DEC's 32-bit machine, with its record-managing operating system (RMS) and virtual memory paging. There were two of these cupboards in the city - we had one in stour, and The Bank had the other one. The VAX was actually peddled as ID 4850 or some other label, and they pretended that they are actually manufacturing them. The manufacturing consisted of peeling the original DEC labels off and putting their own.
And, ah, yes, at least for the pdps, the previous model, not the later versions which went on triglav, they had translated some of the OS messages into slovenian, including the one if you do a shutdown after midnight, "Nakonec, bila je že krajnja ura. Zdaj že ni kava ne pomaga." (Finally, it was really about time. Now even coffee doesn't help anymore.".
In iskradelta's center in Fujvidek one Zoc (guess Zoran) worked at the time, and his regular habit was to come to work at humanely possible ten o'clock and work untill... he gets out of the zone or begins to blunder or just fires himself out towards life, which could be anytime between 18 and 22:00. Then someone among bigheads notices that some liberal habits have taken root, this ain't no west here, bro, and even there they know some order, you better work seven to three like everybody else.
So this Zoc started showung up at seven, and as soon as third coffee (ten thirty or thereabouts) he'd start doing something for real. What was he doing before that? I know only that a few following versions of the OS's translation, there would be a random Murphy's law... and nobody ever found out where's the code which does that :).
(which I think was a legend and that simply the comrades didn't want to find it - I'd be able to find it myself and likewise wouldn't touch it. Unless I had more to add.)
Other machines in the city were the old IBM 360, shared among sdk, textile industry, city hall, social security and Gik; kombinat had an NCR Criterion; textile kombinat had bought a second hand larger IBM in 1988 from the croatian police (and found the disks not erased, with all the files one would ever want), which took the whole basement of a former elementary school because each disk was the size of a washing machine, and Bangro had a Honeywell (aka Hanibal). Don't know what the metal industry had at the time, but I guess they already went for just PCs, without a big iron in the center.
24-V-2013 - 16-VII-2026