09-V-1995.
We drove to Budapest early in the morning. Mihály, Vilmos, Vanji, Joška and I.
We found a parking space near the railway, which was raised a few meters there, luckily not next to it. Those nearest felt the vibration from passing freight trains, and each passing would activate a few fainthearted alarms in the cars. Who knows with how many empty batteries did each day end.
Walking to the entrance we had a rare encounter: Serž. Look at that. Nothing unusual, though, the faces you seldom see at home you'll see in Budapest, Szeged, Timişoara (of the latter I wouldn't know now, not visiting it in years). It's always been like that.
Making the stand at the ifabo computer fair. No smoking in the hall. I still don't speak proper hungarian, yet I need to explain to many people all the good stuff that we have in our software.
I don't think we sold any apps there, none at all. But the nice font Joška made for our VGA cards made it look fancy, and about half of the people thought this was a Windows app. I heard this sold a lot of monitors. On the picture the monitor shows the main form in PolC.
Had lots of trouble with kids trying to insert their floppies and copy anything, but we disconnected them. The machines were scrappable - the disks will be reformatted after this anyway - but getting everything reinstalled in case they infected us with any virus (and kids' floppies on computer fairs were notorious of that) would take hours of our fair time. They also invariably tried to find a way to exit the app and run norton commander... which I quickly circumvented by having a nc.bat which would only restart PolC. Norton wasn't there anyway, I was using the moldavian clone, dos navigator, which surpassed the original by three spears at least. It could even do major damage, if one knew how to use the advanced options. But then it was also able to fix things in the filesystem, likewise.
We were actually one of the four outfits sharing four adjacent stands under the umbrella of Acer's general representative (whoever that was, perhaps the company owned by the co-owners of Szoftex). Our stand was the most crowded. By lunchtime, I almost lost my voice and was nearly fluent in hungarian, which was about the time I managed to get out for the first smoke break.
There by the entrance an older guy stood and said „I haven't had a smoke in last twenty years“ - „four hours in my case, but feels just as long“.
In the afternoon the crowd ebbed a bit, so I was able to take a stroll and see what the competition was doing (what competition - nobody had a polyclinic app, and there were a few amateurish dental apps around, one written by our good doctor for left cases*). The girls at the stands were gorgeous and synthetic, all done in the same csupa lába ("all leg") style, same dopičnjak skirts, same hairdress, same makeup... no matter that some of them would have looked nice on their own, the total effect was just eye candy and gloss over. Couple of eye catchers. Apple brought a real londoner, a red double decker bus, for whichever marketing gimmick they wanted to do. Actually no, it was the Aitchpee. And look, the same street where Szoftex's suppliers were.
Lunch wasn't much, fried sausages and beer, kept us going until the evening. Drove back, dead tired. Luckily, wasn't my turn to drive. Next day, went there with some younger hardware guy, who drove back and got caught speeding by an automatic radar. Just saw a flash in the middle of nowhere, in utter dark apart from headlights, and then waited to whatever fine was in the process.
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* pun on hungarian - accident is „baleset“, literally left fall, or left case
Mentions: dopičnjak, ifabo, Joška Apro, Mihály Weisz, PolC, Srđan Fejlečki (Serž), Szoftex, Vilmos Hausz, Vilmoš Baranji (Vanji), in serbian