Around this time, I remember it was a month in a winter which was more rainy than snowed... Marina phones Avai, allegedly Česterfild is interested in our software, for the tavern. Um, I knew the chances for that are nearly nil, but okay, I'll do a presentation, due diligence etc. One never knows, any former customer of DBA is welcome.
The computer was in some small back room by the tavern's kitchen. I installed the ledger and BarSys, demo versions of course, even generated a fresh defg.prg, and I noticed she wasn't paying much attention to my spiel, so I made fast work of the demo, specially considering the complete absence of the staff who were supposed to use it. Ummm... okay. Her working hours were already finished, it got dark, so I pushed my bike and walked with her to the magistrala, where we stood for a cigarette's length of chat, then we split. Now whether she just found an excuse to see me, or to just have someone in town with whom she can simply talk, fucket. I did feel sorry for her, but then „I felt sorry for her“ is no good basis for, um, don't want to even try.
Instaling Acc157 for the cooperative in Čurda. The direcor seems to be pals with Vanji, now whether via politics, business or who knows how, don't know the guy. Some three girls, all very cute, not drop dead sexy but each a head turner, learn the ropes, how is this or that done. They bring coffees and buzz around. I'm trying to speak hungarian with them, this is Čurda, but nope, they have this lifelong reflex to switch to serbian as soon as there's one among the present who is not a Hungarian. Fuckit, it's already a whole year since I stopped speaking it daily, I'm going to rust completely.
The machine I got into the car (was this the first official ride with the trabant?) is my old [one], the [one] from 1993. Too bad, I liked the box, had a handy design, guess the last horizontal one that we had. The deal was that Laza would just put in a new motherboard for me and leave everything else as before - the keyboard and monitor same old Acrotech's from 1991., mouse and pad Genius's of same vintage... But no such luck, the board let out the magic smoke in two days („these machines are powered by magic smoke... when smoke leaves, they stop working“).
Then, what else, I took it all to CompuWiz. The next day Zvonko called, said „hey, it burned another motherbord... I can't risk a third, that box is screwy, I put it all in a new box, fuck that business, I can justify one board, can somehow twist my supplier to accept the loss of another, but he'd fuck my mother if I allowed it to burn three in a row, that'd be on my dime“. Well, fuck it, what can we do. Even if I liked the box, we didn't swear faith forever. And this way the box is on the side, it's a mini tower, aka piglet, it's somehow chubby when compared with full tower, and the cables are easier to reach. And the old box got its original 386 essex motherboard with 4 or 8 megabytes back, Laza put it back with some crummy disk, and that we sold to these guys in Čurda. It kept working for a few years more, it fit the bill for what work it needed to do.
I went there some two or three times more, in spring, on my bike. It's not that far, 5km from home tops, and I'd put it together with a visit to some other customer.
16-II-2025 - 12-XI-2025