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In March 1989 at the "Future Development of International Olympiads for Youth" consultative UNESCO meeting, Professor Pavel Azalov presented reports titled "Introduction to the Olympiad in Informatics" and "Bulgarian Competitions on Informatics".:

The roots of Bulgarian experience in conducting Informatics competitions for school students go back to the late 70’s of the last century. In those times such competitions were named “Programming Competitions”. As a rule, the solution to problems given at the contests required mainly “paper work”. The contestants were asked to write on a paper a program which, if executed on a computer, performed a specific task. Then the papers were checked and assessed by the jury. If computer resources were available (for instance “computer time” with a mainframe or a minicomputer), the programs of the students were executed on computer as well. The number of computers in the country in those years was very limited and the access to them for school students was rather restricted. With the advent of microcomputers the situation changed. More and more school students got access to computers and this made it possible to organize competitions which are similar to the ones practiced today - the execution of the code on a computer became an obligatory part of the assessment.

The first IOI was conducted in Pravetz, Bulgaria, from 16th to 19th of May, 1989. It was modeled after the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) and this was explicitly mentioned in the written Regulations of IOI. For instance, the participating countries were obliged to send in advance to local organizers sample problems from which the International Jury had to select the problems to be given at the competition. Only school students who have not completed certain age (in this case 19 years) by the beginning of the competition were admitted to participate. In the first half hour after the start of the competition the participants had the right to put questions to the International Jury (in written form) concerning the formulation of the problems. The student work was preliminary checked and assessed by the respective team-leader and then finally marked by the “Coordinating Commission”. The final marking was with the International Jury which decided also how many first, second and third prizes are to be given to most successful participants. All expenses related to the stay in Bulgaria of the teams and the team-leaders were covered by the organizers. There was an excursion to Sofia and an entertainment program for the participants in the competition. Professor Iltscho Dimitrov, Minister of Education, gave a reception for IOI participants.