This may have happened a year later, or in the spring, but let's say it fits in here a bit better.
I tried to reduce smoking. I kept the rhythm of six cigarettes a day on even days, three on odd. It worked for two weeks in a row already.
The Vaha was getting slower, and we suspected it was the fragmentation of disks. Which sounds implausible in light of today's knowledge - those tables weren't so big, and reading the whole table wasn't really required for anything, except perhaps for printing item histories in warehousing. Which only the textile nutcases asked for, not really understanding what they were asking, and when they got 50kg of printed paper, they understood the fuckup. They never took all of it, about a quarter remained undelivered, which we moved into the waste paper storeroom (where the AC was), was recycled later. To print those, we had to sort the table by item, date. To sort it, we had to copy it to a tape, take the tape across the street to vodotoranj, sixth floor, where we sorted it on bank's Vaha, then took back to print. Because the sorting required about five times more space than the size of the table, and we didn't have that much, not so late in the year. I solved that more elegantly, by creating a narrow table with just a key and ordinal number of the original record, which is pretty much over-the-shoulder indexing. This time, let's defragment disks. Which was called disk compression until mid nineties, when first Norton and then m$ introduced defragmentation (which is correct; likewise, when Stacker introduced real disk compression, it was called stacking, of course... misnomers everywhere).
Alright, let's do it, except there's no tool for that. Because... there is none. Lidija told me once how the Iskra Delta guys did it on the pdp: they'd copy whole disk to tape, then format the disk, then restore from tape. And then around the 2nd comma it happens that the tape unwinds on the floor, and they wind it up by hand, and bend it at some point, and that point is where restore stops. So they spent several hours restoring to the point, beyond the point, and then backwards the bit between the beyond and the point.
Which is why she never wanted to be present when it's done, and rather raised anchor and went to petefi to be an assistant, while Radoje and I agreed that I should do that in the evening. Because I'd have to be alone on the system.
Vaha had three disks of 340M each. I backed up the third disk to tapes. I had half a tape on one spool available, and about a quarter on another, should more than enough. And it was. Most of it fit on the first tape, only about 10% went to the other. The curios bit was that the tape unit had a Motorola 86000 processor, same as in then Macs, Ataris and Amigas.
Then I formatted the third disk, copied the second to it, formatted second, copied first to it. Couldn't format the first, as it held the system, but I deleted all user directories, and assumed the free space would now be mostly contiguous, in just a few big chunks. Then I restored the first from the second, formatted second, restored it from third, formatted third. And then went to restore the third from the tape.
It was around midnight already, it did take a lot of time to do. I was already four cigarettes down. The first tape finished, and the restore program asked for the second. I rewound and ejected the first tape, threaded in the second. Went to my terminal and pressed enter. Please insert tape #2... Oh, fuck your mother, what gives now?
Get the manuals from the cupboard. Read. I was the system manager already, or what IBM would call system programmer, or what the rest of the world later called just admin. I should know that stuff. That's my job, to know. What I don't know, is in the books - the Vaha came with three large boxes full of them, neatly organized by subjects.
Around three in the morning I already had some six or seven books laid around the terminal and on the chairs I pulled closer. Around four I already went scouring the drawers, to see if anyone had a black reserve of cigarettes, just in case. Not the case. My last two cigarettes went off soon after midnight.
Around four thirty I just about had enough and... just for kicks, or out of spite, when I tried to restore for the umpteenth time, when it asked for tape #1, I gave it tape #2. And it happily restored everything from it. Well fuck your mother, why didn't you say so? It may have fucked up one file, which didn't quite fit on #1, but it was possibly something unimportant, an old version of some file (the VMS filesystem kept up to 255 versions of each file).
I gradually put the books back into the cupboard, relaxed a bit, thought of something to do in the remaining hour or two until Zlata comes and makes coffee. I made some virtual directories, assigned them actual places where each oour's app was, introduced some rules so they couldn't peek over the fence into each other's yard, nor into what we were doing, and adjusted all the command files to use that when calling the apps. A bit of housekeeping, courtesy of your sleepless admin.
Zlata came, made coffee, we sat and sipped, someone had cigarettes, lit one finally. Seven fifteen, here comes Radoje. I tell him all that happened and how it got solved and how I set up the access rights. Greeted everyone, got into the car (not bicycle, wouldn't let it sit under the eave all night, and wasn't allowed to take it in) and went home to sleep. When I woke up, I decided that I shouldn't play with antismoking schemes. Went back to normal.