I remember when computers were huge

I am writing right now on my good friend and companion Sony VIO. This is a small laptop that weighs less than one kilogramme. It is rather powerful; I can download and watch films, write and store any number of documents, communicate with anybody in the world writing emails or skyping, perform complicated calculations, read newspapers published anywhere in the world, listen to radio in any language… The list goes on. There are many functions my computer can perform that I even do not know about and I do not want to know more than I already do.  Enough is enough. And I know that my computer is already a couple of years old and that there are more advanced technologies widely available. We take it all for granted now. But the times when I saw a computer the first time in my life it was a totally different computer.

Was it in the late sixties of the last century or the early seventies? I think it was already in the sixties. I just got my seriously sounding diploma of a master of pure mathematics and did not quite know how this was going to serve me in finding an interesting job. I even did not know what would really interest me as a mathematician who did not intend to be a scientist or a school teacher. I had to have a job, though, and the caring communistic government found me one as a corrector of school manuals for math. It was a boring job and definitely did not require any serious qualifications or knowledge of mathematics. Ability to spell correctly was important here. So I read page after page with a red pen in hand marking my corrections in spelling. One of my colleagues realised that I might not be in the right job. Christine, I still remember the name, had an idea. Her brother in law had some strange job with computers and was looking for people who could be trained to be computer programmers. Would I be interested?  I did not know. Would I? I knew what a computer was; they taught me about them computers at uni, but it was a very vague knowledge.

So one evening, the brother in law of Christine, called me and casually asked if I would like to be trained to be a programmer. He could not tell me much about it as he has only started the job himself. Generally speaking, it was to develop systems for distribution of agricultural machines, combine harvesters and such. Just what any twenty-two years old girl is particularly interested in. Hmm… However, I said “yes”. This was a pivotal moment in my life and the start to a serious computer career that lasted decades. I was to become one of the first programmers in Poland, but that memorable evening when my professional life had started I had no idea what was ahead of me.

I had a right aptitude, but no knowledge of computers. A couple of courses filled the gap, and a couple of months later I started to program. It was great fun; they paid me for something that was akin to solving crosswords, one of my hobbies.

These were early days in working with computers, and the first computer I saw was ICL 1900. It took the whole big, air-conditioned room and only special people were allowed to enter this magic place. The data to be processed was stored on punched cards, perforated paper tape and on magnetic tapes that rotated mysteriously in their boxes the size of a grandfather clock. Scary stuff and difficult to comprehend.

 

There were only a few computers in Warsaw at that time and corporations that did not have their own computers had to hire computer time by an hour from the lucky institutions that had their own machines. My employer was not one of the lucky ones and had to hire computer time. That meant that my working hours depended on computer availability. Typically we were allotted time in the middle of night. I must say that I was a brave and determined girl, getting a taxi at 2:00 am to go to work for one hour. During the hour I was supposed to load a new version of my program stored on punched cards, compile it into the form understood by the computer and then execute it by giving the command: GO 20! With some luck, the program worked and produced expected results typically in the form of a business report.

  

This was the best outcome one could expect, but typically the program had further errors that rarely could have been corrected on the spot. So, back to the office and analysing the program, punching corrections on cards like the one on the photo, slotting them into appropriate places and back to booking a new computer time. Disasters of dropping programs and spreading the cards all over the floor were not all that uncommon. Who would dream of working in such a manner these days? But it was great fun.

Today, life is so much easier as far as using computers is concerned. I can produce any report; do my income tax return calculations using a standard program like EXCEL without any need for debugging. It is just there in my PC. My little computer is hundred times more powerful than the huge ones of the sixties and seventies. There is no need to be careful with my data falling on the floor and getting mixed up. But even if I have the computer all to myself I sometimes get up in the middle of the night and sing into work or play.  Occasional insomnia may be a reason for that, but the nightly computer work is still a part of my life

Tea drinking

Tea has been my favourite morning drink for quite some time now. In my new kitchen which has four big, deep drawers one of them is almost fully taken by various teas. Black, green, red, white, infusions, herbal teas…Too many really and I am trying to manage it by not buying any new teas except refilling the essential Lapsang Souchong. This has been for few years my favourive morning tea.

