A special form of learning

Students did not encounter computers at every step, they did not have access to personal laboratories, and they could not experiment, as they do today, on their own machines. Direct contact with a computing centre, an automated installation, a factory, or a control room therefore had a revealing force that is difficult to explain today.

The study trips were a hybrid between technical instruction, professional documentation, and academic socialization. They were not merely a reward, nor were they a tourist episode. They had a real didactic component, but one freer than that of the lecture hall. At the same time, they were a way of approaching industry and a moment of passage through a collective experience that bound together a generation of students.

When they took place and how they were organized

As far as I remember, the study trips took place toward the final part of professional training, probably in the third or fourth year, when the students were already entering the proper area of their specialization and could understand what they were seeing. They usually took place in the second semester, most likely in spring, in April or May. They lasted approximately ten to fourteen days.

Courses were interrupted for that period. It was not, however, a vacation. The missed hours had to be recovered, either before departure or after return. Sometimes courses and seminars were compressed into heavier days; at other times work was also done on Saturdays. It was an additional effort for teachers and students, but it was accepted because the trip was considered a concentrated teaching activity, approved by the faculty and by the department.

For four consecutive years I led such study trips with my students. I was not the practical organizer. The material organization was handled through the BTT, with the involvement of the year representatives, but I was asked for advice on the itinerary and on the selection of technical objectives. A balance had to be found between important industrial sites, computing centres, universities to be visited, and the cultural part of the journey.

The technological route

For a professor in Automation and Computer Science, designing the route was a challenge. The idea was to visit places where automation, electronics, and computing technology were beginning to play a visible role. In the language of the time, these places were often presented as “pearls” of socialist industrialization; for us, beyond the official formula, they were places where students could see technology at real scale.

The trips went to large industrial platforms, territorial computing centres, enterprises that used or produced electronic equipment, hydroelectric plants, electrotechnical factories, and partner universities. One circuit could connect Bucharest with Brașov, Sibiu, Cluj, Iași, or Timișoara. Other routes could go toward Galați, the chemical platforms in Moldavia, or the Iron Gates.

Computing centres and computing technology

Visits to computing centres were, for our students, among the most important. There they could see Romanian Felix computers, but also imported equipment of the IBM or IRIS type. At a time when the computer was still a rare machine, kept in special rooms, direct contact with these centres had considerable formative value.

The students saw not only the machine, but also the organization of work around it: operators, programmers, processing flows, punched cards, tapes, printers, air conditioning, and technical discipline.

The Memory Factory in Timișoara

One objective that has remained in my memory was the Memory Factory in Timișoara. For Computer Science students, it was a first-rate objective. Timișoara already had a special technological prestige, linked also to the tradition of the MECIPT computer. Visiting a place where the physical components of memories were produced, often through fine and highly precise operations, helped students understand hardware architecture beyond the diagrams drawn on the blackboard.

The Iron Gates

Another impressive objective was the Iron Gates I Hydroelectric Power Station. For a future automation engineer, the machine hall, the control room, and the regulation systems represented an encounter with automation on a monumental scale. One could see there how automatic control was not only a chapter in a course, but a technology that kept turbines, energy installations, and processes of a complexity hard to imagine from a university laboratory in motion.

Factories, combines, industrial platforms

Depending on the route, one could visit Electroputere Craiova, the Steel Combine in Galați, electrotechnical plants, chemical platforms, or enterprises in which the first command and control systems were appearing. At Pitești, for example, the interest was connected with the organization of production and with elements of automatic control in the automobile industry. In such places, students understood the industrial dimension of the disciplines they were studying.

The sleeping car as an “operations base”

The logistics of these trips was, in its own way, remarkable. Sometimes coaches were rented, through the BTT or the ONT, especially for local travel, for a deviation from the railway route, or for reaching sites located outside the cities. But in the trips I remember best, we used second-class sleeping cars.

The car would be waiting for us at the station, standing on a dead track, then it would be attached to another train and take us to the next city, according to a carefully prepared schedule.

That sleeping car became a moving home. For twenty-four or forty-eight hours, the station was our base of operations. In the morning we washed at the station fountains, and during the day, when necessary, we used the municipal baths. Today these details may seem picturesque or uncomfortable. At the time, they were part of the normality of the journey.

We had no claims to comfort, but rather the feeling that we were taking part in an organized adventure, with clear rules and also with a freedom that ordinary university life did not offer.

In the evening, returning to the car after a day of technical or cultural visits created a special cohesion. Discussions continued long after lights out. The stationary or moving train became an intermediate space: neither faculty, nor dormitory, nor home, nor hotel. It was the place where the group found its own rhythm.

Group life

The study trip dissolved, to some extent, the formal barriers between professor and students. I remained, of course, responsible for the group. I had to take care of the students’ safety, the observance of the program, and the relationship with the representatives of the enterprises and institutions visited. At the same time, however, the relationship became more direct.

