At newfoundedDBA, we had a window facing the park. Springtime... and a lovely girl comes up the path, blonde, sunshine just over her right shoulder at the best angle. And then I recognize her. Proven to be an unforgettable moment, as I'm writing about it 24 years later.
That zen moment when you spot a gorgeous chick, ogle her at ease, and only then realize that you already married her.
These days I was trying out a financial app written in fox by the Strongest* programmer in town (with maybe some help from another guy from the city waterducts, these two were later dubbed "the school of dirty programming"). I didn't really speak Fox, but it wasn't much different from Clipper, which I learned the summer before. The app, however, was a mess, and I couldn't understand what he was doing. Him being a few years older, and allegedly doing this app for a few years, I thought this was more complicated than it really was.
[few months later I realized the guys also spoke very little fox, and didn't really know how to use it, so they somehow managed to simulate cobol way of doing things in it, putting out one field, then a read statement, then another field, another read statement ... so this was a set of unrelated textboxes, where the user couldn't even move from one to another, had only one at a time... the horrors]
But this was dropped as Vanji came up with a proposal from a band of guys from the metal industry (yet another local kombinat... we had several), who worked in their erc and wanted some freedom to go into business on their own, even promising they'll just keep doing what they're doing for the same money, and would bring more money to the enterprise. Now that I think it over, it was the same kind of proposal I inserted into that rules book on salaries in the school, that the workshop will have a share in its own profits, while contributing to the common purse more than that share. And the CEO, being at an important position, had to be a hardcore old-style party cadre, and couldn't allow anyone to get rich on his guard. No matter whether that'd be deserved or not - politically, when someone would point a finger at him, based on some rumor that his erc guys are making money while some others aren't, he'd be in a hot seat. So he vetoed the whole idea.
As it turned out, they had a bunch of apps ready to sell, some already in production at a few places (within but also outside the kombinat), but didn't have a legal entity from which to operate. We were such a legal entity, and had not a single line of code written.
So we joined. Actually, we hired the whole team, they brought the apps. Vanji remained the CEO for a while, and then Sale, the chief of that team, took over. And we went into business really fast. By the end of the month, a local manufacturer of perlite, previously a tezga of the team, was now our first official customer. And the word has spread.
So now there were seven of us - Vanji, Sale, me, Brata, Blaža, Grgi and Nena. And we were on the roll. Within the next week or two we bought our first yugo. I took to register it, and on the way back I surprised myself by hitting 89 kmh just between two lights. I got too used to the dead mule engines of škodilak. This is a light car, and the engine is 55 horses... beware, you may get carried away.
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* nobody dared arm wrestle against him