Petr Král

"The tanks arrived. I wouldn't wish that on you. You wake up in the morning and hear... Why is the radio rattling? And why is everybody talking? Then you hear that tanks are rolling down Vinohradská Street and that there's shooting, the radio is in Vinohradská Street, so it's rather bad. How did we experience it? We were twenty-one. We didn't really perceive the danger. We took a motorbike, a Czechoslovak flag on the handlebars, and we went to see our friends in Klánovice and there, in front of Šestajovice, where there are shops on the right today, soldiers say: Stop! It's unpleasant when you're driving and suddenly you see soldiers with machine guns. I stop and an officer comes. I see a square cap - Poles. They were not only Soviets, they took Poles, Hungarians, I think Bulgarians too. What did the Pole want? You have no idea... He was apologizing to us! He was apologizing to us young people for coming. The Poles would never do it on their own, but he was a soldier and had to obey orders. That's probably my biggest experience. Meeting the Russians was completely different. They prattled on and on. You're here, you have to obey us, we've come to save you. And why do we have to obey you? Because you're our younger brothers. And they believe their younger brothers have to obey them. So that Pole was an experience I don't think I'll ever forget."

"After school I joined a computer company. They ran a mainframe computer. Mainframes were around; when I left the Faculty there was already something like a personal computer but it was bigger than a desk. You couldn't do anything sensible with it. I came to a computer company where there was a Tesla 200 computer in use, which was some licensed product from Bell. That was great. It had 64 kB of memory, which is about a thousand times less than what your phones have. There was a punch tape reader, a punch plate reader. These were these little cards where the holes were punched as a code telling the computer what to read. There were programs on the cards. We had a big program in a drawer, it was 2,000 labels, so it was also really heavy. A colleague of mine had her wooden label scanner chopped up one night. This could happen easily because it would scan so fast, it was like chopping with this blade and it was going so fast and reading so fast, so when it got chopped up she was crying. It was over- she had to do it all over again herself. We computed what was needed; the computer company was a service organisation for the statistical office, which was called the Federal Statistical Office at that time. I was fortunate enough to get to work on other things beside statistics; I worked for an external client who was processing the impact of power plant emissions - the way they impact the various towns around. See, until it was proven how emissions were moving through the landscape, nobody knew. It was taken as just a gossip saying the power plant was polluting the air. But then it turned out that the power plants were to blame."