She went to Timişoara, probably with my parents, and possibly without me, as I was rather busy at the time, and it was easier for her to get a day off, me being the system manager on that Vaha.
Last year, the team from stour, namely Radoje, me and three more of the gang, had a tezga at the hospital. Did the standard bunch of apps - payroll, main ledger, assets. We sat long hours there, making sure that the triglav that Presprom sold them (plus two extra Paka terminals, cute and weird design altogether) would print properly on a dl2400 (actually 3400, they all need wide reports), specially the shorter payroll slips and virmans. The printer had a serial RS232 interface, because Dec's machines never heard of a Centronix.
There were just a few places to sit in the room where the computers were, in the rear building where, in the other wing, the construction office was, so we'd sit on stacks of printed paper. The employee list had a thousand people, and it was printed about thirty times (the 19th version, which I accidentally dug out of the stack, was labeled, by hand, as "the latest").
There was some trouble with payment, though. There was no way we could charge them directly and get paid; all the income was to come through your salary. I did have a giro account, though, was a requirement for the kviskoteka a few years ago, and so the others had to make theirs, so it would go through a bank and all the income would be registered ("don't nobody get rich on my watch" as Žića would say when he was the boss at sdk) and taxable. The tax would apply only if some limit was achieved, which we were far from, it was around a triple average salary.
Still, we couldn't just bill the hospital as a group of citizens, so we had to have an intermediary: the petefi. It was a kind of science project, scientific-technical cooperation, or cooperation of science with industry or whichever nice phrase was the cover, so we became scientific cooperants of the faculty, and the faculty had the contract with the hospital and the faculty, willy-nilly, had to take a cut of the loot. Which was still fine, less than what it would be if paid through the salary.
But then they felt they owe us (in a sense, they did), so they offered all of us to get a magistral degree (which I first translated as master degree, but it's not - it's actually higher, it being two year and master only one). Only Radoje and I took it and thus went to sit in the same bench, at the same classes. He did finish it, and I didn't touch it. About spring 1989 it was time to pass all those pesky exams, and I got only as far as to buy one book, from the oldest professor they had, something about cybernetic management or organization or whatever. The guy lost touch back in the sixties. The latest scientific achievement mentioned in the book was a gantogram (!). And I should learn that, and cram for an exam, at the fair age of 34? Forget it, I don't need this diploma.
But I sat through all the lectures, for two years, IIRC from october 1987 to may 1989 or so. It was interesting, mostly, specially the maths part (where I learned the fuzzy logic and some things about pattern recognition, both new and hot at the time) or the database stuff, where we got introduced to what we were doing already but didn't know it was called normal forms and actually had rules (as in "we did this since forever, now they came and told ut it's called sex").
There were interesting moments, met interesting people. First, met Lidija, who was an assistant there now. All relaxed and in much better mood. Then, met the colleagues from the bank again - didn't see them too often otherwise, even though both our Vahaes were within 300m of each other. Professors were interesting too (apart from that old fart and a couple of nobodies). A few times we'd arrange for the team (few professors, Lidija, select few students) to gather at stour's erc on saturday mornings, where they'd bring their wannabe AI app - basically a formal boolean statement cruncher and muncher, because on our Vaha there was a proper Fortran compiler, so we could run it, adjust it, run it again. It produced some interesting results, though I wonder whether that had any scientific merit. The math guy loved my solitaire and got quite good at it.
There was a guy from the textile kombinat, namely the carpet factory. He told us of the machines they had, how they could do practically any pattern in a carpet, as they used hollerith cards. I got to an idea that scanning a city map could produce the pattern, so you'd be walking the same streets in your room, taking perhaps 1:1000 ratio. We could almost do that - I'd lay my hands on the first (handheld, with roller) scanner by the end of 1989. But nothing came of it.
The only tangible takeaway from that course was the book I borrowed and never intended to give back: Stanisław Lem's "Summa technologiae". What each SF writer must read.