In my town (in Czechoslovakia), of the people of my generation, only those who listened to the BBC or VoA knew who the Vaclav Havel was, who became the first president after the fall of communism. I can't imagine the chaos that would happen if no one had any true information at the time of the fall of communism.

The same thing happened to me. Ads from Kazakhstan impersonating a Czech state-owned energy company etc. And almost every day there is an article in the news about how older people have been caught and lost their savings.

In my case, it was either from Kazakhstan or the US.

I did, on a Czechoslovak 8080-based machine called TNS: I have written & cross-compiled a fulltext screen editor for another 8080 machine. It was written in the assembly language, and the resulting product had less than 2 KB.

Many many years ago I was bullied at school (and almost killed). But I was fortunate to get help from a roommate at college: he helped me to learn karate. This changed me in many ways, including seeing my situation in an "objective way" instead of feeling offended.