Started working on the enhancements to the screen generator. What Sale made, worked, but it was generating dozens of separate .prg files, and we already had one app with 1500 files in the directory. With DOS 3.1 reading directories sequentially, this would degrade speed on an XT machine significantly. Combine that with the places where they had 10 megabit network, with a 16MHz 286 as a server and a few XTs as workstations, it could get really slow. And then the disk on the XT got heavily fragmented. Ouch.
So I started looking for a way to bundle these into a single file, one per form.
It was around this time that Toza brought a floppy with blockout. Played that a lot, as soon as we figured out how to configure it for Hercules graphic card, which was the most popular at the time. Maybe I wasn't the champion, I think Grgi was better, but then I played mostly the harder, all-3D levels. Nena, for one, couldn't get her head around the 3D way of thinking, rotating pieces around any of the three axes to fit them best. OTOH, Rade was later (in 1991, IIRC) the champion in Pentix, which is the 2d Tetris with 5-squares pieces. He actually found a keyboard accelerator, because the regular keyboard driver wasn't fast enough for him.
One afternoon it happened that Blaža and I were alone in the office. Just then a customer came, with his son I guess, with an ex tee, which we sold this spring, said it just wouldn't. We turn it on, and it really won't. Okay we'll take a look, come around in about half an hour, by which time we'd have a diagnose, and we'll see. So they leave and we - what shall we do now? Opened the box, and it's all new inside... So he said, let's, just for kicks, yank all the cables and plug them back in. Let's. And it worked. Later some hardware guy told us we did the right thing - the fan vibrates, disk vibrates, and so the whole box vibrates. The tiny fine dust gets into the contacts, and may accumulate enough to prevent contact, supported by the fact that vibration may open the contact just enough for the grain to seep in, then close it back to press the grain against the metal. When you yank the card out, you disturbed the dust and made it work.
This is about the time when we started preparing the 1990 guide of the city. DTP was the big thing then and everyone had a pirated copy of ventura. We decided that we're too busy with regular work to do this, so we wanted to hire outside help - that being Mika Fišer and his pal Jevrem. The negotiations were tough, I think they sat with Vanji for more than three hours, several times returning to the beginning. The main point of contention wasn't the content of the job or its extent or the deadlines - no, it was "how can you guarantee that we don't get stiffed on this".
So we decided that I do it. What qualified me for the job was the atarist with GEM on it, same GEM that ran Ventura. So I, kind of, had the most experience with typesetting. And, ah, yes, that school newspaper in 1973, yeah.
I even once arranged a trip to Belgrade to purchase a set of Bitstream fonts from one of the owners of later sezam, the ones with šđčćž and with the cyrillic version, in juski and jusćir layouts. Went to Jugodata, then partly owned by these two guys, and then had to go with one of them over the river, to his apartment, to get fresh copies on diskettes. On the way back, while waiting for the bus, I spotted one girl from VIII2, who was always cute but not too prominent while in school. This time she looked just right. We recognized each other immediately and were happy to have met. Haven't seen her since 1970, and probably won't see her again.
The book would be mostly in cyrillic, which was purely my decision and nobody had any firm arguments against my "why not". We borrowed a HP III laser printer from some guy (for whom we later did some service here and there). The book looked ugly, but I guess it sold and would serve as a document on how the city was in those last two years of good life in SFRY.
In parallel with that, it somehow fell to us to procure a plotter for kombinat's technology institute. Whether it was still some connection between Štraus and Vanji, or someone of lower rank, no matter - we bought it, plugged it in and... now what? I leafed through the manual, found that commands were to be sent through a serial cable. So let's try it. I wrote a dozen lines, in some version of basic or in fox, and there it was, a red circle where I meant it to be, a blue line crossing it, cool, it works. It even wrote some bits of text. In haircut latin, of course, it's a new gadget that can make pictures in a different way, going for literacy is always the last on the list of features.
I know we delivered it under some boring drizzle, and that was the only time I entered that building. Ah, no, there was another one - Vanji's brother-in-law fucked up a batch of rakija. I had something to do in KuPro so he hitched a ride with me and we went to see Bosa's husband, who was a chemical engineer in the institute, to see whether the shit can be fixed. Yes it can, leave it with me, not a problem. Later I heard that he got it fixed.
Speaking of which, I met Bosa once when she was working in Luxol (few blocks beyond KuPro) as an economist - we were cooking them out as a prospective customer - but can't remember the year. And also a certain G. who was a girlfriend of Pali once upon a time, now a fellow mathematician and looking even better than in 1977. Don't think I ever saw either of them again.
6-I-2012 - 18-V-2026