The kviskoteka was broadcast last night. My few weeks of local stardom begin today. The students at school already got me a nickname, "Kvisko" (for a mascot of the quiz, which was something you earned in the first part of the game, and could later use to double a score on one question, or to avoid negative score if you failed). Previously they called me "tata brada" ("beard daddy"). Couldn't do much that day, each class wanted to know how was it, and of course I obliged. There was some pedagogic value to it, too. Learn, be a geek, and you may get far.
Didn't help me much, though, or not immediately. Maybe a couple of times in the following weeks, I would get milk in the grocery when it was allegedly sold out (obviously from the reserve the staff kept for friends or themselves - such were they at NuProm). Also had a few visits from another guy, whom I sort of knew from elementary school, the photo section, a year younger than me, who came to borrow some LPs and to ask for instructions about the quiz. Returned the LPs in perfect condition. He was also with us in Kragujevac in june 1973. I knew him from Zmaj, he was a generation or two behind me, but we were never pals, even after he joined DC-99. His style of communication was putting me off somehow, couldn't talk normally with him, dunno why. He fared a bit better there, in the spring season. I think he made into the quarter-finals, where he lost from that same girl with wobbly eyes.
The effects of this local fame were subtle but lasted longer than I imagined. Almost two years later, it finally did what I wanted it to.
Around this summer Zoran Modli began broadcasting programs for zx spectrum, Commodore and, above all, Galaksija in his Ventilator 202 show, saturday afternoon. Technically it was feasible, despite the fact that it's digital content and radio is analog. It was encoded as sound, so it was theoretically possible to transfer even via phone, if the quality of the signal would be good enough. On FM it was just as good as needed, and I remember that by end of spring I recorded some breaker thing, perhaps fifty bytes long, which made stopping the autostart games possible. It was important to stop the game, so that it could create a copy of itself, it only took typing the save command. The typing was usually unnecessary, as the command would be inside the code which created the recording, so it only took running it from that line.
The autostart feature was necessary to prevent exactly this sort of copying, and this breaker prevented that. I used it to make copies of a few games, brought by a neighbor who had a few cassettes and didn't have a zx spectrum.
Then that was circumvented, in newer games, by recording the whole memory, so it would overwrite, when loaded, any previously loaded breaker code. But then someone found a way to break that too... and so on, this kind of oneupmanship went on for years.