Kuble Soft
Kuble Soft (until 1992 the Kuble computing cooperative) was a software company in Talas that made computer games and educational programs from 1988 to 2007. It is best known for Köch: The Road to Iyık Janyl, a caravan game that its founder, Mederbek Esenov, first wrote as a student in 1979 and that was played on three generations of home computers in Irad and among the Iradi Americans of Chicago. The company also made Ulak! (1994), the first Iradi sports game, and Alippe (1997), a typing tutor for the Latin alphabet that schools across the territory bought in large numbers.[1][2]
Kuble Soft stopped trading on 31 December 2007, after its American orders ended with the territorial administration and pirated discs had taken most of its sales at home. Former staff have kept its website online since 2008, and its surviving programs have been released as freeware.[1][3]
Name
The company took its name from kuble, the traditional orientation toward Polaris, which it glossed as turning to face the Pole Star "the way a herder finds the road home". Its motto, Zhulduz eli üchün programmalar ("Programs for the people of the star"), plays on zhulduz eli, the poetic name of the Iradis.[1]
History
Origins (1979–1988)
In 1979 Esenov, then a mathematics student at Talas State University, wrote a caravan game in BASIC in the evenings on the university's computer. Students played it on the terminals until the computing centre banned games played on state machine time. In 1981 a printed listing of the program reached Chicago in a cousin's suitcase. In 1983 the computer club of the Iradi American Association typed it into a Commodore 64 and sold it on disk by mail order, and in 1985 the club's Nick Bekmatov made an Apple II edition with pictures, a named family and hunting with an eagle.[1][4]
Cooperative (1988–1992)
In 1988, under the new Soviet law on cooperatives, Esenov and Gulzat Kalmatova founded the Kuble computing cooperative in Talas, in two rooms near the Bazar-i Kalan, with three borrowed computers and a typewriter for the manuals. Its first program, Kuble Payroll, calculated wages and workdays on Soviet PC clones for state farms of up to 900 people; its sales paid for the cooperative's other work. In September 1990 the cooperative released the MS-DOS edition of Köch, with sixteen-colour pictures drawn by Kalmatova. It sold for 18 rubles in Irad and for US$24.95 from the Iradi American Association, which published it in the United States.[1]
Private company (1992–2004)
The office closed during the siege of Talas in the spring of 1992 and reopened in 1993 as Kuble Soft, a private company. It released Ulak! (1994), a two-player game of ulak tartysh on one keyboard, and Bazar-i Kalan (1995), a trading game set in the old bazaar of Talas. In November 1996 it opened www.kuble.ir.ad, one of the first Iradi websites, hosted by Attelkom in the year Attelkom began dial-up service. Alippe (1997), a typing tutor for the Latin alphabet and its letters ı, ö, ü and ñ, appeared in the year the Language and Education Reform Act made the alphabet compulsory in public schools, and schools bought it by the hundred.[1][5]
On Irad Day, 11 March 2001, the company announced Köch II: The Sky Road, a second journey for Windows over the Torugart on the old caravan road to Kashgar in 1889. It was never finished.[1]
Decline and closure (2004–2007)
By 2004 pirated CDs sold at the Bazar-i Kalan for a tenth of the price of Kuble Soft's programs, and half of its staff left for Attelkom. Its American orders, the company's main source of foreign currency, ended in 2007 after the close of the territorial administration. The office near the bazaar closed in June 2007, the month Talas fell to the Popular Front, and the master disks of Ulak! were lost with it.[1][2]
The company stopped trading on 31 December 2007. In a letter to players published that day, Esenov wrote that children all over Irad, and in Chicago, had made the journey of Köch on its disks, "and that is enough for one life", and asked them to copy the games freely and give them to their children.[1]
Legacy
On 14 January 2008 former staff announced that they would keep the company's website online. After the company was wound up the site moved from kuble.ir.ad to the generic domain kublesoft.net (see Internet Domains of Irad). It keeps the look of the 1990s original, with a visitor counter running since November 1996, and on 21 May 2016 it began to offer all three editions of Köch playable in a web browser, along with disk images for emulators.[1] Kuble Soft is remembered as the leading Iradi software firm of the territorial period, and its collapse is often cited in discussions of software piracy in the ISEZ.[2][4]
Products
| Year | Title | Platform | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1979–1990 | Köch: The Road to Iyık Janyl | University terminal; Commodore 64 (1983) and Apple II (1985) by the Iradi American Association; MS-DOS (1990) | Freeware |
| 1988 | Kuble Payroll | Soviet PC clones | Out of print |
| 1994 | Ulak! | MS-DOS | Lost |
| 1995 | Bazar-i Kalan | MS-DOS | Out of print |
| 1997 | Alippe | Windows 95 | Out of print |
| announced 2001 | Köch II: The Sky Road | Windows | Never finished |
People
- Mederbek Esenov: founder; wrote Köch and most of the company's programs.
- Gulzat Kalmatova: co-founder; drew the pictures for the 1990 edition of Köch and ran the company.
- Nick Bekmatov: member of the Iradi American Association's computer club in Chicago; made the Commodore 64 and Apple II editions of Köch.[1]
See also
References
- ^ Kuble Soft. 'About Kuble Soft' and 'A letter to our players' (31 December 2007). kublesoft.net. Accessed 14 October 2026.
- ^ Talas Herald (3 January 2008). 'Kuble Soft, maker of Köch, closes after nineteen years.' Talas.
- ^ Talas Herald (16 January 2008). 'Köch to stay online, free.' Talas.
- ^ Central Asian Cultural Studies Review (2019). 'Caravans on the Screen: Köch and the Beginnings of Iradi Software.' Vol. 11, pp. 112–131.
- ^ Talas State University Press (2009). The Latin Alphabet in Iradi Schools, 1992–2007. Talas.