Table of Contents

Preface

"To predict the future does not mean knowing what will happen. A good futurologist ought to know that the future is what we forgot to imagine whilst we were making plans."

Chapter 1

“For reasons known only to himself, the mathematics teacher had taken a liking to me.”

Chapter 2

“Where do you study?” “At ASE, in Mechanisation.” “Mechanisation?!” my interlocutor asked in surprise, convinced he had misheard, no doubt picturing me in overalls with a screwdriver in my pocket. “Wait, it’s not what you think. It’s something new…”

Chapter 3

“And what good did it do us?” an imaginary reporter asked me. “That one I’m throwing out,” I thought furiously.

Chapter 4

“Gentlemen,” he began, blithely ignoring the five young women in our group, “today you will interact for the first time with a computing machine. Not just any machine, but MECIPT, the electronic brain of Timișoara.”

Chapter 5

“So the exchange of data between ‘memory’ and the ‘central unit’ was done as though you were sending a newsletter today by carrier pigeon.”

Chapter 6

“Congratulations,” the professor said. “You have just taken your first step into the world of computer programming.”

Chapter 7

“In my youthful imagination, fed on the films of my childhood, I already saw myself in the mountains, rifle in hand, fighting the invaders… exactly like the Russian partisans I had seen in the Soviet films. Ironically, I had no other models of partisans…”

Chapter 8

“I was in fact witnessing, without knowing it, a fundamental paradigm shift that took place in those years. The emphasis was no longer on the algorithms, but on modelling — what is it for? How does one apply it?”

Chapter 9

“Assembly language programmers were a breed apart… People spoke of them with a mixture of respect and fear, as one might speak of the snipers of computing: they did not fire often, but when they did, everything was precise.”

Chapter 10

“COBOL has become the victim of its own success: it is so reliable that nobody wants to replace it.
‍But it is so old that nobody wants to learn it any more.”

Chapter 11

“I? I was left speechless, frozen between astonishment and despair.
‍I felt like a soldier in a trench, uncertain whether the bugle would sound the charge or the bombardment was about to begin.”

Chapter 12

“My dissertation: A Comparative Analysis of the Languages ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL and PL/I.”

Chapter 13

“And now, rereading what I have written so far, I realise I have made us all out to be rather too… “showcase” students.Myself, at any rate.”

Chapter 14

“Romania had taken off like a rocket on the road to computerisation and, as I learned much later, among the communist countries only the Soviet Union was ahead of us.”

Chapter 15

“— Can you read dumps?”

Chapter 16

“Does anyone still remember direct file organisation on disk in FORTRAN?”

Chapter 17

“— Why do you bother with Assembler?
— So that I don’t bother worse later on.”

Chapter 18

“The next day I solved his dump fairly quickly.”

Chapter 19

“The Eternal Algorithm”

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