Back in 1990 computer technology was at a turning point. Personal computers have become everyday, but they have not yet entered every home. Although each computer was an island unto itself, some ideas on how to connect these islands have already entered the realization phase. Computer software it was little, but there was a sound basis for it to be much more. What existed was well designed and usable, and healthy competition stimulated innovation and favored the highest quality solutions.
The time of "programmable toys" like "spectrum" and "commodore" is behind us, just like the era of expensive programmable calculators like "HP 41" or "Texas Instruments 58/59". A typical personal computer of that era was an IBM PC clone, with an Intel 80286 or 8038 processor, with an operating frequency that averaged around 20 megahertz and a working memory of no more than 2–4 megabytes.
Relatively unwieldy and rather noisy hard drives with a capacity of 10 to 80 megabytes were used for data storage. For external data archiving, 3,5-inch diskettes with metal, sliding doors and a capacity of 1,44 megabytes were used. Although these floppy disks have completely disappeared over time, their design has been preserved to this day as an icon that needs to be clicked in order to permanently save the data.
For the sake of illustration, if you wanted to transfer one music track or photo from a mobile phone to such disks, you would need from 3 to 10 pieces. For one film in today's quality, that number rises to three and a half thousand! Microsoft's text-based MS DOS 5.0 was used as the operating system, which had a command line but no graphical environment.
It was in 1990 that Microsoft launched Windows 3.0, the first operating system that used graphics and was commercially successful. Somewhere in parallel, IBM was developing an alternative, OS/2, an operating system that initially seemed promising, but eventually failed due to slow development and a small user base. At that time, "Apple" had its "Macintosh" computers, which were very popular in the graphics industry and education. At that time, Apple's graphical environment was extremely attractive, polished and very reliable. The "Amiga" and "Atari" computers had a marginal role, mainly because of their multimedia capabilities.
Those with deeper pockets could also afford some extras, such as a dot-matrix printer that printed pages using a head with a certain number of pins and an ink ribbon, similar to that used in mechanical typewriters. Those who dabbled in math and programming bought a math coprocessor, a chip similar to the main processor, which allowed more complicated computational operations to be performed incomparably faster.
GREEN OR AMBER LETTERS
Graphics cards appeared that could display an image of 640x480 pixels in 256 colors on the monitor. Sound cards, like the famous "soundblaster", enabled the processing and reproduction of digitized audio signals. The monitors were big, hot, had long cathode ray tubes and a small screen, curved like a soccer ball. In the beginning, they were monochromatic with an eternal debate: are the ones with green or those with amber letters healthier for the eyes? Later came shades of gray, and then full color. Laptops were still a distant future.
There were not many useful applications, but they had an enviable quality. "Lotus 1-2-3" and "Quatro pro" were used for tabular calculations, "Wordperfekt" and "Word" for writing. There were also "Photoshop" and "AutoCAD", which gained great popularity among designers and engineers. It was programmed in "Fortran", but "C", "Pascal", "Cobol" and "Basic" were also widely represented. Although Tim Berners-Lee started the Internet in 1989, very little was known about it, given that it was limited to scientific institutions, universities and the military.
Some kind of "online" life still existed - thanks to modems of 2400 bits per second, it was possible to access various forums (so-called BBSs) over the telephone line, where you could discuss anything and everything. In addition, the PC computer became a means of distraction: some games would gain world fame ("Prince of Persia", "Sim City"), along with the ubiquitous and unsurpassed "Tetris", which destroyed more working hours than all strikes combined. By the way, "Tetris" is one of the most successful games of all time, it has sold over 500 million copies in all formats. The game was invented in the mid-eighties by Aleksey Pajitnov (USSR), and the PC version was written by his friend Vadim Gerasimov.
COMPUTER SOUL
Once it broke the shackles of academia, the Internet began to spread unstoppably. In the beginning, Tim Berners-Lee manually maintained the list of Internet presentations, but in 1993 he finally had to give up the futile work: the influx of new sites became too great. The first pages specialized for Internet searching were created, some in the form of catalogs (like "Yahoo"), some with an empty line where the user entered search words. There were a lot of such sites ("Laykos", "Hotbot", "Altavista", "Excite"), but none of them had a constant dominance until "Google" appeared in 1998, with a new site ranking mechanism that quickly proved its superiority.
