Went with Vanji to yet another field trip to one of the villages, where we had two customers in the same building, both agricultural. One is a so-called "agricultural good", i.e. a large farm on land appropriated by the state back in the late forties from any of the enemies of people, i.e. anyone who fled (Germans, collaborators), was too rich (which is relative) or was a church. The other was a peasants' cooperative (zadruga - literally, "for friend" or "for comrade", which is a traditional name from centuries past). In the latter we promised to convert any data we can from the old Acc157 app... done by DBA, none the less. This is actually how I came across their old files, because whatever I have from that era is on 5.25" floppies, which I can't read anymore. This old app I copied on a 3.5" floppy and then kept copying from one disk to another... now it resides on a 640G disk (and was written on a 286 with a 20M disk), along with two terabyte disks.
The machines they were running in the cooperative were still the same 386s delivered by DBA, maybe one 486, and the good old Fujitsu dl2400 dot matrix printer. Or maybe they were generous and had a 3400. It all sat on desks which were probably fifty years old, on worn out floorplanks covered with worn out linoleum or something, with gaping holes near doors or where chair legs were.
We managed to get the job done there, despite the lousy machinery, but had lots of trouble getting money out of them. The manager was some kind of politician, and as such she felt that we, as a politically incorrect company, rank very low on the to-pay list. Otherwise looked like a smart and nice enough woman, but... anyone who was too close to Milošević's socialists was to be suspected. [Later it turned out that she was a sister of J.B. from IV4, directly or by uncle, which I found out eventually at his funeral, v. 19-XII-2025.]
There's a grupe.doc, part of the dijeta zip file, where there's some text generator prg, which would use the hm2.dbf (heavy metals), where I guess the compound result of what I had then was. The interesting thing is that among other useless information in the end (like mentioning that m$ is a corporation about twenty times), there's also the printer info, where it mentions Okidata OL-400 printer, which should be the office laser printer in Avai, which we got from Szoftex - now whether we paid it or was it some sort of help, is irrelevant. We paid it in labor, if not in cash. But all the time I thought we had a Lexmark... and I should have known better - they didn't have those at all, but had OKIs everywhere. I specially loved the dot matrix ones, they would outlive both the cockroaches and Ron Wood.
An interesting thing occurred when she once went to Novi, as part of that specialization course, and got, as reading material, some brochure issued by United nations... and she recognized the text. It was what we two translated a year ago and she gave it to them, to contribute. So they give you your own labor to learn from...
And since now we have the internet again, she also dived into searching the nets to see any relevant works. She did find something Medlink, Medline or some such, and a whole trove of stuff there, all in abstracts. To read the whole paper one had to pay, if the authors were from any anglophone or generally western university or institute, but these were very few and far apart. Guess that scientific exchange they kept within some internal channels of communication, an academic network, accessible to members only. Which is why the papers by Russians and Chineses were wide open and constituted about 90% of materiel on any given subject. [25-30 years later these opened their gates and flooded out the Russians and Chineses, practically reversing the proportion]
Around this time some girl student, from petefi, came to get some lessons about HTML. The exam was nearing... and for a while I thought she knew the theory but just couldn't understand how it all fits together. But no, she was completely clueless and just wanted me to do her homework. Which I did and charged her accordingly.
One week some pal from sezam passed to me a hint that Srbijašume [state forestry enterprise] has opened a tender to acquire an application of unknown specs and purpose, and gave me a phone number of someone in charge up there to just ask and see. Any chance for a larger contract is more than welcome, and trying costs nothing. The conversation with the lady went like this:
- Good afternoon, I am Gradivoj Sredljević, co-owner of Avai el el see from Zrenjanin, and I heard you are buying an application so I would like to know the specs, terms, conditions etc...
- From Zrenjanin? Where did you get this phone number?
Then in a couple of steps it came down to them not buying anything, there's nothing open, there was no worm in the first place.
5-IX-2019 - 17-VII-2026