troubles. We must rejoice. In this sense, everything was fine with the nose.

So, the nose exaggerated, telling “Runetology”, how did he make up the TK for design and the engine, how he corrected the script written in Perl? Professionals came and did everything?

Not at all. He just acted as a good “organic” leader who prefers not to explain everything to his employees, but to hire such employees who do not need to explain anything. Which, in fact, Maxim confirmed with his story.

He remained in the staff of the Gazeta - “Ribbon” until March 2009. His duties included not so much to “screw” something new, how to urgently repair the existing one. What he really did from anywhere in the CIS, where he was thrown by the activities of the Hewlett-Packard computer courses instructor. Sometimes literally “whistling on the phone”-correcting the code in the WAP browser. Even the critical points of the launches of both projects found him “outside the office”:

At the start of Gazeta.ru, I was in Kazakhstan and made the last changes, sitting in some office in training courses. And I remember that I began to program the final start of some transformation at 6 pm, and at 4 in the morning I pressed the final button, and everything finally worked for us. And at 6 in the morning the audience went there, and everything worked.

And with “Lenta.ru” about the same thing happened, only I was in another city. Once I was launched from Kazakhstan, and another time when explosions went, I was somewhere in the north, somewhere in the Nizhnevartovsk region. The nose did not worry about this and did the right thing, because we managed to go under the deadline.

And after his dismissal (caused by the financial crisis, it became too expensive to maintain a high -class “playing coach” in addition to full -time programmers). The engine flew for a few more years. He simply functioned, nothing broke in it.

Indeed, the visual and technical solution approved by Lebedev and Moshkov and approved by the nose was very simple, efficiently and at the same time extremely sustainably. Like Kalashnikov’s assault rifle or, say, Niva, Gazeta.ru, and later “Lenta.ru” were distinguished by reliability and cross -country ability: they opened with the worst connection, did not fall at peak loads and were intuitively understood. According to Moshkov, “the nose knew where to click. I knew. Now not everyone knows. ”

Perhaps it would not be a strong exaggeration to say that Artemy Lebedev is a reference hipster that opened a coffee shop on Nikitsky Boulevard directly opposite the Rostov monument to his own great-grandfather Alexei Tolstoy-and Maxim Moshkov-a baidaro and a skier, a KSP lover, bones from the bones of Soviet technicians-conversely acted as real Russian engineers. The successors of the Kalashnikov and Korolev approach (whose “seven”-a ballistic missile, which has become a launch vehicle-also flies so far).

Fortunately, they happened to realize their talents not in the field of weapons.

Although, of course, how to look.

Mikhail Visel