Estimated reading time: 6–7 minutes
“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…”
One day, my mathematics teacher asked me: “Where do you want to sit the entrance exam?”
I replied: “Astronomy.” He said nothing, and I assumed that was the end of it, slightly worried that I had not even received a word of encouragement — a sign, I supposed, that my future in astronomy looked promising.
But a few days later, he asked: “What do you know about computers? Have you heard of cybernetics?”
I did not know. I had not heard. I told him so, feeling like a child caught with his homework unfinished. In those days there was no internet, so there was little point in asking for a pause to look things up on a merciful Google. He invited me to the Staff Room after lessons.
I had studied at Șincai for eleven years — all three cycles took place in the Șincai building. There I sat the fourth-form examination (one class above the train, as the joke went at the time — passenger trains had three classes), the seven-year leaving examination, then the entrance examination for the upper school, and finally the baccalaureate. In those eleven years, I visited the Staff Room twice — a place sacred and mysterious to pupils, somewhere between the Vatican for teachers and the tribunal of the Pedagogical Inquisition. I prefer not to speak of the first visit; suffice it to say that it involved a frog, a chair, and a scientific curiosity gone awry.
After lessons, I went to the Staff Room, and the teacher began to tell me about computers and cybernetics. He explained things clearly and persuasively. He was a good teacher. Eventually, he also mentioned Ştefan Odobleja, though I did not fully grasp the connection at the time, like a tourist hearing a foreign language for the first time. It intrigued me, naturally. Finally, he asked: “Why not go to ASE? They have recently opened a department there where they study these things.”
I harboured no prejudices about ASE — unlike most of my classmates, who dreamt of going to a polytechnic institute or the faculty of medicine — but the prospect of studying economics for the entrance examination held no appeal whatsoever. The thought of memorising lectures on Marx, Engels and Lenin, the theory of value and the class struggle, filled me with much the same sensation as a list of geometry exercises. Though, to be fair, I read Marx’s Capital years later and rather enjoyed the theory of value, which had been developed in essence by Adam Smith.
But what a surprise! At the faculty in question — General Economics — the entrance examination required physics (mechanics and electricity) and mathematics, provided one enrolled in the section called “Mechanisation and Automation of Economic and Statistical Computation.”
There was something distinctly odd about the ASE admissions process.
I enrolled without hesitation. There were sixty places available.
It was 1966.
I did not know it then, but had I graduated, I would have become part of the third cohort of computer scientists in Romania. And, as it happened, that is precisely what came to pass.
In the end, there were 360 candidates. This worried me — six applicants per place was formidable competition. I was accepted, somewhere in the middle of the list.
Five years later, fewer than half of those admitted had graduated — roughly twenty-eight, I believe, and I was among them. We studied for four and a half years, then had a further six months to prepare our dissertations. That was how university education worked in those days — long, thorough, and without compromise.
I was overjoyed to have been accepted, yet something still nagged at me: the faculty was called the Faculty of Economic Computation, and the section where I studied was called “Mechanisation and Automation of Economic and Statistical Computation.” The word “mechanisation” felt rigid, almost mechanical, conjuring images of a factory full of cogwheels where thoughts were treated as spare parts. To say nothing of the fact that the word was widely used in connection with “the mechanisation of agriculture” — an exceedingly common slogan in the communist propaganda of the day.
A typical conversation ran roughly as follows:
• Where do you study?
• At ASE, in Mechanisation.
• Mechanisation?! my interlocutor would ask 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…
Some understood, or pretended to understand, whilst others regarded you with condescension, saying something along the lines of: “Never mind. That’s fine too.” The tone was the same one might use to console someone who had just failed an examination and enrolled in some programme or other.
When I was in my second year, the faculty changed its name to the Faculty of Economic Computation and Economic Cybernetics. It was thoroughly deserved — a long-awaited rebranding.