(date approximate... I know it was around the middle of the month and that it was a tuesday)(correct now, found notest)
Second day of my second course in Nova Gorica. The course was, IIRC, networking (among Vahaes and other DEC's machines that ID peddled as their own product). I left for Ljubljana instead, there to meet with Mika Fišer and another guy (my note of the month mentions "Bogdan flew in at the last minute - so he was probably there, I can see the table with and without him in my mind), to tour the two or three small sofware enterprises, d.o.o. Grad (City LLC) and Mikrohit. Interesting times to be visiting the latter, as its CEO (or a co-owner) was Janez Janša, who was then a reporter for Mladina, the youth magazine which pretty much was the forerunner of the (counter?-)revolution that was to follow. He was publishing articles about generals (and admirals) who had their huge seaside villas built by soldiers' free labor. For weeks they had their back page dedicated to Stane Dolanc (minister of interior at the time, and in charge of the secret service, aka social safety), with "only nnn days" - countdown to his retirement. The one issue I had in my hands was with him leaving the big black mercedes with a thick cigar in his mouth, and above that a nearly identical photo of Al Capone (or was it Churchill? some scum anyway).
I somehow met the guys near the bus station, had a burek (from, I'd say, an Albanian - good burek all the same) at a kiosk right there, then went to find Mikrohit. It wasn't far - can't be, it had to be somewhere downtown, and Ljubljana is about thrice smaller in area than our city (while having three times more people at some point) because it's in a valley. Found it in a small set of rooms at the ground floor, enclosed yard side, of a larger building. There was some nice grass, good light but I didn't bring any camera, and a rabbit's hide tacked to a board to dry. Nice touch - and this is where I didn't even realize I was starting to get ideas. First off, we don't have to have proper office space, architecturally it can be anything. Second, we'd be the bosses of ourselves, and mostly beyond anyone's control - out of any hierarchy unless we decide to create one. And true, for the first four years, the later DBA had a very horizontal structure.
Inside, the offices looked very differently from what I was used to see (but then I hadn't really seen much that I could compare with). Janša was away - probably hiding from police, or investigating his next piece.
At d.o.o. Grad it was more office-like, rather modern, with lots of blue-gray color (matching the façade of the big Rebro hospital in, IIRC, Zagreb, and its twin that was built in our city), various PCs, printers, scanners and whatnot, including some rather modern-looking office furniture, the likes of which I didn't really see before. We talked for a whole hour, asking somewhat technical questions, but also about the business side. The most important part was "don't worry about finding customers, there's actually too many of them".
After that, we strolled around town and settled into a pizzeria on the bank of Ljubljanica. Had a couple of mugs of beer and a pizza each. Mine was the devil's (vražja), wit some thirty little green pickled hot peppers. The next day I had my first "second helo", aka "the ring of fire". Thinking about that years later, it wasn't burning... I had an advance warning that I'll suffer from hemorrhoids ten years later.
Came back to Gorica in time for dinner, but not in time to get into the last courses of the day.