Another professional path

Alongside the programming projects, another path opened up through which I could make use of my professional experience: computer science courses.

DEC and Roberto Galanti

Roberto Galanti worked for Digital Equipment Corporation — DEC —, one of the major computer companies of the period.

The company had made its name in the minicomputer market as early as the beginning of the 1960s. The PDP series, especially the PDP-8 and PDP-11, had ranked among its greatest successes. Later, the VAX “supermini” systems, introduced in the late 1970s, had been designed to replace the PDP-11 gradually. As microcomputers improved, particularly with the spread of powerful personal computers, the minicomputer market contracted rapidly.

By the period I am describing, the early 1990s, DEC was already in crisis, and sales of minicomputers had collapsed. The company nevertheless continued to promote its products and to provide courses for those who had bought, or still wished to buy, DEC equipment. Roberto Galanti worked in this field: he promoted the company’s products and organized advanced training courses for users of its equipment and systems.

I no longer remember with certainty how I came to meet Roberto Galanti. He may have contacted me in response to one of the many advertisements I placed in newspapers, especially Il Messaggero, which devoted pages to classified advertisements. In them, I offered my services as a teacher of programming in Pascal and C.

Such advertisements appeared quite often in those years. Companies were looking for instructors to teach programming courses to their employees, but people capable of giving such courses were not easy to find. Computerization was spreading rapidly in Italy, while the number of people able to train new users and programmers was still limited.

Roberto Galanti was a presentable young man with a black beard and a great liking for talking and explaining to others whatever he had in mind. When we met, he was the one who spoke, while I listened. He explained the situation at DEC Italy regarding the promotion of equipment and operating systems. He needed specialists capable of explaining how the equipment and system software were used. He asked whether I could help him with some programming courses. In my situation, accepting was the natural thing to do.

In Romania I had worked with PDP-11 minicomputers and their Romanian clones: CORAL, which implemented the PDP-11 architecture, and Independent 100, which emulated the PDP-11 instruction set. I was not, however, a specialist in the RSX-11M operating system, still less in the more recent VMS systems. I was nevertheless convinced that I could catch up quickly. I made myself available on condition that I receive the DEC documentation for the courses, the minimum I needed to prepare them properly.

Once I received the documentation, I set to work and prepared my own courses, using the structure of the DEC materials as a starting point. I bought books on Pascal and C, hoping to find approaches more up to date than those I had used in my courses in Romania. Moreover, the courses needed visual material projected onto a screen, something to which I was not accustomed: in Romania I had taught at the blackboard, using chalk.

That was how I began to give courses lasting several days or a week at DEC premises in Rome and, sometimes, at clients’ offices, provided they had suitable training rooms.

IBIFORM

Many DEC employees, sensing the company’s decline, were leaving. Roberto Galanti was among them. DEC’s attempts to enter the workstation and file-server markets had come too late to save the company.

After leaving, Roberto Galanti founded a small company with a business partner.

It was a situation typical of that period. Numerous small firms were emerging around the major computer manufacturers, created by former employees who knew the equipment, had retained their contacts with customers, and could obtain favourable commercial terms. Some sold computers; others provided installation, maintenance, software development, or staff training.

Galanti’s company was called IBIFORM and had a classroom in an elegant area of Rome. About ten computers had been installed, enough for a small group of participants. There I began to teach Pascal, then the C language, as well as courses on the operating systems used by Digital computers.

Back in front of a class

Returning to the classroom felt natural to me. I had taught for almost twenty years at the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest. I knew how to organize the material, explain difficult concepts, and notice when those in front of me had failed to understand, even if they asked no questions.

I had, of course, to teach in Italian, a language I was still learning. At first it was not easy to find the right word immediately or to answer a question spontaneously. Technical language was familiar to me, however, and the logic of a well-constructed explanation did not depend on the country in which it was presented.

I prepared the courses carefully and tried not to let my linguistic uncertainty affect the clarity of the content. The teaching experience I had accumulated in Romania largely compensated for my hesitations in Italian.

Courses outside Rome

Not all the courses took place at the company’s premises in Rome. Sometimes I was sent to companies in other towns, where employees had to be trained directly on the equipment they would be using.

In this way, I began to discover an Italy different both from the one seen by a tourist and from the one known by an emigrant whose life had been confined to Caritas, the boarding house, and administrative offices. I entered companies, spoke with technicians and managers, and met young people trying to acquire a new profession.

These journeys showed me concretely how computerization was penetrating the Italian economy. It was not a uniform process. Some firms had modern equipment and well-trained personnel; others had bought computers without yet knowing clearly how they intended to use them.

An intermittent activity

At first, the courses did not form a continuous activity. One might last a few days, another several weeks, followed by a period in which no new request arrived.

For that very reason, they could be combined with programming projects and other collaborations. For me, this alternation was not a choice but a necessity. I still had no stable job and had to build my income from several sources.

Sometimes I worked on a program; at other times I prepared a course or left for several days in another city. My professional life no longer had the predictable continuity I had known in Bucharest. It consisted of projects, waiting periods, telephone calls, and short-term contracts.

Without my realizing it at the time, each course became a test for the next one.

SOFOS

About a year later, another opportunity came to me from the same Digital world. Barbara B., a DEC employee of Lebanese origin who had long been settled in Italy with her family, had heard about me from Roberto Galanti and wanted to meet me.

