At DBA we were getting more and more of Big Ćale's dissatisfied customers. His system of dumb terminals... not quite terminals, they weren't connected to anything. They had some simple processor and a bit of code on some memory device, and they'd present a data entry screen, and the entered data would be recorded on audio cassettes. Then they'd take the cassettes to erc, where they'd copy the data to disk and ran validations - the results of which were then printed and returned to them. When the data were eventually correct, they'd put them somewhere on tape and run reports (daily, monthly, annual). They did have another line of software, in (I think Microfocus) cobol on xenix (or eventually DOS) which did pretty much the same, except the validation was perhaps local and it did have its own tables - but the logic of data entry, then reports, was the same. Most of the code seems to have been the same, just reworked for this compiler, with its own data entry screens, but the rest of the logic was the same and so were the tables.
What we were offering was hugely different - first, there were searches for various things needed during entry, so manually preparing codes of each item became unnecessary; the reports could be printed immediately after entry, and even better, could be previewed onscreen (they were text files and we used Dave Buerg's List, at least renamed to list.exe with help in serbian hacked in). We also employed LAN to the max - shared tables, shared printers - on the then coax cables with BNC connectors and terminators in a bus topology, with RPTI cards which came with some of the software in ROM and a tiny driver (12-24K, depending on which pieces you needed) and it worked flawlessly until someone unscrews a terminator or yanks a cable. Many secretary's heels have been found guilty.
Having many customers at once, one car simply wasn't enough, so we got this second yugo, and even so, this wasn't enough. We installed modems wherever we could, and getting the customer to buy one wasn't hard - it was hard to get it connected to a phone line. A dedicated line would be a luxury, but at least a line on which there would be only one phone and no PBX was the goal, still not easy. By this time we already had about nine, and the piece of paper which we taped to the side of the tower server we had, a proud 386 with a whopping 2M of memory (I'd say, not quite sure - but machines above 1M did start popping up at the time) had the names and the clients and their modem numbers. There was no sense in having more than one in the office, as we had only two phone lines, and the main one was always busy.
My latest addition to that list was klaanca (where I installed the modem, by connecting its phone cable in parallel to the existing line, using nail clipper to remove insulation from cable ends, crawling under the desk, which I will then repeat in a dozen places more), name of which I spelled as just NJ. Because Nj was our internal nickname for their boss and chief accountant ("nj" is a bosnian shorthand for "njega" - him - and is used only if it's the last word in the sentence or syntagm). Vanji complained that this would be hard to explain, even completely benign as it is, because the guy has the habit of dropping by, and he'll recognize his own phone number. So I spellt it NY now, as if it were in hungarian (which was the case - just a few weeks ago I noticed many cars with NJ-nn-nn and NY-nn-nn tags in Hungary).
And it did happen - he did come, he did recognize his own phone number, and asked about the NY - what for? Off the top of my head I said "Njujork" and went back to my monitor. "Why New York?" Vanji took over: "well who else has such a concentration of equipment? You have the strongest machines of all our clients, and so many of them at that.". I added something about the lights looking great when seen from the road, almost Manhattan skyline... and the guy was happy. Until the end of DBA, that place was called Njujork.
4-III-2020 - 16-V-2026