George Iwanow

Last week I found myself hand-assembling some 80×86 opcodes, for reasons I won’t to go into today, and I was reminded of George Iwanow. George was a character and a half, and an excellent programmer, who sadly passed away many years ago. Amongst other things, he was largely responsible for the Spectrum versions of The Empire Strikes Back and Fighter Bomber.

I could tell George-stories all day long, but I’ll restrict myself to the one that brought back the memory – the job interview…

The scene, an office building in Leeds which by coincidence housed both the legendary Realtime Games Software and upstarts Vektor Grafix. Quite a large coincidence given that Realtime were well known for 3D Starstrike, an unofficial clone of the Star Wars arcade machine, while Vektor Grafix had just completed the official Atari-licensed conversion of the same.

It was at the door of Vektor Grafix that what can only be described as the third Blues Brother arrived, complete with dark suit and sunglasses. This was George and he played bass guitar, but rather than wanting to put the band back together he was selling out to the man and had come about the job. It quickly became apparent that he knew his stuff, and he also demonstrated some very complex circuit board design software he’d written, so he moved straight on to the coding test which had been hastily invented the day before. If I remember correctly, it was along the lines of “here’s some font data, here’s some text, render it to the screen.”

We sat George down in front of the development system of the day, which was an Amstrad PC1512 running an cross-assembler called PDS and hooked up via some custom hardware to the innards of a Spectrum.

“I just type it in here, do I?” asked George, somewhat bemused.

“Yes,” we answered, and off he went. Type turned out to be probably too strong a word, but nonetheless George set off typing – by which I mean alternately peering at the screen through the sunglasses and peering at the keyboard through the sunglasses while prodding a key with his index finger. This (or something like it) appeared on the PC screen…

17,0,64,33,...

“Whoa there,” I said, recognising Z80 opcodes (in decimal, of all things). “It’s an assembler, you can actually type the assembly language.”

“Wow, really? That’s amazing.” Off he went again…

LD DE,&4000
LD HL,...

The resulting program worked of course. It’s probably worth pointing out that knowing the opcodes (and associated instruction timings) was not all that unusual in those days, but when we realised that he’d developed the circuit board design software he’d demonstrated using nothing but a stream of decimal opcodes, we were blown away.

Anyway, it’s not a plaque on a park bench (or one of those ghastly football shirt and flowers tied to a lamppost things that seem to be all the rage these days) but for what it’s worth this is my memorial to George.