KeyRus

KeyRus
Original author(s)	Dmitry Gurtyak (uk) (1971-1998)
Initial release	1989; 37 years ago
Stable release	8.0b16 / January 17, 1994; 32 years ago
Written in	Assembly language
Operating system	DOS
Available in	Russian
Type	DOS driver
License	freeware

KeyRus was a DOS-based TSR device driver for keyboard and display, written by the Donetsk student and hacker Dmitry Gurtyak (uk) in 1989. It was widely distributed in the USSR and outside of the country free of charge. The last version of KeyRus was released in 1994, not long before Gurtyak suddenly died.

KeyRus was distributed primarily via electronic bulletin boards and Nikolai Bezroukov's Softpanorama electronic magazine. It loaded fonts into the EGA/VGA and supported changes to be keyboard layout. Initially, it could change only between the Russian and Latin keyboard layouts, but later became more configurable. Its distribution included layout and font editors.

Later versions of KeyRus utilized an original font compression technique - the bitmaps were stored in memory being packed and unpacked just before loading into the graphics adapter. This allowed KeyRus to occupy a minimum of the limited DOS memory space.

KeyRus

Topic: Software

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Further reading