                                                    

Recently I claimed my birthday present at Kikki's as I found an interesting teacup which is a cross between tea glass and a teacup. Being a stationary junkie I found my way to the local Kikki shop and enrolled on their customer list. Now each September I get a $10 coupon to purchase my birthday present in the shop. As I have all the stationary I need I focused on their home line and found this glass-cup. It says :  Dream Breath Create Inspire. The writing is unobtrusive, hardly visible really. I like it. The reason why I chose such a present is in a way related to old Polish way to drink tea.

When I say “old Polish way” I do not think of all that very distant times. The tea drinking out of  a simple 250 ml glass is still done in many Polish homes. Tea tastes best when it is hot and drinking it out of a thin  glass burnt one's fingers. Sometimes such a glass did not have a saucer underneath and as sugar was widely used in my young days I had a dilemma if I should leave the spoon in the glass or put in on the table after I was done with stirring my tea. Then my mother typically gave me a beauty lesson saying: if you drink your tea with the spoon in the glass you will look like general Rokossowski. I did not want to look like him and have one brow higher than the other so I quickly took my spoon out of the glass. Funny things we remember and the lesson was rather interesting and saying things about my beautiful mother.

                                                      

Tea drinking out of a glass rather than a teacup is rather tricky and requires some care and clever ideas to cope with it and enjoy the beverage without burning your fingers and harming your beauty forever.

With passing years glasses with handles appeared in Polish homes but they were typically made out of a thick glass and this was not particularly satisfying to me. There was another way and this was to put your glass in a holder with a  handle. This could be really a nice way to drink your tea especially if the holder was antique and pleasingly designed. This is really a Russian way to drink tea without burning your fingers, but also used in Poland.

My new cup satisfies my taste in many ways. The glass is thin, the shape (minus the  handle) reminds me of a regular polish tea glass. It has a simple design that looks elegant to me. I wonder if Swedish (Kikki is a Swedish shop) also drink tea out of a glass. My Swedish husband was not really accustomed to it and made funny faces expressing discomfort of burning his fingers. Very quickly he was served his tea in a little holder. My mother always tried to please her guests and her Swedish son in law in particular.

All this tea drinking thoughts came quite unexpectantly while drinking this morning my Lapsang souchong out of a Kikki glass.

My travels in time - from horse and carriage to jetset

My travels started early. I was less than two years old when my parents started to look for a better place to live their life than a small village somewhere in the eastern part of Poland, close to the new border with Russia. It was just after the Second World War and Poland was a troubled country with post-war borders just being enforced. We had a long trip ahead of us. Not so much in kilometers but in duration. It took few days to reach the destination but my mother and me, still a baby, traveled in the comfort of something like a gypsy wagon. My father was a very enterprising man, and he always knew how to take care of his family and how to create a good life for us. We traveled to this Promised Land, and for us, it was a small industrial town in the central part of Poland. The name of the town is unpronounceable, sorry.

I did not like the place because my mother did not like it and she was my role model. It was a small town, but perhaps not so by Australian standards. Even if around 70,000 people lived there, it had a feel of a small gossipy place, and it was full of fumes of the factories around. I was happy and excited to move to Warsaw when I finished my HSC. It was a move a little more to the west again. This time I traveled by train, and it was a great upgrade on a horse and cart of my first life trip.

Then I started my shuttle traveling between the town of my early youth and Warsaw where I studied. Warsaw was a big city, and I had to do many adjustments to fit in. Some were good some not so good. I learned to smoke cigarettes to be more like other students. This part I regret now. But generally I had a really good time in the big city, and after a while, I felt like I belong there. I became a Warsaw girl.

Then I fell in love with a man I met at work. He was Swedish and after few years of being married and living in two different countries, I lived in Warsaw, he in Vienna; we decided to move together and the place to live together was Paris. Not so bad, really, especially that being a true Pole I loved anything French. This is difficult to comprehend as French never treated Poland all that well, but we loved them with love without reciprocity. This time I traveled by car and I recall with fondness our Alfa Romeo sports. I thought it was an upgrade on the train that brought me from this smaller town to Warsaw.

We were very proud of our Grand Turismo Veloce

It was an interesting time, but after the three years of my husband's Paris assignment  and me being a housewife, it was a time to move again. We were looking for an English speaking country and even if Australia was not on our list at first, we were lucky to be directed by fate to come to Sydney. It was 1979, and the new life started then. With some stretch, I could say that I traveled west again and this time by a jet set. Another upgrade on means of transport. 

After being naturalized a few years later, I legitimately call Australia home. Yes, I have my “charming” accent which is rather strong and people sometimes ask me about my nationality, but I feel Australian even if I sound a bit funny for an Aussie.  