Working with computers back then was different than today. You had to know something about them, to feel them... Each one had its own soul that you could recognize through the sound of the fan, through the click of the massive mechanical keyboard, through the continuous "clicking" of the hard disk, through the flickering of the screen that made your eyes water. Today, computers are just tools, but back then they were partners you hung out with. You knew where each file was, whether it was on the hard drive or on a floppy disk, how big it was, when it was recorded. Today's computer users write a complaint to the magistrate, after five days they look for it in folders they have never accessed, they only find it when the deadline for the appeal has expired.
At that time, every interaction with the machine had its own meaning. In order to get the most out of your computer, you needed curiosity, persistence, and creativity. The tools at your disposal were modest but sufficient, work was slow but attainable and when in the end the thing (whatever that thing was) turned out right, you would feel like a master who had done a good, great job. You were much closer to the hardware itself, the computer logic was simple and efficient, there were no distractions in the form of messages from mobile phones, there were no intelligent assistants, bots, most of the time there was no literature or necessary instructions. There was just you and the machine and the desire to get something meaningful out of that interaction. Every letter, every line, every click represented a small creative act. And when at the end you put what you made on a disk with the sticker "Important", right next to the disk with the inscription "Tetris", pack it all in a small red box and put it on the shelf with ten other such boxes, you could say with satisfaction: "Today I made a great thing!".
"KOLUBARA" AS AN INSTITUTION
In 1990, I got a job as an assistant at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Belgrade. For someone who came to Belgrade from a fat province with the desire to graduate in less than ten years, it was no small thing. If my memory serves me right, I think my first assistant salary was about 700 DM. I started to indulge myself: after class, I would go to lunch across the street at "Kolubar". That tavern was, in fact, an advanced department of Mašinac - there they celebrated diplomas and passed exams and gossiped about the professors who, "out of pure malice", knocked down some martyr for the tenth time. It was a tavern where professors and students sat together exchanging witty remarks, where some learned head knew how to pick up a guitar and play for everyone's soul, where graphic works were occasionally reviewed, and solutions to complicated problems were drawn on napkins spread over checkered tablecloths.
"Kolubara" was a cafe on a higher intellectual level in every respect - even the waitresses, based on the haunted appearance of a student who alternately drinks beer and brandy in solitude, knew from which subject the person in question was "sick", whether it was "Mathematics 2" or "System Dynamics". Why the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering allowed the collapse of the "Kolubara" institution is not clear to me even today - probably to give way to the progress that culminated in today's "golden age of Serbia" (there is now a betting shop).
After a healthy lunch (kebabs and fries), I usually took a taxi back to the room I rented from the landlady for years, because who would wait for a tram with a full stomach? From my first salary, I also bought a box of cream bananas, which at that time were bigger and somehow tastier. All my life I got one or two from my parents, grandmother, grandfather, aunt... You get one and you can eat fifteen. And then I lie down on the bed of my student room, open that box of cream-bananas and start taking one by one, without counting. When I'm thirsty, I drink Coke from a glass bottle. I ate that candy until I passed out, whether it was from the overwhelming sugar or because it was getting dark in the meantime - it doesn't matter, I just know that I was happy.
There were some computers at the university at that time, some were interested in their possibilities and some were not. A colleague invited me to sit next to him, to see what he can do. He typed in the command "date" and the date appeared on the screen - happiness-happiness-joy. Admittedly wrong because no one knew how to enter the right one. But it doesn't matter, every half hour he sat down at the computer and typed "date" to confirm the material. There were also advanced users, some knew how to use "AutoCAD", and there were also those who knew how to write something on the computer and save it for tomorrow.
There was little programming, although there were already excellent tools for that back then. At that time, programming was considered to be a magical skill - it was enough to write a few lines of code to someone and they would add you as a co-author to a scientific paper.
For a short time, life was good.
