Exploring the Internet
the overcrowded, spartan restaurants and ordered the house special, a pizza topped with ham, eggs, and peas. The beverage menu also featured "Bois Avocat," a French drink which could be translated either as the blood of a lawyer or some form of avocado nectar. I had a beer.
With relief, I finished my sightseeing and we it back to my room. The number of tourists in Prague was staggering, but they didn't seem to have anything to do. With few restaurants, most milled around in the streets. The Jehovah's Witnesses smiled a lot. It was as if Walt Disney had taken over the country, but had named Kafka managing director.
The next day, I went over to the Czech Technical University. Jan Gruntorad ushered me into his office wearing a Hawaiian shirt, having come in from his holiday a day early to see me. His office was piled high with papers, computer boxes, a huge 3270 terminal, and books. An ancient TV was on top of one cabinet, and on the other were dozens of empty bottles of various kinds. In other words, my kind of office.
For many years, Czechoslovakia had suffered a technology embargo due to COCOM regulations and, like other Eastern bloc countries, concentrated on reverse-engineering IBM mainframes. Jan took me into their computer room and showed me a Russian mainframe clone, together with a Bulgarian-made front end processor (FEP). The MVS-like operating system had been written locally and it had taken two years to integrate it all into a semi-working system.
The Bulgarian FEP and the Russian mainframe were right out of an episode of "Lost in Space." Full of knobs and mechanical registers, it reminded me of early computers like the ENIAC, which can be seen at the Smithonian's American History Museum in Washington, D.C. In a corner were a pile of removable disk packs, each the size of a keg of beer.
Forcing designers to reverse-engineer systems and to serve as super-systems integrators had produced one positive effect. Many of the engineers at the school were quite sophisticated. Unfortunately, however, the operating system had never quite run right and the users never had enough confidence to invest their time learning to do useful work.
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