Estimated reading time: 6–7 minutes
“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.”
After we walked out of our diploma examination, all the boys headed straight to the military commissariat near the Academy of Economic Studies. It was fairly close by, on Mihai Eminescu Street. I can no longer recall whose idea it was, but it was not a bad one: to go and “request our conscription.” I say “request” as though it were a service at a counter: “Good afternoon, would you be so kind as to enlist me in the army!” But that is precisely how it went.
The actual conscription took place a few months later.
I did my military service in Focșani, at the Reserve Officers’ Military School, in the Economics Section. If you were to ask me today what exactly we did there, I would be tempted to answer: we economised on bullets and kept ledgers of our marching step. I remember there was one company of economists and one of physicians.
It was not a “hard army.” We were there with a great many classmates, and the four months passed quickly.
Naturally, there are memories with plenty of salt and pepper — especially the poker games between the economists and the physicians, that is, between those who calculated the probability and those who diagnosed you with “chronic bad luck” — but I shall not go into the details.
I had initially received a Government Assignment to the Territorial Computing Centre in Iași, from which I obtained a release relatively easily. Like most of the Territorial Computing Centres newly established in that period, the one in Iași lacked its very “object of work” — that is to say, a computer.
Romania had purchased the manufacturing licence for the IRIS 50 computers from the French in 1968, but series production had not yet begun. The truth is that only much later did I understand how quickly things were moving in Romania, despite the isolation and the grand rhetoric. In June 1967, the National Programme for Equipping the National Economy with Computing Technology had been launched — a kind of “birth certificate” for computerisation as an organised national project, with clear directions: equipment, applications, trained people.
Whoever has had the patience to follow the reading this far should piece together the episodes described earlier: in 1966, when I entered university, I was part of the third cohort of students admitted to “Mechanisation” — the future Faculty of Computing and Economic Cybernetics; my story about the MECIPT episode in 1968 in Timișoara; the IBM 360 computer at the Academy of Economic Studies.
Also at that time, in that same era, the Computing Centre of the Romanian Railways was being built, initially equipped with a Siemens 4004, and the first applications ran “offline,” as was the norm back then.
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.
I ended up getting a job at the Institute for Technological Research and Design in Transport — ICPTT, for short. They needed programmers, so they took me on in the Economic Research Section, in the laboratory for Cost Pricing and Tariffs. The institute was on Calea Grivitei, near Chibrit Square. As far as I know, the building is still there today. For those unfamiliar with Bucharest: the Computing Centre of the Romanian Railways was “at the Station,” meaning in the area around the North Railway Station, behind the Ministry of Transport — whose main entrance faces the station. When the researchers at the institute said “I’m going to the Station,” they were not referring to a train, but to the computer. That is where they ran their programs. They were, quite possibly, the only generation that commuted to the “cloud” by tram.
ICPTT was not an institute that had appeared overnight, with a fresh signboard and the smell of paint. Behind the acronym lay a long history: it began on the 8th of January 1929, when the CFR Technological Institute was founded, comprising laboratories for chemistry, materials, and combustion — serious matters indeed.
Why is ICPTT special in Romania’s technological history? Even though it was not chronologically the first research institute in Romania, ICPTT held several pioneering records:
• The complexity of its laboratories;
• The symbiosis of research and design: it was among the very few places where theoretical research was immediately transformed into execution blueprints for locomotives, wagons, and infrastructure. This principle was preserved and passed down through the years. It was only natural that it became imprinted in my own way of working as well — the blending of theory with practice.
• In the period after 1972, ICPTT became the technical brain behind the great expansion of transport in Romania. I trust it is evident that I am referring to the expansion of that era, and not to the disaster of the present day.
Over the years it kept changing its name and form — in 1991, when I left, it was called INCERTRANS.