Loba and Magi decided to live together, so they bought half a house downtown, more or less in the area where the club once was, so close to the center and yet an old peasant's house. I went twice to join a moba there. First time we were dismantling a shed, particularly the chimney, slowly, brick by brick, so not to destroy them and specially not the roof tiles, will need them. That went well, despite of all four of us (his, later, kum, and another guy whom I don't remember) being clue upon clue on masonry - a painter, a poet, a mathematician.
The second moba was when he bought the big window. He tore down the sheds to make an atelier upstairs, so he needed the bricks. A painter's first need is light, so this was some huge window, something like meter and a half by two and a half, from some old house in the area of Pinova vila. He needed the moba for transport - it wasn't too far, three-four corners. It made no sense to hire a truck for it, the loading and unloading would be equally difficult as this thing that we did: we loaded it on three bicycles, two at front corners, me in the back, and pushed it slowly. The panes were already moved, probably his dad came with a car and did a few rounds, this was just the frame. We did this by night, so we'd have the full width of the sidewalks, not being an obstacle to others and having none ourselves. And, amazingly, it worked - we never veered in wrong direction, didn't have to reverse, no bike slanted away from the vertical, everything went as imagined. And I think we had a drink or two, the downstairs already had places to sit.
Software for the zx spectrum started appearing, from an unexpected source - the Bakračevi brothers. Though, the younger one was an electrical engineer, he may have moved in the like circles. He brought a kasetofon (cassette player) so we retaped what we could. Around that time Zoran Modli (yes, the same guy as of 01-XII-1972.) started his emisija where he'd play, over the waves, what these house contraptions would put on tape, and amazingly it worked. The first thing was the breaker, a puny bit of some twenty bytes, which would prevent the autostart of code loaded from tape, which was the oldest trick against copying. Well, good for you to protect your code and make the users buy and pay for it, but we here barely managed to procure computers, and of software we don't even know what exists out there, let alone have places where to buy it. So we managed to copy two games with Horatio - skiing and spiders. Soon more serious games started arriving.
Bane sort of invited himself, that is he invited us - he got a formula one race simulator for the zx spectrum, so we'd bring ours. By then he was already living with his doctor girl (maybe graduated yet by then, who'd remember), the house was large enough for them and his parents. We sat for a while, and then he'd asked me to leave the computer, he'd bring it to work in mašinska on monday. Okay... later he recounted how he and a friend stayed until three just taking turns, for as long as they were able to sit.
Around 2024 or 25 I heard why was the import of home computers prohibited. The country was, as usual, peeing thin with the hard currency, so lists of items which would be forbidden to import were made (and the joke made rounds, on how whiskey was listed - a waiter came by, asked „whiskey?“, guys raised hands, count was taken and written into minutes), and the story that importing them would allow us to grow a whole generation of programmers, which we need like bread, was refuted by some bigshot's counter story, which he read in some magazine, that in two or three years there'll be self-programming computers, so why waste money on such a futile thing.
This spin on selfprogramming machines, or any other thing which will make programming obsolete, I'll hear for many years, every few years. About the time the utter failure of the last prediction was forgotten, a new one would hatch.
8-I-2026 - 18-IV-2026