Chronological markers

• 1961–1966 – years at the Polytechnic Institute (Power Engineering → Automation)

From success to method

I entered the Polytechnic Institute, the Faculty of Power Engineering, with very good grades and without private tutoring. I still remember the feeling—“I made it”—mixed with a cautious pride: I was not an adventurer; I was a hard‑working student seeing, for the first time, that diligence publicly confirmed.

I met new classmates, and I ran into many high‑school colleagues again, drawn by the reputation of the Faculty of Power Engineering in years when Romania’s energy industry was taking major steps: the Bicaz hydroelectric plant was about to go into operation, and Vidraru was still on the designers’ drafting boards. In short: for my father, a great engineer’s future awaited me.

Classes, at the time, were held in the Institute’s many scattered buildings; the “New Building” was not even taking shape in the designers’ minds. During breaks we moved in groups from one building to another, cheerful, as if this wandering were exactly what student life was meant to be. Because of these commutes, professors were lenient about arriving late. Many classmates from outside Bucharest lived in the old dorms or in those being built in the Grozăvești area and ate at the canteen near Piața Buzești.

The first year—with mathematics, physics, and descriptive geometry—was an initial endurance threshold. I passed it cleanly, with good grades, and my father was very pleased with me.

Around then, thanks to the efforts of Professor Corneliu Penescu, an Automation section was established within the Faculty of Power Engineering. To populate it, it was decided that years II and III would be formed by selecting the best students from Electronics, Power Engineering, and Electrical Engineering. That is how I was selected for Automation. Beyond the selection itself, the feeling was simple: the road was beginning to set.

In January 1963, however, my father died. The winter exam session fell on me like a heavy cloud: you may want to function normally and still be unable to gather yourself. It was the first time I felt, brutally, that “performance” is not an automatic mechanism, that there is an inner price no one explains to you.

The second semester woke me up in another way: in Special Mathematics (Șabac) I discovered uncontrolled anxiety. It was not a dramatic scene—it was something more humiliating: to know you studied and still be unable to deliver because you freeze. That episode triggered in me the “swot’s crisis”: the crisis of someone who learns a lot, yet still in a high‑school logic— too much memorization and too little internal architecture.

Third year: the specialty, the era, and a tool

At the end of the second year, during the summer break, we were summoned for the 23 August parade and sent for a period of training in Costinești. The Costinești of those days did not resemble today’s resort: almost nothing “touristic,” only that terrace with its strange roof, like a piece cut from a hyperboloid, and the large tents where ten of us slept. That is where my sea summers at Costinești and Schitu (a nearby village) began. I reached 2 Mai much later, more than ten years afterwards.

In the third year—the hardest of all five—I finally entered, through the courses, the core of Automation. The central course was “Fundamentals of Automatic Systems,” taught by Corneliu Penescu, a leading figure of Romanian Automation and, at the time, vice‑rector of the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest. Penescu came accompanied by assistants carrying an overhead projector; he drew with marker on transparent foils and we followed the projected lines on the wall as if formulas were being born under our eyes. He taught, essentially, from a book in English—a book I only “tracked down” later at the Central Library.

Still, I learned Penescu’s course best from Analysis and Synthesis of Linear Automatic Systems, a book by Christofor Văzacă, a former professor at Electronics and one of the important figures of the early Romanian Automation school. A dramatic story already circulated around him—his removal from teaching after a conviction for what the era called “homosexual activity,” an accusation which, in those years, could destroy not only a career but a biography. The book was excellent, clear and solidly built, but Penescu did not favor it. In that tacit interdiction you could feel, I think, not only a didactic reservation, but also the old rivalry between two men who could each, in his own way, claim a leading place at the beginnings of Romanian Automation.

The industrial internship closed, in its own way, the third‑year stage: I wrote about it separately in Memories from the third‑year internship (Reșița). A distinct episode from that summer is told in Renate, an encounter from my youth whose meaning changed more than sixty years later.

I used the summer after the third year to learn English. My knowledge amounted to short (quarter‑hour) lessons with Mrs. Musceleanu in middle school. It was not enough to read a technical book—such as the one Penescu used. That situation stressed me and I decided to learn on my own, with a discipline I already knew from other areas: daily, without negotiation.

Every day I extracted into a vocabulary notebook about 40 words from a lesson in English Without a Teacher (Leon Levițchi and Dan Duțescu). I memorized them with their translations, then quizzed myself to make sure I had absorbed them. The method was effective for reading: in the following years I could go through specialized books—almost all of them in English—without difficulty.