Outside the classroom, the professor could be seen in another way as well: as a companion, as a mediator, as a person who tells stories, listens, answers questions, and sometimes keeps silent together with the others.

After visits to computing centres, industrial halls, or control rooms, the evenings belonged to the group. We went to local restaurants, terraces, and talked about what had been seen, but also about things unrelated to the official program. Friendships were formed, affinities emerged, small tensions appeared and other tensions faded. In the compartments, there was almost always a guitar gathering the students around it.

Bridge tournaments also took place on the trains, bridge being a very fashionable game in those years. It was, in fact, the continuation of a practice widespread in the faculty. Bridge was often played in empty seminar rooms. More than once, while looking for a free room for a seminar, I opened the door and found a group concentrated on the game. I would close the door quietly, so as not to disturb them, and continue looking for another room.

Between technology and culture

The study trips also had a component of getting to know the country. This was not an artificial addition. For many students, it was one of the rare opportunities to see cities, regions, and monuments that, on their own, they would not have visited so easily. Cluj and Iași meant universities, computing centres, meetings with colleagues from other academic centres, but also urban exploration. Timișoara, Brașov, Sibiu, or Craiova each had its own technical and cultural profile.

Some photographs from the album show that, during one of the trips, we also reached Sinaia, in the area of Cota 1400–Cota 2000. I no longer remember with certainty the reason for the stop, but it is quite possible that it was connected with a technical visit to the Fine Mechanics Factory — MEFIN Sinaia — an important industrial site of the period, specialized in injection equipment and precision mechanics. As in many other cases, the technical program was probably completed by an excursion into the mountains.

During a trip aimed at Transylvania, after Cluj and its important computing centre, we also reached Băile Felix. It was a moment of respite, a necessary pause after days spent through industrial halls, laboratories, and presentation rooms. On other trips, the route took us toward the mountains. The photographs I have preserved usually refer precisely to this cultural or relaxed part of the journey.

They show me that we reached mountain areas, probably through railway junctions such as Suceava or Piatra Neamț, from where we could continue by rented bus toward passes and places such as the Bicaz Gorges.

In the last year in which I led such a study trip, the chosen area was Moldavia, especially northern Moldavia. After Iași, we visited the monasteries in the Rădăuți area: Voroneț, Sucevița, Moldovița, and Putna. It was a strong contrast between the technical coldness of the computing centres and the warmth of medieval architecture, between industrial discipline and the quiet of paintings centuries old. It was not merely tourism. It was a form of humanistic education, naturally added to a technical formation.

Photographs

The preserved photographs capture above all the cultural and relaxed side of the trips: stops, groups, moments of respite, and visits to places that completed the technical route.

Sinaia, Cluj, Băile Felix

Eastern Carpathians, monasteries of northern Moldavia

Different generations of students

The fact that I led these groups for four consecutive years gave me an interesting perspective on the changing generations. From one year to another, the questions students asked during technical visits changed. It was not only a matter of differences in preparation or curriculum. Each year had a certain intellectual “mood,” an atmosphere of its own, born of the affinities, rivalries, and curiosities of the group.

I remember in particular the trip with the generation in which the number of girls was unusually high. In 1973, after admission, many of the boys had to complete nine months of military service before actually beginning their studies. That year, in proportion, more girls and boys exempted from military service for various reasons remained. When this generation reached the study trip, the dynamics of the group differed from those of previous years.

It was a noisier group, but, paradoxically, also a more disciplined one. The female students seemed more attentive to cultural details, more willing to observe places, people, cities, and monuments. The atmosphere in the railway car was more settled, with longer conversations, sometimes in whispers, with a less rough air than in the years when the ratio between boys and girls was more balanced. Such nuances appear in no official document, but for me they give the true colour of those trips.

The meaning of these trips

Seen retrospectively, the study trips of the 1970s belong to a world that no longer exists. In the 1980s, as the economic crisis deepened, such journeys became harder to organize, poorer, more restrictive. But in the years when I led them, they still preserved an air of intellectual freedom and technical curiosity.

For the students, the trip was an encounter with industry, with other university centres, with real technology, and with the country. For me, as a young professor, it was another form of teaching activity. I did not lecture from the chair, but I continued to form. I answered questions in front of an installation, in a computing centre, in a railway compartment, or on the path of a monastery. In such moments, teaching became less formal, but no less serious.

Perhaps precisely for this reason these trips have remained so clear in my memory. They gathered into one time technology, friendship, fatigue, curiosity, improvisation, discipline, and freedom. They were part of the engineering education of a generation that was learning computers in an age when computers were still rare, large, inaccessible, and, for that very reason, surrounded by a certain aura.