Andrei Aleksandrovich Chernov (russian: Андре́й Алекса́ндрович Чернов, translit=Andréj Aleksándrovič Černóv; 27 August 1966 – 16 August 2017), also known as Andrew Chernov and Ache, was a Soviet and Russian programmer who was one of the founders of the Russian Internet and the creator of the

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

KOI8-R KOI8-R (RFC 1489) is an 8-bit character encoding, derived from the KOI-8 encoding by the programmer Andrei Chernov in 1993 and designed to cover Russian, which uses a Cyrillic alphabet. KOI8-R was based on Russian Morse code, which was create ...

. He is also known for his contributions to the esoteric

counterculture A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behavior differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores.Eric Donald Hirsch. ''The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy''. Ho ...

of the Russian 1990s, especially the popularization of

Thelema Thelema () is a Western esoteric and occult social or spiritual philosophy and new religious movement founded in the early 1900s by Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), an English writer, mystic, occultist, and ceremonial magician. The word ...

and the name of

Aleister Crowley Aleister Crowley (; born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prop ...

in post-Soviet Russia. He also hosted the website ''Vniz.net'', which contained a collection of various rare pieces of media, including

anime is hand-drawn and computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japanese, (a term derived from a shortening of ...

and art by Fin de siècle painters like

Nicholas Kalmakoff Nikolai Konstantinovich Kalmakov, known as Nicholas Kalmakoff (russian: Николай Константинович Калмаков; 23 January 1873, Nervi, Italy – 2 February 1955, Chelles, France), was a Russian symbolist painter, graphic ...

, Louis Wain, and

Franz von Bayros Franz von Bayros (28 May 1866 – 3 April 1924) was an Austrian commercial artist, illustrator, and painter, best known for his controversial ''Tales at the Dressing Table'' portfolio. He belonged to the Decadent movement in art, often util ...

Biography

Chernov was born in Moscow on 27 August 1966. He graduated from

Moscow State University M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU; russian: Московский государственный университет имени М. В. Ломоносова) is a public research university in Moscow, Russia and the most prestigious ...

in the 1980s, after which he was employed at the first Russian

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privatel ...

Demos, and worked on the

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections ar ...

RELCOM which linked Russia to the global network. Chernov developed the Cyrillic

, which he registered at the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and ...

in July 1993. In 1992-1996 he along with P. Sushkov worked on translation of the PGP software. From 1993 to 2000, Chernov was a member of the FreeBSD Core Team. He is listed as contributor to the FreeBSD. In 2000 he participated in the first full-team BSDCon meeting. Earlier he was denied entry to the US as he was deemed "unsuitable". Chernov died on August 16, 2017, at the age of 50 after a long illness. Before that he allegedly suffered from osteoporosis and broken leg.

Personal website

In December 2018, Chernov's personal website ''Vniz.net'' became unavailable due to the expiration of domain registration, after which it was reconstructed at the new address ''Zachem.ne.jp'' with the use of

Wayback Wayback may refer to: *''The Waybacks'', a 1918 Australian film *The Waybacks, an Americana band based in San Francisco *Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprof ...

materials.

References

External links

Zachem.ne.jp

Another reconstruction of Chernov's personal website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chernov, Andrei 1966 births 2017 deaths Counterculture of the 1990s English–Russian translators FreeBSD people Scientists from Moscow Russian bloggers Russian computer programmers Russian occultists Russian Internet celebrities Russian Thelemites