But the method was, at the same time, “deadly” for listening. I learned with my eyes: the list of words and translations in front of me. My ear stayed outside. I have never, since then, excelled at listening—and I think this is the price of a too one‑sided way of learning.

Fourth year and the first semester of fifth year

The fourth year—and the first semester of the fifth—was devoted almost entirely to the specialty. Young lecturers began to appear, with the air of people coming “from the front,” from the zone of novelty, in a field in full ascent. The curriculum was well conceived, probably inspired by Soviet university models: automation in major industries (power, chemistry, machine building), then telematics and, inevitably, digital and analog computers.

Teaching had a particular trait: many lecturers presented “hot,” reading and translating on the spot books or articles in foreign languages. That brought novelty into the lecture hall, but made a personal synthesis almost impossible: you could not demand “style” and “architecture” from someone who, at times, was building the course right there, in front of us, out of the literature of the moment. For the student, this meant double work: to understand in real time and then to build your own order afterwards.

During the fourth year we had to decide on our diploma project. It was not too early: the serious work concentrated in the second semester of the fifth year, but the path began with choosing the supervisor—professor or assistant, preferably someone “verified” in lectures and seminars.

I chose Ivan Sipos, our teaching assistant for the Digital Computers course.

Ivan, from a family of “illegalists” (old underground party activists), was one of the young assistants formed around Corneliu Penescu in the early years of Bucharest Automation. He was not only a promising teacher: together with Adrian Petrescu, Petre Dimo and Mihai Ceaparu, he had taken part in building the MAC‑1 analog computer, one of the team’s early important achievements.

A few years older than my other young assistants, already slightly graying, athletic, Ivan was very successful with my female classmates and did not shy away from showing it—helped by a quip he repeated whenever his reputation as a conqueror was discussed: “silver at the temples, gold in the pockets, steel in the trousers.”

Much later I learned that his biography too had been touched by the harsh mechanisms of the era: when he applied to emigrate in the early 1980s, he was barred from teaching and his office was left to other colleagues. For me, however, at that time Ivan Sipos remained the assistant I knew from the Digital Computers courses, the person I turned to naturally when I had to choose a supervisor for my diploma work.

Diploma exam and job allocation

The diploma exam was, in practice, the defense of the diploma project. It took place at the Automation Department, in Dormitory 303, where the student club “303” had also begun to operate. I mostly remember the strange sensation of entering a space that was, at once, school and threshold: inside I was still a student, but I was about to walk out as a “graduate.”

On the state‑exam committee, besides Ivan, were our professors for automation courses: Sprânceana and Tertișco. On a large sheet of tracing paper I had drawn my entire “machine”: registers, adders, memory—everything was there, in front of them, like a map of the last years. I answered the questions and everyone was satisfied. A 10 was therefore the natural grade.

Ivan insisted that I also be awarded cum laude, but the committee did not agree. It seems that the two grades of 8 on my record mattered. In any case, I was among the top ten in a cohort that itself came from a selection of the best students from three faculties. Only the “top 5” obtained trainee assistant positions at the Polytechnic Institute. The rest of us had to choose from a list of positions prepared by the Ministry for Automation graduates.

On that list there were “positions” and “positions”: some in Bucharest, others in the provinces; some in design institutes, others in factories. When my turn came, the few openings in design institutes were already gone, so I chose FEA (the Factory of Automation Components)—a new factory, precisely in my specialization, in Bucharest. It seemed perfect.

But between “allocation” and actually starting work came the army. In September I left for Bacău, where I began my military service, which I interrupted on medical grounds. I did not reach FEA until March of the following year—with the strange feeling that I was entering engineering life late but, at the same time, with a clearer eagerness to begin.

Only on 16 March 1967 did I finally report for work, practically at the same time as the other colleagues who had completed their military service.

Episodes

• Wagner listening sessions at the Conservatory
  (1964–1965)

  George Bălan’s gatherings in the first half of the 1960s: Wagnerian initiation, the friendship (and love) between Christiana and Corneliu, and the way music became, for me, a form of inner metamorphosis.
• Memories from the third‑year internship
  (summer 1964)

  The summer internship after the third year, spent in Reșița, left me few technical memories, but it left me the atmosphere of a student summer: the dorm in the factories’ vocational school, my colleagues, evenings with a guitar, and outings to Secu or Văliug.
• Renate
  (summer 1964)

  An encounter that began after a concert at the Palace Hall and continued in Reșița and on Mount Semenic, remaining in my memory for a long time as an erotic episode from my youth and acquiring a different meaning more than sixty years later.