The Financial Times, London, May 27, 1995
New York Times, April 27, 1994
A four-year blockade of most of the main land transport routes into Armenia has forced Yerevan, its capital, into a strange limbo which awkwardly combines late 20th century infrastructure with early 19th century conditions.
Cars, running on smuggled fuel, still make their way through the gracious city streets, but do so without the aid of traffic lights, which have been turned off because of an electricity shortage. Watching television has become a technical challenge which Armenians solve by wiring their sets to car batteries or clandestinely siphoning electricity from one of the government lines used to power vital services.
In this hostile environment, some Armenians are taking refuge in the high-tech oasis of their country's fledgling computer software industry.
Aragast B, which means sailboat in Armenian, is one of the pioneers of Armenia's unlikely effort to master cyberspace. As Mr. Gourgen Martirossian, the 36 year-old president of Aragast B, explains:
For more traditional industries, the blockade by Azerbaijan and Turkey has been devastating, contributing to a 52% fall in GDP in 1992 and a further 15 % decline in 1993. But Aragast B, which supplies the modest energy requirments of its 50 employees and several dozen computers with its own generator,
has proven relatively immune to the contry's power shortage and physical blockade.
says Mr. Garegin Chookaszian, the 34 year-old vice-president of Aragast B.
The siege mentality the blockade has bred in Armenia, and the deeper comitment to national survival at the heart of Armenian culture after 15 centuries of foreign domination, have also inspired the programmers at Aragast B with a sense of a mission beyond the technological obsession of computer hackers in the west.
Founded in 1987 during the first wave of Soviet capitalism, Aragast B produces tailor-made programmes for big institutions, such as the Armenia Central Bank, The Armenia railway system and some Russian banks. It has also begun to design multimedia software programmes, sometimes in partnership with western companies eager to take advantage of Yerevan's highly trained and inexpensive workforce.
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia was the Silicon Valley of the USSR, designing 40 % of mainframe computers used by the Soviet military. Dissolution of the Soviet Union triggered a shrinking of the vast Soviet military machine which put most of Armenia's computer programmers out of work.
Aragast B, which occupies brightly lit offices in the otherwise largely vacant building which used to house the 5,000 employees of the Yerevan Computer Research Institute, once one of the Soviet Union's high security elite research facilities,
to measure political developments in millenia rather than decades,
also see their work as part of a
says Mr. Chookaszian.
While former communist states have resurrected the memory of ancient military heroes in an effort to build up atrophied national consciousness, Armenia's pre-eminent national hero is Mesrob Mashtots, who created an Alphabet in 405AD which helped the Armenian people to preserve their identity through centuries of foreign rule.
"All of our aggressiveness and enthisiasm comes from our history." says Mr. Chookaszian.
Judging by the offices of Aragast B, some Armenians have already become competent sailors in the newest wave of information technology.
An educational programme, for example, offers a
the words children need to learn are transformed into colourful moving characters, including neighing horses and figures that walk, talk, and dance to illustrate verbs.
By RAYMOND BONNER
Yerevan, Armenia
...Aragast B, has 100 employees whose accomplishments include writing software for banks in Siberia and selling computerized dictionaries to schools as far as California...
Forty percent of the mainframe computers for the Soviet military were designed here...
...At one time 5,000 people worked at the Yerevan Computer Research Institute, a downtown complex of stone buildings so secret that ordinary Armenians did not know what went on inside...