15-VIII-1991.

The date is roughly approximate, I remember it was summer, but could be next year or even 93. At DBA we considered getting to resell Mannesmann's dot matrix printers, which didn't look quite trustworthy. The dl2400 was one thing, you knew it was a beast of burden, fixable until unconsciousness and with good chances to outlive three computers. This... looked like far flimsier plastic, too fragile and light. So I took to testing it, at home.

The printer turned out to be a veritable mule, the wee fart seemed to have square pins and printed qute clear, and I did give it loads of stuff to do, printed whatever I'd find. I even took a wider list from the menu in dijeta, ass crammed wiith condensed font to fit 132 characters per line on an A4 sheet (and we were als quite good on the trapese and salto mortale, acrobatics were the house special). The problem was the character set. The printer was supposed to support the šđžčć, but not in the juski codepage...

So she took the printout to her professor at the specialization, and the guy didn't know what to do with it, here's some specializant girl with something done on a computer (!), can't find anything to say about it... And he did find, the juski. Among the parameters of foodstuffs listed was sugar, šećer in serbian, „{e}er“ in juski, which he read as celer[y], just like that, „this is nonsense, what's celery doing here“ and dismissed the whole thing altogether.

The other thing I remember that I printed was a few photographs and whatnot, which we pinned to that itison carpet on the kitchen walls. In the corners around the table nobody sat, both chairs there were mosttly donkeys, ever since the times when the right one held the reel-to-reel tape recorder for zx spectrum. Now there was mostly the atarist; when I'd bring a PC from work, it would be too big for a chair, it had to go on the desk in the bedroom.

The main printout was this frame from Alan Ford, where Number 1 taps Bob Rock on [the, his?] head. True, this is not the original series, which lasted for some seventy episodes and this is already 91, but by this time the new artist has learned the tricks. Not hundred percent, but good enough.

And so it happened, a few months later, that Nina said something silly, and Go started tapping her on head. To which she said „no good, should tap faster“. „How do you know it should be faster?“. „Well it's obvious on the picture“.

Because it was quite clear to even the kids that the strip [„comic“ is a misnomer, there are not-at-all-funny strips] is the art in which a drawing conveys time, motion and speed. It developed its own language which everyone understood.

There was more head tapping in the following years, and the tapper was expected to ask „need any faster?“. As this became part of family folklore right on the spot.

---

Mentions: Alan Ford, atariST, DBA, dijeta, DL2400, Gorana Sredljević (Go), juski, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), ZX Spectrum, in serbian

27-II-2026 - 3-III-2026