She came to the meeting with her sister, Marie-Laure B., and Paolo P., a small blond man with an aquiline nose who constantly smoked little “cigars.” Paolo owned SOFOS, an SRL whose stated business was creazione di software. The company had only recently been founded and, apart from its owner, employed Marie-Laure as secretary and as the person responsible for administration and finances. Clearly, they needed employees who could actually create software.

Paolo explained to me that the company’s name came from Ancient Greek, a language he held in very high regard, and that it combined several meanings: suitable, wise, perceptive, knowledgeable, sensitive. I believed him; I knew nothing about Ancient Greek.

My name begins to circulate

Gradually, my name began to circulate from one company to another. Someone who had attended a course recommended me to a colleague; a training manager spoke about me to another company.

In what was still a relatively small professional environment, personal recommendations often counted for more than a curriculum vitae. It was not enough to have been a professor or to have published books. What mattered was what you managed to demonstrate in front of the participants, in a classroom in Rome or in a company elsewhere in Italy.

A course for the inmates at Rebibbia

My presence at Rebibbia, and the computer courses Roberto C. had asked me to give to his staff in the clothing depot, brought me to the attention of the prison chaplain, Don Sandro Spriano, a severe priest feared not only by the inmates but also by the guards. He wanted to meet me, asked Roberto for references, and then decided to hire me to give the inmates a computer course lasting several days. He allowed me to choose the subjects, but also explained certain restrictions: I could talk to the inmates about anything except their problems with the law.

It was an intense experience, but one that is difficult to convey after so many years. The group was heterogeneous in age and social background. Everyone was extremely disciplined; they did not ask questions even when I encouraged them to do so. I was not prepared for such an audience.

I especially remember an older inmate with a well-kept white beard. He seemed to be an intellectual, was respected by the others, and gave the impression that he understood what I was explaining. During the course, I therefore found myself addressing him in particular. During the breaks he came over to me and spoke about his experience with computers, which was by no means superficial.

At the end of the course, everyone thanked me. I wanted to offer the older inmate some encouragement:

— With what you know, when you get out, you will be perfectly able to work in information technology.

— I will never get out. I am serving a final life sentence.

His answer struck me like a blow. I had forgotten where I was, forgotten whom I was speaking to, and broken the very rule that had been explained to me.

Roberto C. helped me find new collaborations whenever he could. Appreciating my progress in Italian and my knowledge of information technology, he recommended me to colleagues at other prisons near Rome, in Velletri and Latina, where I went to explain to the guards how to use computers.

Looking back, I liked to say that I had been on the right track toward computerizing the Italian prison system. Other circumstances took me away from that field, however, and the prisons had to wait a while longer.

Returning to Datamat

At a certain point, Datamat, the company from which I had waited in vain for an answer after the 1989 job interview, began asking me to give specialized courses for its own employees.

Not just once, but repeatedly.

Dozens of courses followed, organized from one week to the next. Datamat became my most consistent collaboration in this field and, through it, I also came to work with other major companies.

It was a reversal I could not have foreseen after the interview that had received no answer. Datamat had not hired me, but it had come to need me as a teacher.

Other collaborations

Datamat was not the only beneficiary of my courses. In the years that followed, I collaborated, either directly or through training and consultancy firms, with Dataspazio, Selenia, Telespazio, Olivetti Ricerca in Bari, CNR, Systech, and Sincro Consulting. Sometimes I taught at the premises of the company organizing the course; at other times I was sent directly to the final client.

The subjects gradually expanded from Pascal, C, and operating systems to Java, UML, object-oriented design, CORBA, J2EE, Web services, service-oriented architectures, software engineering, and project management. A systematic presentation of these courses and of the materials that have survived can be found on the page Professional Training Courses in Italy.

Learning in order to teach

The subjects of the courses diversified as technology evolved. From programming languages and operating systems, I moved on to development methods, modern software technologies, and, later, the Internet.

I had to keep learning in order to teach subjects that were sometimes only beginning to spread. Knowing a product manual was not enough. I had to understand the place of the new technology within a broader whole, its advantages, its limitations, and its relationship to what the participants already knew.

The experience I had accumulated in Romania proved decisive. Our education had been largely theoretical and academic. At times, I had felt that we knew many things with no immediate application. In Italy, it was precisely that broad foundation that enabled me to move from one subject to another, understand new technologies quickly, and present them coherently.

Putting theory to work

I had, of course, to adapt. Companies did not want academic demonstrations, but answers to concrete problems. Participants had to be able to use immediately what they had learned.

I learned to select the theory that was necessary, omit details with no immediate usefulness, and build examples close to the work of those in the room. I did not abandon the rigour to which I was accustomed, but began to place it at the service of practical effectiveness.

This adaptation later influenced the way I taught at the university as well. Contact with companies and their real problems forced me to see differently the relationship between concepts, technologies, and their effective use.

A network of collaborations

I was not employed by a single company. I worked for several firms, sometimes in parallel, without concealing the fact. Each called upon me when it needed a particular course or a competence it did not have in-house.

In place of the linear career I had had in Bucharest, a network of collaborations gradually took shape. It was a less secure professional arrangement, but it also gave me the freedom to enter very different environments and to come into contact with rapidly changing technologies.

At first, I had been the emigrant looking for any opportunity to work. After a while, the companies began to seek me out.

The change had not occurred through any spectacular gesture, but through every course prepared seriously, every recommendation, and the trust earned from one week to the next.

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