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 Zeta, 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.
22-VI-2024 - 24-VI-2024