The first job in Italy was not a spectacular entry into a large company, nor a natural continuation of my university career in Romania. It was a concrete opportunity, born of a newspaper advertisement, a market need, and my willingness to learn quickly what, until then, I had looked at only from a distance.

That is precisely why the episode matters. After months of waiting, recommendations, phone calls and uncertainty, at EUR Microcomputer I practically became again a man who could work. I was not yet professionally settled, but I was leaving the condition of a refugee in waiting and re-entering my own competence.

The first job in Italy

One day, while I was at home, I received a phone call from EUR Microcomputer, which had contacted me in response to an advertisement I had placed in the newspaper. They were looking for a database programmer. They wanted to meet me. I did not know much about databases; I had deliberately ignored them when I was in Romania. As happened with other fields, such as microcomputers and personal computers (PCs), fashionable in recent years, which I had snubbed when I was a professor, databases seemed to me a field too banal to deserve my attention. Obviously, I was wrong, but I had my reasons. The distance I kept from these fields was due to the fact that they were the domains of the “luminaries” M.P. and A.P. in the Computer Department at the Polytechnic, with whom my relations had been, for the previous twenty years, almost always strained. In order not to make those relations even worse, I preferred to keep away from their fields.

EUR Microcomputer

After arranging the meeting with Carlo Caratelli, the owner of EUR Microcomputer, I went to the company’s office, in the EUR district. It was my first visit to that district.

The EUR district

EUR was conceived in 1937 and partly built by Mussolini for the Universal Exposition of Rome, planned for 1942, but never held because of the outbreak of the Second World War. The monumental complex was completed in the following decades, modifying and extending the initial project with modern buildings, congress halls and sports architecture. I had never before been in that part of Rome, and I was delighted by the urban rationality emanating from its wide, straight streets, with intersections perfectly controlled by traffic lights, with an artificial lake surrounded by majestic buildings — in fact a district-park whose urban qualities were reinforced by abundant greenery. All this had been born from a single vision and in a single architectural style, a mixture of classical and modern, a kind of neo-Italian style favored by the Fascist regime, just as the Nazi regime in Germany had fashioned a style of its own.

EUR also represented an exemplary case of postwar reconstruction, which formed the basis of Italy’s economic and social recovery. In addition to the construction of housing, the completion of the historic buildings was essential, followed by their assignment to museums or institutions of the new Italian republic. On the occasion of the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, EUR underwent further urban and architectural development, which enhanced the district’s public image.

For me, EUR was not then a district visited with the eyes of a tourist. I was coming from the precariousness of my first Roman months, from Sirio’s room, from the walks to Caritas and from the telephone calls made with anxiety. On those broad boulevards, among severe buildings and spaces arranged with an almost abstract order, I felt for the first time that I was entering a Rome of work, not only of waiting. There, in a monumental and cold setting, I was about to test my professional competence again.

Carlo’s company

EUR Microcomputer consisted of two people: Carlo and his wife. It operated in the basement of a residential building in EUR. The company’s office was, in fact, a large room with seven or eight desks, where, if necessary, ten or twelve students could fit for computer courses, a very fashionable service for computer companies in those years. Being a relatively new company, before it reached the point of organizing courses, it functioned mainly as a kind of intermediary, dealing with the sale of computers, printers and other computing equipment to companies or public institutions that wished to computerize. Since suppliers of such equipment — IBM, Digital or Hewlett-Packard — handled the sale of their products only to large companies and state institutions, they used such intermediaries, often start-ups created by former employees, offering them more advantageous prices in order to penetrate Italy’s rapidly expanding computerization market, down to the periphery of small companies or less important institutions. The intermediaries cultivated relationships of friendship or business with managers or even ordinary employees of economic agents interested in acquiring computing equipment. They were the first to be consulted when an enterprise needed to buy such equipment. And these preferences for supplier-friends worked even in the case of public institutions, where procurement was subject to compulsory tenders: a rigged tender is always better than a tender al buio.