"EVERYTHING WAS LIKE THAT, OR EVEN WORSE"
But all that didn't last long, we went to war with everyone around us and beyond, instead of relative abundance, misery awaited us. Enjoying cream-bananas has replaced waiting in lines for everything and anything. I would often stand in line without actually knowing what to expect. Anyway, I waited and was happy if I picked up a carton of olives or a couple of kilos of sugar as a reward.
It wasn't much better at the university either - once, along with the salary (which over time dropped to a measly five marks, plus two marks for a hot meal), we received a bag of powdered milk that had to be distributed to colleagues from the department where I worked. Someone had to distribute that "treasure", and who will if not the youngest. It's not a difficult job, it just requires plastic bags (which I didn't have), some spatula (which I also didn't have) and a scale (same case). I don't want to go into the details of how I measured it in the end, it wasn't overly hygienic, I only know that I was completely white and that, walking around the university so that each colleague could get his milk dish, I left behind a white trail. One of my bags tore, the milk spilled right in front of the professor's hall. Unfortunately, some students only remembered me for that.
As Bora Ćosić wrote at the end of her book The role of my family in the world revolution: "Everything was like that, or worse".
PAMPUR IN "TIME"
And then in 1993, an advertisement appeared in the newspaper that "Vreme" newspaper was looking for two assistants in the technical editorial office. My wife persuaded me to apply, we were regular readers, why not, and I passed, I guess because I had a master's degree in robotics at the time.
photo: Goranka MatićTEAM OF BREAKERS 1999: Boris Dimitrov, Vladimir Stankovski, Ivan Hrašovec, Vesna Srbinović, (Mirko Marjanović), Saša Marković
It was another world, a world of normal people, a world of people who hated war and did everything they could to wake up our deluded people from their narcosis. "Time" very quickly became a place where I took refuge from the madness on the street and in the whole society. I would not like to talk about Žaret, Pera, Stojan, Sasha, Miloš, Dejan, Uroš... there are people who got to know them better, who are much more invited to say a few nice words about them. I was an "ordinary" member of the technical editorial office, which was involved in editing texts and preparing them for the press, but, in addition, I felt part of a big family that shared similar values: journalists, we from the "technical" department, proofreaders, proofreaders, typists, administration...
photo: m. Milenković...editorial analysis of prepared pages;...
In that technical editorial office, we somehow managed to follow technical innovations, even though "Vreme" never had too big a budget for that. I found computers on which "Windows 3.11" was installed, we also had "Photoshop" and "Pagemaker 4" as tools. When I started working, the only network that connected computers was "frisbee-net": we had one diskette with corrected texts, ready to be flipped, so we threw that diskette to each other from one end of the room to the other.
Later came the BNC-network, the first real computer network, actually one long coaxial cable that stretched over two floors and for which the so-called "T-forks" held by all connected computers. That cable had a "terminator" (we called it "pampur") at both ends, a cap with a 50 ohm resistor that was absolutely necessary for the network to function properly. However, the network stopped working every hour, usually because of some sloppily made fork. But which one? The only way to determine this was to move the cable from the end to the middle of the cable and check which half of the network is working and which is not. By successive application of the "halving method" the point of failure would eventually be found.
photo: m. Milenković...the printer who swallowed and threw out all kinds of things;...
It was a time of struggle, stick and rope, but it always arrived... It often happened that a journalist would dictate a text to our typist over the phone, and she would enter it into the computer. Some sent their texts by fax, handwritten or typed. Possibilities for communication were limited, some did not even have a computer at home, so we socialized more and got to know each other better. Newly entered texts were printed on the best printer ever made, it happened that someone's notebook or the previous issue of "Vremena" fell into the paper drawer by mistake. The printer jams, sometimes dangerously so, but in the end it always cheerfully continues to eject the printed pages.
photo: m. Milenković...what cannot be put on thin monitors today - miles
MY FIRST EMAIL
I don't remember exactly when the Internet started to be used in the newsroom. But I remember that one day someone from radio "B92" came and started to explain to us how to use e-mail. A man came, arranged everything properly, gave a lecture, I did not attach any great importance to it, until I noticed that the letter "@" was used in that electronic correspondence.
