A little bonus for you! I was going through some old notes and found my copy of Alex's timeline that he used when talking about Tetris. I thought everyone would enjoy taking a peak at it. Most of the time Alex goes off of his memory, or with a few references in front of him. In this episode he prepared a timeline to make sure all the dates, and times were correct as he recounted them.

Enjoy!

~ Jeffrey

Alex's Timeline of Events

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1983 – Mirrorsoft formed as the computer software arm of Robert Maxwell's Mirror Group. Jim Mackonochie establishes the company after discovering the Commodore PET and VisiCalc while serving as development manager for the Mirror Group.

1983 – Phil Adam and Jeff Sauter form Spectrum Holobyte in Colorado as a hybrid hardware/software company.

1984 – Jim Mackonochie becomes managing director of Mirrorsoft as it becomes a proper division of the Mirror Group.

1984 – A former college math instructor named Alexey Pajitnov working for the Academy of Sciences in Moscow often creates simple games to test new Soviet computer hardware. Fond of puzzles, he discovers a game called Pentominoes and decides to create a version on the Electronika 60, similar to the PDP-11. After creating a routine to spin the pieces, he was impressed by how fast they moved and decided to have the pieces appear and fall in real time. Deciding five-block pieces made for too many combinations, he slimmed down to four. To stop the game ending too quickly as the screen filled, he briefly experiments with a scrolling screen before deciding to remove completed horizontal lines instead. The game is completed in less than a day. He names it Tetris, a combination of tetra and his favorite sport, tennis.