Rebibbia and the warehouse

Over time, Carlo had won the trust of many potential clients through the sympathy and confidence he inspired, but also through the low prices he practiced. Among Carlo’s clients was Roberto C., head of the Clothing Warehouse for the agents and guards of Italian prisons, located inside Rome’s Rebibbia prison, who had opened a tender for computerizing the warehouse, a tender won by Carlo. This warehouse delivered clothing of all kinds: uniforms, shirts, socks, boots and so on, to all the prisons in Italy. From the warehouse, crates or bales had to leave for every corner of Italy, in response to orders from prisons for their guards and agents.

The management of these orders, the formation of packages according to the orders and their delivery to the prisons were the main activities that the warehouse, under Roberto C.’s leadership, had to carry out. But since the warehouse had to be constantly supplied with new products as stocks decreased, clothing suppliers had to be asked in good time to take part in tenders and, once they had won the tenders, had to be monitored so that they delivered the contracted clothing on time, lest the warehouse become unable to satisfy the prisons’ orders. In short, it was the well-known problem of inventory management, which required the handling of a large quantity of documents (orders, estimates, contracts, etc.) and rigorous stock planning, which, in the absence of computers, required a large number of people and an enormous amount of paperwork. The decision to computerize the warehouse was therefore natural and, consequently, Roberto C. correctly proceeded to establish a tender for a turnkey information system for warehouse management, using the three PCs available in the warehouse. Roberto himself was passionate about computers, especially Microsoft Excel, with which he made his own calculations and activity schedules.

The missing software

In the tender, Carlo proposed the requirements for software capable of computerizing the warehouse at a price low enough to have no competitor. Carlo, by training a merchant and not an engineer, believed that in an information system the hardware is the important element; the programs would come afterward almost by themselves. But the reckoning at home did not match the one in the marketplace, and Carlo entered a state of continuous stress because the system could not become operational within the deadlines established by the contract, and therefore he could not collect all the money, because of the lack of programs. He looked for programmers able to write the system software and, eventually, found a small group of Poles passing through Rome, on their way to Canada, who wrote the programs in Pascal, using a dBase III database. Unfortunately for Carlo, the Poles received their visas and left, leaving the software, broadly speaking, complete, but not installed and, obviously, untested.

Turbo Pascal and dBase III

“But what software did they use to develop the application?” I asked Carlo.

“They told me they used Turbo Pascal. You know it, don’t you?” Carlo asked me suspiciously.

“Oh, yes, of course,” I answered, without lying too much. I knew Pascal, because I had taught it for several years at the Polytechnic in Bucharest; I had also heard of Turbo Pascal, an integrated development environment (IDE) for the Pascal programming language proposed by Borland, but I had never used the library for database access.

A week of learning

I made several rounds through the bookshops I had already identified in the center of Rome, made a list of more than twenty books that would allow me to catch up on the Turbo Pascal and MS-DOS knowledge I lacked, then analyzed their contents and prices calmly at home and finally chose three of them, which I bought. I set to work learning and, in a week, I was able to continue the work of the Poles.

Returning to competence

Sitting at my desk at EUR Microcomputer and working again on programs, as I had in Romania, I did not truly realize that I was in another city, in another country, doing a different kind of work. Raising my eyes from the computer and seeing where I was, I felt a mixture of amazement, fear and enthusiasm at having subjected myself to a test of maturity and competence.

Conclusion

The first job did not solve my life; the pay from Carlo was small, only a little more than the monthly rent, but it changed my relationship with Italy. I had begun to no longer depend only on help, recommendations and promises. I could read, learn, continue the work of others and produce something useful in a completely new context.

Roberto C., however, did not remain for me merely the head of the warehouse for which I was working. The relationship born around that project soon went beyond the professional sphere and developed into a friendship that has lasted for more than thirty-five years. In Italy I had many professional relationships and acquaintances, but few true Italian friends; Roberto is one of them.

This first job was a lesson in professional modesty, but also one of confidence. It was no longer only what I had done in Romania that mattered, but what I could do immediately, in a basement in EUR, with Turbo Pascal, dBase III, a few books bought in haste and the pressure of a project that had to be finished. From that moment, Italy was no longer only the place where I was waiting for an American decision; it was also becoming the place where I could work.

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