Reporting to oldwave: „BTW, the epilogue of then buying the tiny boxes on the Fair: Go should haul the new Sony line, twice hundred hwatts, from Novi. The windows are anchored well, the house is solidly built, now only to avoid quarrel with sisters about the noise. Anyway, not one of them can sleep unless something is playing :)“
Go was doing her matricular paper. She picked art as subject, and surrealism as the topic. This meant hunting down the net for any available pictures from Dali, Magritte and a few others. We did find them, though not in any particularly large resolution.
She typed it in Word. Not that we had any other text processor at hand, the software was scarce, and anyway Avai was a m$ reseller at the time, going where Szoftex went before. On the other hand, even if we had any different software, I'd have to find a place to print this properly, and had to use a format that would be available there.
She did it right, the end result looked perfectly. And I found a place to print it - the city hall. While the SPS did buy off enough members of the local parliament and did run the important stuff, the IT department of it wasn't on their list, so its chief was no other than Mika Fišer. I brought the thing on a floppy, and he printed it on their best color spitter (that's what we called the inkjet printers), on best glossy paper, even engaged the in-house services to have it properly bound.
She passed (well, in may, as per the schedule) with flying colors, and the paper was such a success that we never got any of the printed copies back, the professor kept them.
The aforementioned Avai got screwed around this time and yet came off well at it. We had a big contract with a formerly state run system, now a joint-stock company, to network dozens of computers in their headquarters in some fifteen cities. Good dough, moderately complex job - Peja went through the list of places one by one, clocked hundreds of hours in the field, all went ship shape (and our CEO used this as grounds to claim that the hardware part of the company is so much more profitable than the software - yeah, right, but software cash drips every month, and things like this sometimes come, often they don't).
And then all of a sudden - bang, we lost the contract. Just so. It was awarded to some company connected with SPS, at the point where we already did half of the work, got 60% of the money and bought enough material for two more cities ahead. I couldn't even imagine that this was even possible, even less that there would be any profit in such a takeover... unless, of course, there was a possibility that they charged for the remainder much more than we would charge for the whole bundle, but as our liaison man there said, „ask me again about this in some twenty years, maybe then I'd be allowed to tell you what happened...“.
5-V-2023 - 26-VI-2024