29-XII-1989.

In her passport it says she went to Hungary this day.

The dinar was denominated to 7 din = 1 DEM (12 din = 1$ at the time) and the rate was set for the next six months. We could buy currency in the banks. These were the reforms by Ante Marković's government at the time. The following year brought us good life and prosperity, and also the beginning of the end.

By december 1990, the banks stopped selling hard currency, and by the end of the month the official rate was 1:9.

(... 102 words...)

The Guide was published on time, I even saw it in the shop window of putnik. I learned to play the ventura, but I'm no graphical designer, not good at all, it wasn't looking good. But there it was, published, mostly in cyrillic. The final template for the print shop was printed on paus paper (tracing paper), mirrored, so when it's pressed against the zinc plate, the toner would be in direct contact with it, not lit through the paper. The mirroring had to be done while sending to printer, for which there was a special driver, which was hard to come by back then. I don't remember how we solved that, I guess it came bundled with the fonts and editor on those floppies from ZŽ. It was a common problem for anyone doing this kind of DTP, as probably nobody in the rotten west had to deal with it, they must have had more elegant solutions, perhaps some kind of photo process.

We didn't even had a printer. We had dot matrixes, but their print is not so black, sharp and opaque as needed for the print shop, so we kept borrowing from an electronics engineer, some Zaković guy. He had an Aitchpee two (or three; in 1991 when we bought one for DBA, it was a four), heavy as devil. Took me a lot of effort to haul it into the yugo and out of it. We kept it all the time while working on this, and a couple more times next years, for some smaller urgent jobs, mostly school bulletins.

When I returned the printer to him for the last time, he called me to come in, to see if I can help him with something. Well, we're cooperating already, it's due. First he showed me the software he had, to design printed circuits. He'd lay out the chips, draw the connections between pins, and the app would draw all the leads neatly, to be printed. He'd print that on tracing paper, press it against a breadboard, light it and develop it - photo process. I wondered what can I help him there, my expertise in electronics is worse than just superficial, it's at elementary school level - I know what resistor, capacitor, diode and transistor do, I even understand Gretz's circuit, which is diodes alone. The moment it has three or more different elements, I'm lost, I don't know what it's doing, not to mention how.

Turns out he needed help copying eprom memory from one poker machine to another (and then more of those), which was actually made for something else. He did have an eprom copying gadget, so what's my job then?

When he got the eprom board out, it was in a box, palm sized and just 10mm deep, with some hard plastic poured over the chips. That could be melted, but then it's anybody's guess how much would the chips be damaged in the process. I don't know how he solved that, never saw him again.


Mentions: DBA, Putnik, Ventura, yugo, in serbian