DBA's big lunch for women's day. The location was a restaurant at a customer's premises. Now who exactly was it is disputable - the big Elmont factory of heavier electrical equipment there had rented the whole front building to some private merchant, also our customer. They were a couple and he was doing wholesale while she (ms) did retail, and then they divorced. And then the front segment of that building was the restaurant.
Now the sitting arrangement was like this: at the top of the table, to the right, Grgi. To the left, we, Vanji, his wife. The rest were there too, whole of DBA. After the long lunch, which went pretty much as usual, ice cream was served. Two large balls of icecream with a thin tube of wafer stuck upright between them. Graphically, viewed from the side, looks like a dick. Vanji didn't have it, but his wife did, so I nudged him to notice the phenomenon. Which he did. Then he asked his wife "Hey I didn't know you liked it so thin with cold balls... could have arranged something".
The only two people who got hurt by this were Grgi and she - they had huge bellies (for different reasons), and laughing this much was a lot of work. They both complained about their belly muscles the next day.
On 30th wrote this on sezam, the Atari conference, about emulators (so this was about zx spectrum):
I once had fun repointering the font address to my cyrillic font, and token table to my translated table, so you issue a "LIST AT 5,4" and it says "ПИШИ НА 5,6".
(of course, I couldn't type it in cyrillic on sezam, they had enought trouble with juski and other ten layouts)
Although the whole story about binding is as late as 15-I-1995., it actually began years before that, I guess last or forelast year in Sombor, and got refined a lot meanwhile. In the code for some Čole Komerc on the narrow track I see that I already have (as of 18th of march) rather elaborate automatic procedures, in the case unbinding of unbalanced binds. How could it be bound if it didn't balance? Well it did at the time, whatever was bound had to balance or it wouldn't be, but it happened that some of bound items were actually in error, were deleted or corrected later, and the bind's total isn't zero anymore, it lost balance*.
I can barely remember that firm, this was probably not written for them, so versions of various things are in their zip file which I have, and their predecessors I mostly don't, or probably do have on one of those floppies which I can't read on anything anymore. Not that they've gone bad, it's the 720K format on 5,25" that's not suported by BIOSes after, I guess, 2002 or so.
Such small trading compaines, which would consist of three palls, two desks, two phones, coffee cook/secretary and a rent office, were a dozen a dime at the time, at least ten of our customers were of the kind. I'd even dare say that the trading between our customers (producing and trading [ones]) probably surpassed the throughput of once, which to pick, Čelik or Presprom. Many of those would dance for a year or two and vanish, or would split into two, the partners wouldn't sit together for a whole year. These guys, however, were able and nimble, and the village (not too small either, once a county seat) worked well together, and for each deal one would find someone to pull it with. I didn't hear much of them later, they were Grgi's baby, I was there that one time.
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* years later I heard that in american english „there's a balance“ actually means „your account is below zero“.
1-II-2019 - 16-V-2026