The Chinese Curse

May you live in interesting times. Even the Chinese origin of the statement is apocryphal, and I am going to make adjustments to serve my purpose. I want to modify it a bit to say - May you live an interesting life and examine its merits.

This blog makes me look back and reminisce, observe my past and myself in it. This is sometimes like self-psychoanalysis. My life has been interesting and seems to continue along the same line. I mean, continues to be interesting. I have lived in four countries. I was married to three wonderful men. One at a time, I would like to clarify. I have lived in three exciting, big cities: Warsaw, Paris and Sydney and some not so big and not so exciting: Włocławek and Düsseldorf. I had the interesting and successful career, changing my profession three times. I have had many great friends and have met many interesting people. I traveled quite a bit; I walked on fire, I have learnt many useful and not so useful skills...  

I feel that there have been many, many changes in my life, many very good ones and some character building. I was born in a small village in Poland somewhere close to the Russian border in the part of Poland that is still considered to be in the Poland B category. This means behind normal Polish standards. The happiest times of my childhood I spent with my grandparents in a village where electricity came long after the rest of Poland was considering it a normal convenience. Then it was time to go to school, and they were times spent in the industrial town, I consider small. Ray from Mummulgum thought that 75,000 citizens constitute a metropolis. People have different ideas about things.

When the time came to go to Uni in Warsaw, I felt really small and insignificant, lacking looks and manners of a big town girl. I was tutored in the big city skills by my husband to be. He was a man about the town; smoking, riding a scooter, knowing how to behave in fashionable places and generally very impressive, perhaps not only to me, a girl from a small town. I caught up with all of that jazz in a short time.

The next major step was to learn how to live in a western country with my second husband, extremely elegant in his looks and behavior. Another need and opportunity to smarten up. I rose to the occasion again.

All of that may look like bragging, but it may be just the opposite. Recently, in discussion with a friend, I was asked about happy moments in my life. The memories of times spent at the home of my best friend came immediately to mind. I have many such wonderful memories, and I hope I will be adding to them with time passing. We were nineteen years old when we met and when I was first invited to her home. From the first moment, when I entered the house where she lived, I was enchanted. It was a quintessential family home, and her parents seemed to me, quintessential parents. Warm, kind, caring for their daughter and her friends. The place smelled of good, homemade meal we were soon going to have. I felt accepted and invited to this sanctuary from the first hello and the first warm smile of the parents. This has never changed even after the parents passed away. The mother left us quite recently. She lived 105 years and to her last day she was up and about making sure that there is no drop in the family standards. My friend took over the home and cooking, but I always recognised the school of the old lady. The cooking and the place itself have been modernized with time but with respect to the roots and the family traditions. To me, it always meant love, safety, authenticity, generosity, stability, and happiness. To this day when I cross the gate, I enter this very special atmosphere, and I know it will warm me up and restore my spirits.

My friend has lived in the same place since her early childhood, has been a math’s teacher all her working years, married to only one great man also a teacher. She retained the important friendships from way back while I lost many of mine through moving. She is a mother of a wonderful young man, happily married and a proud grandmother of a beautiful and clever girl. In my mind, she has all that I would love to have. However, I made different choices. I wanted to have an interesting life, and I have had what I wanted.  No regrets, but have I lived in agreement with my core values?

Sydney is vivid at night

I almost missed this spectacular event. I mean Vivid. If it was not for a friend, more watchful than me, who suggested the night on the town, I would have ignored the snippets of information that I was most likely getting without paying attention to it. Life in suburbs can be alienating. 

This week after my regular bridge session I got myself to the city. Crossing the bridge I noticed that some buildings have unusual colours. I mean really unusual – bright pink, neon green, purple… The city suddenly looked like if it was coloured by Ken Done. Rather cheerful. 

                                                               

Walking towards Circular Quay I realized that not only the colours are cheerful, the people around me looked cheerful as well. As I stepped in to the Vivid part of the town I was surrounded by people who were celebrating the colorful beauty of Sydney so I also got into a party mood. 

