june 1985.
Competitions season, Narodna tehnika and KMT (association of nonexistent clubs) are organizing [them] again. While I've already had enough of school, both as a student and as a professor, and the parent role was yet ahead of me, being a member of a žiri is still okay, specially in the new discipline - computers. It was more of a problem to organize the cables and come up with tests, because we had no clue as to what are the kids supposed to know, they didn't learn it at school. The education did begin in some places (don't know when exactly, this year or next), where the son of the province secretary for information and informatics (!)(yes they put those two together), the famous ŽGLJ, sold some junk to elementary schools, a Misedo, where about 20% of them had faults, and the tech support was near nil, and if anyone asked me, those wouldn't even be produced, it was an unfinished thing, bugs everywhere from the moment you turn it on.
But nope, the contestants we had were highschoolers, that bunch I already knew, some were attending that course I held in Dom. Scoring them was a problem, as some of them had zx spectrums, most had Commodores, and perhaps a few had a Galaksija. Later I understood the reason for the popularity of Commodore - the gastarbajters, because you could buy those in any department store in Germany. Sinclair simply didn't overwhelm the german market, and even the local Amstrad had a share too. All in all, the picture was far from homogenous.
Well, we managed somehow. The municipality competition we held in the same room, of classroom kind, next to the space held by the club, where I held that photography course in late 1978. One guy just caught my eye, being large and ginger and full of knowledge, waxing over some theories how in Lisp one can use numbers of arbitrary precision, want 20 decimals, no problem, and how in it one can model the turbulence of fluids around an obstacle, using complex functions. Whoa, buddy, a highschooled dealing with such heady stuff. While I didn't expect that he ate complex functions for breakfast (they were difficult for me as well) and fluid mechanics (which were every machine engineering student's nightmare), I suppose he just retyped the ready code from somewhere and understood what it did. Even that is quite a feat in Lisp, after you finish balancing the parentheses you are ripe to retire.
Don't know who else was in the žiri, guess I knew one (maybe Mika Fišer, though unlikely, in the middle of exam term, perhaps someone from petefi) and the third guy would be some oto lecturer, repurposed into teaching informatics, and remember even less whom did we pass to the next level, the province.
The province [competition] was held in Kikinda, I remember it was in their gimnazija. Of the materiel I found only this second page of the competition terms, which is weird for the way the copy was made. This is indigo, the black soot-on-paper kind, it's been years since anyone had real indigo for the typewriter. It must have been somehow copied for the contestants as well, the šapirograf (I guess mimeograph would be the brand name elsewhere) must have seen action... And then there must have been printers already, it's hard to believe that nobody knew how to put this much text to print. Well so much for People's tehnika. Wish I kept the prgrammatic contest task, to see what did that look like, I know I took no part in composing it, we got it from Novi, who knows who sat there in what council. I foggily remember that I had more to say about that than about the most of the kids' works.
There I knew two colleagues, who hooked up while were still at the third year, but they didn't appear that day, it being on weekend. This event was somehow more chaotic than the municipal, guess beause we of the žiri didn't know each other, and at least one of the other two was less knowledgeable than the contestants. The guys from Jovina gimnazija of Novi were smashing it, they knew their stuff, by obviously having their home machines [for] longer than anyone else and spending huge amounts of time on them. True, they had this dickhead novisadistic approach, the sea being knee deep for them, the rest of you are clueless, bue even when you take away that layer, the remainder was big. Not that the Zrenjaninians were much worse, just obviously less experienced.
The only other thing I remember was a lunch in Sidikalni dom, which came across as a true city restaurant of higher category. Something I could get used to, assuming someone else pays.
Mentions: 03-III-1987., Dom omladine, gastarbajter, gimnazija, Novi Sad, OTO, petefi, Radovan Fišer (Mika Fišer), ZX Spectrum, žiri, Živorad G Ljubišić (ŽGLJ), in serbian
6-VI-2025 - 16-VII-2026