Today, 10 years ago, 12-Mar-2013, first git commit happened.
Earlier versions was only in Russian and in Mediawiki format (like Wikipedia). More about that.
So I probably put the first PDF on web in 12-Mar-2013, 10 years ago. My webserver started to serve these files:
% cat access_log | grep "RE_for" | cut -d '[' -f 2 | cut -d ':' -f 1 | grep Mar | sort | uniq -c 18 12/Mar/2013 63 13/Mar/2013 26 14/Mar/2013 72 15/Mar/2013 155 16/Mar/2013 350 17/Mar/2013 3419 18/Mar/2013 1192 19/Mar/2013 582 20/Mar/2013 378 21/Mar/2013 378 22/Mar/2013 252 23/Mar/2013 233 24/Mar/2013 251 25/Mar/2013 193 26/Mar/2013 129 27/Mar/2013 133 28/Mar/2013 108 29/Mar/2013 135 30/Mar/2013 182 31/Mar/2013
This is how it looked at 15-Mar-2013, ~210 pages in my lousy English with thick Russian accent.
At 18-Mar-2013 my 'book' went viral, probably because I put it on GitHub, but not sure. It was posted on reddit. Hard to believe, but after 10 years these URLs are still not rotten:
% cat access_log | grep "RE_for" | grep "Mar/2013" | cut -d ' ' -f 11 | sort | uniq -c ... 29 "http://t.co/YgZcNaji0X" 25 "http://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=hb_tab_home_top" 35 "http://www.reddit.com/" 233 "http://www.reddit.com/r/ReverseEngineering/comments/1ahnen/re_for_beginners/" 20 "http://www.reddit.com/r/asm/comments/1aiv4a/quick_introduction_to_reverse_engineering_for/" 50 "http://www.soldierx.com/bbs/201303/RE-Beginners" 121 "https://github.com/dennis714/RE-for-beginners" 3 "https://github.com/dennis714/RE-for-beginners#readme" 19 "https://github.com/dennis714/RE-for-beginners/" ...
(I had a low-profile GitHub username at that time.)
The first who wrote me about the 'book' was Herbert Bos, in 18-Mar-2013. He said he will use my 'book' for teaching. My first thought it was a prank. (He was the coauthor of the A.Tanenbaum's book.)
I dug in my archives for some memorabilia for that year. All pictures are clickable.
6-Aug-2013, Cygwin, Texlive, Vim, Metallica:
10-Oct-2013, IDA, FAR, IDA, Watersian Pink Floyd:
16-Oct-2013, Hiew, FAR, Vim, old-school Winamp, notebooks:
12-Dec-2013, Cygwin, Texlive, Vim, Google Chrome, IDA, Winamp:
27-Jul-2013, my weary face, due to lack of sleep and overworking:
Huge lumps of whatever I wrote between 2011 and 2018 I wrote using cheap and light (as book) Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3. I almost always had it in my backpack and worked in buses, cafes, at friends' places, hotel rooms, even beaches.
Many parts of RE4B was written on it, using console Vim without syntax highlighting. I used suckless dwm + st + terminus font.
Hinges were broken after ~2 years, as I remember. So I drilled the case through and screw in 4 bolts. It added a hint of steampunkness, I hope.
Its hosname was 'lobzik' ('fretsaw' in English).
Many parts of 'SAT/SMT by Example' were written on this netbook as well. There are still 5 places where I mention the 'Intel Atom 1.5GHz netbook' -- that means I ran SAT/SMT solver(s) on this netbook.
The netbook was finally 'decommissioned' in 2018, after 7 years of heavy usage. When I finally got tired of repairing it.
Almost everything was written when I lived at Podol area of Kiev, not far from Contract Square.
Thank you, everyone, who helped me!
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