Later in the afternoon, Ford on the phone. Chatting about this and that, and just when we wanted to hang up, in parting he said „...just let's hope that our morons won't do anything stupid, like... wait, its on the tevee, straight from Aviano, they are taking off, they're going to bomb you now. They'll be above you in half an hour. Hold tight and good luck.“
So I knew about the bombing half an hour in advance. Told my girls, we quickly planned to clean the basement a bit, we have that piece of carpet from the old kitchen, it's tough synthetic and practically indestructible. Then I dialed sezam to tell the news, straight into the chat, but it seems only The Fat Guy heard me, and maybe two more guys also came with similar news.
I saved the logs from all that, counting on writing this article once. And here it is, 25 years later, I'm finding lots of stuff, just can't find them logs. Until I do, going like this, from memory...
So sezam had three servers, of which one was mainly for conferences, groups and other messaging, one for administration, chat and to take spillover from the first, and the third was dedicated to play Quake... Which was no miracle, the game probably had a heap of graphics on local clients, and the modem, aka network, was only to exchange the information on which player is where, doing what exactly. I never tried it, I wasn't interested in playing online, that's for these Belgrader guys to whom it's a local call. Though, at this time it was local for me as well, my boys were the technical support at Beotel, but the force of habit... I don't like playing while the meter is ticking in my head.
The Fat Guy decided to shutdown the Quake server and reboot it for chat, correctly foreseeing that it will be the fastest channel of communication between the users. And so it was, in the following days and weeks, but at this first instance more than half of the text in the chat was about why is the quake server not working... Even when someone brought news about bombing being already underway (like I did, half an hour ago, and someone else too within ten minutes), the newcomers didn't see that but would start from scratch, why is quake not working.
I don't really remember who was present then, there were many known names, I think I remember pLazić and Stinge.
I stayed online for maybe half an hour, then I heard that Novi was the first target. So we called Go, she was there. It turned out she was somewhere on Štrand with her roommate, in a stroll, luckily almost a kilometer away from the bridges, which were shot then. Even later it turned out better than being in their room, because there a tomahawk missile fell right behind the next building. Didn't demolish anything except causing a lot of broken glass, and making a heap of about ten cubic meter of soil, saw a photo online later.
Later in the evening, sent this email to someone on the UA.
Thanks. I was just worried if we'll stay connected - I last connected at 23:30, and between 24:00 and 08:00 I couldn't connect, though I tried three ISPs where I have access*. The two local ones beeped their modems, but refused to authenticate, or kicked me out with some error; my old ISP in Belgrade was busy or I couldn't get it to authenticate.
We got connected from the office, and read CNN but couldn't get to Washington Post's site. We've noticed that the proxies are probably filtering out some sites, but we sure know how to turn that off. Radio B92 was immediately banned, but I'm receiving their news via e-mail - and they had some extra editions (didn't read it yet).
If I get disconnected, which would be at least three days in a row off the forum, it may mean one of two things: we lost connection, or I got drafted. I'm a bit too old for the later (I'm almost 45), but I've seen older than me in the reserve. If this happens, just pass this info to Burt, Beatrice, George Tasker, other sysops and... well, let's hope it won't be necessary. No need to get alarmed at this moment - we're having a beautiful spring day, and I'm expecting my apricots to blossom any day now.
So far, everyone's just making jokes, with a slightly bitter face. Some are making reserves, but most of the people don't have any money to make them.
I'll try to stay online as long as I can. Maybe they won't get too deep into cutting off the 1% of people who use the Net.
----
* that would be the Beotel, where my guys did the tech support, the post office, and sezam, all via a modem. Guess I had a 14400 at the time, even though I could have had a faster one, but it simply didn't make sense, my phone line went through that shitty MetaKanta (kanta=bucket, it was a Metaconta) switchboard, where any attempt at a higher rate simply yielded more errors, so it dropped speed by itself.
22-VI-2024 - 26-IX-2025