                                         

The Opera House and the Contemporary Museum, in my opinion, were the most spectacular. The patterns and colours constantly changed and as soon as I opened my mouse to say “have a look at this one” the picture was already different. Long forgotten German word came to mind.  It was only an “augenblick” and things before our eyes were new. It is strange how some of the words and expressions stay in ones mind. I even do not know German all that well. Maybe my language is becoming a collection of memories. Like this American lady who I spent conversing with for few hours at the swimming pool next to a golf course somewhere South of France. We were grass widows waiting for our husbands to join us after completing their 18 holes round. My English at that time was rather poor, but the lady spoke few languages and she used them all in our conversation. Sometimes few of them in one sentence. It must have been an amusing conversation, but I found it rather stressful. It was a rich people place and I did not think I belonged there. I certainly was not rich. It was just that my husband was a very keen and a very good golfer. The lady was considerably older than myself and was a type of Zsa Zsa Gabor in her fifties. She was very bored and very friendly, so she told  stories from her rather full life. She even knew president Cater! Nice memory…

When the pictures on the Opera House changed in a blink of an eye I pondered on my memories. 

                                                              

                                          

Back to Vivid…I particularly liked the drone show that was a modern form of Sound & Lighting.

              

We paid particular attention to the light sculptures as my friend’s son was a designer of some of them. I was impressed. This is one of them.

I promise myself to get out of my suburb more often. Sydney has so much to offer. Somebody even said that if one is bored in Sydney this is not a fault of Sydney.  

The Man Who Knew Infinity

My interest in films returned with more quiet time in the kitchen renovations. Not that the kitchen is finished yet, but we are now into cosmetics and my nervous system is coming slowly back to normal. I started to have better results in bridge and consequently I am back to enjoying it. I still have problems to concentrate on reading heavier books like Adam Phillips (I have his there books on my table waiting for better quality of my concentration) but seeing films is not beyond my current mental capacity, so went to see The Man Who Knew Infinity. I am glad I saw it as the film has not been screen for a long, two days later is off already. This may say something about its attractiveness, but I liked it and would recommend it but not to those who like action movies or love stories. Actually this film is about love but not necessarily romantic type even thought there is a bit of romance as well serving to highlight hero’s life priorities.

The film is about a self-taught Indian mathematics genius Srinivasa Ramanujan who traveled to Trinity College, Cambridge where he stayed five years surprising respectable and famous professors (like Bertrand Russell) with the depth of his conclusions to which he did not think it was necessary to supply proofs. The most involved and revolutionary mathematical theories came to him from nowhere. From God? Definitely from some higher power talking to his subconscious. This is the true story and Ramanujan really lived, albeit a short time and made serious discoveries in mathematical analysis and numbers theory. Most of his theorems have been proven by now and serve us somewhere in the scientific background of our every day life. This is deeply philosophical film, in my opinion, and the question of how Ramanujan  knew what he announced, in such profusion to the stunned professors at Trinity College, does not have an answer. The only answer that comes to my mind is that God exists and is active in our reason driven life. The story of Ramanujan is almost a mathematically based proof of that.

The film is also about an unlikely friendship of two people, an English mathematician G.H. Hardy and mainly self taught very unconventional Indian young man Ramanujan. Jeremy Irons who plays the English professor is absolutely wonderful in this role, but isn’t he in all his roles? He is to me. In this film he is more handsome than ever, but this is rather beside the point.

                                 

Dev Patel is good in his role, but somebody said that it is time he played a villain. I think there is something in it. He is a bit sugar coated in this role as well as he was in Slamdog Millionaire. I still liked his performance a lot, he is convincing playing a young man bewildered by other than his own realities. One can see his growing acceptance and resignation to it. 

One of my detours in life was studying pure mathematics for five years. I did not turn out to be a real mathematician, but these five years were useful and it gave me a powerful message – if I could do that, I can perhaps do almost anything else, it should not be harder than the five years of math. Maybe it was not a detour but an important part of my life education?

I got a glimpse of infinity when a professor presented us with a model of a universe being a circle without borders. My mind went into overdrive and this was my chance to understand the beauty of mathematics. I did not take this chance. Regrets? Maybe…

My talented student fellows were not your conventional people. They were forgetful, eccentric, and sometimes really strange. They loved music and they lost themselves in it. They loved mountain claiming risking and sometimes loosing their lives in the process. They dressed in a most strange fashion. Matching socks were a rarity with some. So when I read that G.H. Hardy was an eccentric, I did not agree with this opinion. He was about normal being a talented mathematician. This is how I know such people. What is in their minds is so absorbing that outside life is insignificant.

The film made an impression on me and woke up memories that had not surfaced for a long time. For me 10 out of 10, but this is a very personal rating.