First day on the new job. Finally sitting all day, at a real keyboard, at a machine (a Partner) with a real (green, dotty) monitor, not a TV, a hard disk (10M) and a 5.25" floppy drive, not cassettes. True, it had the same Z80A processor as my zx spectrum, but it had the whopping 128K of memory, had a word processor (a WordStar, IIRC), and a few compilers (for m$ Cobol, Borland's Turbo Pascal 3.0, DR Basic). It even had directories - 16 of them, named 0 to 15.
There was also the silence, just the hum of the AC in the system room. And, ah, yes, an ashtray next to the keyboard, nice. Don't have to wait for a break to go sit and have a smoke. And no bells interrupting. I could get used to this.
The place was smack downtown, in a narrow street branching off (but not drivable from) the main street, just a few doors away from the post office. I think I walked the first day, but then in the following two and a half years I generally rode my bicycle.
The place was one of those long pannonian houses, where two big rooms were facing the street, and then a long gonk would connect the others lined up behind it. The previous tennant in it was the wrestling club, which got moved away when stour was formed. The rooms in the front were already reshaped into one big room, where the wrestlers were fighting; now it held the Iskra Delta pdp 644, a 16-bit cupboard running a couple of dozens of terminals throughout the building, and the other buildings of the member oours in nearby streets - all within walking distance. The connections went along 200mA loops, which could sustain about 9600 baud to a kilometer. So Čelik, Presprom were connected; NuProm and one more were just a bit over the feasible distance, and they had their own pdp machines, somewhat weaker than the 644.
I didn't get to sit much at the Partner, because it was taken by Joži, whom I didn't quite get at the time. It took me only a week to see how long he could read newspapers and do nothing. It took me two years to notice that he'd stare at the same page for hours. I heard a couple of years later that he was actually a nutcase.
Radoje was my boss; Lidija was the admin. The others either left soon or came in later. Her I somehow knew from Zmaj, she was the 54 vintage, one whose names would be prominent on the walls of the school, for this or that achievement. If there was the title of the student of the generation then, she'd be it. I don't even know when that novelty came about.
Let it be noted: around this time the female fashion introduced the shoulder inserts, which somewhat raised the corner. They appeared this summer, and by end of september you couldn't see a round shoulder, all of them suddenly had at least one garment with these pads, most often the innermost one - a shirt, blouse or dress, even when these made quite visible under thin or semitransparent cloth. All girls had those hokey player shoulders, even my dear had them, because a year or two later you couldn't buy anything without. To differ from other fashions, this lasted more than five years, somehow avoiding being pushed out of the fashion, forgotten and omitted from the obsolescence checklist.
15-XI-2015 - 23-VI-2024