I first saw that letter on a note with contact information that my best friend from college left me when he left for graduate studies in America. And there, in the "Vremena" editorial office, I somehow connected those two things, sat down at that new scalameri and wrote my first email in my life. Actually, I thought that there was nothing to all of that, that I had "missed" something and mis-captured it, but as soon as tomorrow - I received an answer. Everything I heard and saw after that could not be compared to the exhilaration I experienced then.
Later, we had regular telephone ("dialup") internet, through a modem from which those unforgettable ping-pong sounds could be heard when establishing a connection, and when we managed to secure the so-called The "ISDN" line, which had two channels, each of 64 kilobits per second, with instant connection establishment, seemed as if we had already entered the 21st century. Since that moment, my memories are much rarer and fainter - computers have become stronger, the Internet is faster and more accessible, the amount of content on it is increasing. But nothing was a surprise anymore - technical progress was a given, and it quickly became clear that, as time went on, that progress would be faster and faster.
WISDOM AT A CLICK
I wrote the first time text in 1997, when the "Sojourner" rover landed on Mars. Even today, I am grateful to Jaret, who encouraged me to write that first text. I left the technical editorial office in 2000, but in spirit I remained attached to "Vreme" and the people in it, past and present. I also left university and started building an IT career, but that's another story. Meanwhile, decades have passed: the working clock of the processor is now measured in gigahertz and not megahertz as it used to be. The hard drives have been completely redesigned and have a capacity of up to 20 terabytes (one million times larger than the one from the beginning of the nineties). The same acceleration was experienced by the Internet, home speeds reach a full gigabit. Today, ultra-high resolution (4K) graphics are supported on TVs in pubs, not to mention computers. Today's cell phone is incomparably more powerful than the computer that landed Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon. I recently rummaged through the basement to find a floppy disk and showed it to my son - to no avail.
Is every technological advance also a change for the better? Instead of the "soul" that old computers had, today's ones imitate intimacy with bots like "ChatGPT" or "Kopilot". Instead of programmers who once had to understand every written letter, to know how that letter is mapped to the hardware under the hood, a generation of "professionals" is emerging that relies on "vibe-coding", a style of programming in which you as a programmer do nothing, you just dictate instructions to a bot that writes programming code for you. There are more and more various applications on the market, the source code of which a person has not even seen, let alone touched - they were compiled by ambitious amateurs, blindly trusting their digital assistants, about which they hardly know anything. One day such a program will get into a car, into a plane, into an elevator and it will be white...
And it's not just about programming: it's similar in science, journalism, literature... On the other hand, enormous billions of dollars are still being invested in the development of models based on artificial intelligence (AI). They say that these AI models are constantly learning because that's the only way they can progress. But what will happen when they start learning from material they have produced themselves? The Internet is already full of falsified images, documents, fake information created by AI programs... You can't learn anything from it except to lie.
However, technological progress is undeniable, we have seen all kinds of miracles in the last 35 years. But how far have we progressed as a society thanks to that? "Wikipedia" was launched in 2001. In the first month, over a thousand pages were published on it. Despite the (seemingly absurd) fact that texts on "Wikipedia" can be created or edited by anyone who happens to be on it, today it is, both in terms of quality and volume, the largest digital treasure of knowledge with over 60 million articles, which has long surpassed "Encyclopedia Britannica" or "Encarta", if anyone still remembers them. Mainly thanks to "Wikipedia", I naively believed that the Internet would eradicate ignorance in a short period of time and push the dilettantes and the ignorant to the sidelines, where things naturally belong. Because all of humanity's wisdom was suddenly just a click away.
Unfortunately, the world hasn't gotten any smarter in the meantime. Moreover, it could be said that it has regressed to a great extent and that the progress of technology has mostly helped the "low-spirited" to organize themselves, to make themselves heard even louder and to start burying humanity with their crazy ideas.
THE PLAGUE OF DIGITAL PLOTS
Back when I went to some kind of school, anyone who said the Earth was flat would not get an ace in geography - instead, they would first be taken for a thorough psychiatric evaluation, perhaps along with the parents who had so thoroughly neglected their child. Today, "flat earthers" are legitimate "residents" of the Internet, they have their own "conferences", publish "scientific papers" and "irrefutable evidence", recruit young people and with all their might support various conspiracy theories that sprout like mushrooms.
Now you have graduate meteorologists who give "alternative" weather forecasts by counting sunspots and bulges, aviation engineers who believe that the American moon landing was filmed by Stanley Kubrick somewhere in Arizona, doctors who practice homeopathy or wholeheartedly oppose vaccines because they don't want their child to be microchipped and autistic, pharmacists and chemists who see in the contrails of airplanes the agent with which world leaders dust us to keep our numbers. under control... Learned people began to believe in nonsense, and those who never did well with school took the opportunity to systematize their ignorance and turn it into an advantage: they have an "untouched, open mind, unburdened by pre-served truths", "practical experiences", their "sources of information" ("One guy told me/ in one place/ with one guy/ one thing..."). Everything finally went to hell with the advent of social networks, which littered the Internet with colossal amounts of worthless garbage. If the Internet were compressed into one room, all you could hear in it would be noise, with only the occasional slurred word. Everyone got their own digital plot from which they can, without any moderation, launch into the cosmos an endless series of texts and photos that have no use value even for family members, let alone for a wider population.
Most sites have turned to information that collects "clicks", because clicks bring advertisers, therefore money, and if the truth needs to be sacrificed for the sake of sensationalism, why not? Today, people consume exclusively the short form, communicate exclusively with "tweets", people make claims, no one cares about arguments, instead of nice words we have bar discussions, so that over time we become unable to "process" anything that requires more than 15 seconds of concentration. Although on YouTube you can still find a huge amount of content that is useful, cultured, professional and measured, its authors in most cases can only envy the most popular Serbian YouTuber. Who, by the way, is called "Grandma Pig" and does - if you don't know what, ask your kid, he knows.
HEAD AGAINST BANDERA
Our problem is that we don't know what we don't know. The other night on TV, a gentleman (director?) from the state E-administration offers jobs to young people advertising "quantum computers" which, he says, are also arriving here, to the delight of the presenter (is her name Marica?) who obviously "understands" quantum mechanics. What kind of quantum computers? Where do we train staff for such a thing? At the Faculty of Physics that enrolls one student per year? And do we even have any idea how much a real quantum computer costs, today, when the whole nation is focused on the price of a meter of salami or a roll of cheese? Add to that the fact that fewer and fewer people at home use a laptop for anything because they replaced it with a mobile phone, that the elderly who were never interested in technology can now, finally, enjoy an ever richer offer of the yellow press and, even worse, television in order to regularly consume the recommended daily dose of naked show asses and crime ("Andrija liquidated, Filip got a bullet in the forehead while on the run"). Those with greater intellectual ambitions will also read "the most accurate horoscope in the Balkans and beyond" (hey, horoscope!), and with particular enjoyment the bombastic statements of the "last king of Scotland" who holds Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo and some other countries in checkmate.
Realistically speaking, 35 years ago we were in a quagmire, now we are in a barrel without a bottom ("there are only partitions"), we were in a mushroom, now we are in living mud. The main actors of the misery that befell us at the end of the last century are riding again, they even pitched their tents in the center of the city, as if we were, far away, some oriental despotism. Today, as then, it seemed as if democracy was right around the corner, only we could never find that corner. We came out of Tito's "socialism" like a drunkard from a barracks: we smashed our heads against every pole we came across, we didn't pass a single one. Mathematics says that a drunkard will never stray too far from the bar he left, we are living proof that this mathematical theorem is correct.
And therefore, let others deal with quantum computers, artificial intelligence, nuclear fusion, genetics, "Hubble" images from the cosmos, it only distracts us. We will go to the Expo and we will ride flying cars at the Expo like we used to do on a merry-go-round, and we will have a good time, as good as it used to be in the nineties.
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