My Father Wrote Software for the Sarajevo Olympic Games in 1984
His birthday was recently, so let me tell you his story.
He would not have wanted a sad post, and this is not one.
He was a mathematician before anything else. He won medals at faculty competitions, and one of his professors put his work into a textbook.
Energoinvest and the Olympics
From 1978 he worked as a software engineer at Energoinvest in Sarajevo. Yugoslavia built real computers back then, and his company built some of the most serious ones. Its computing institute, IRIS, developed its own machines and its own operating system, and the Energoinvest headquarters ran a local network of some two hundred computers connected with optical cables.
Then the Winter Olympics came to Sarajevo in 1984. The company’s hardware and software ran behind the whole Games.
My first computer
My first computer was an IRIS PC 16, a machine his company made in 1986. It was an IBM PC clone with an Intel 8088 at 8 MHz, sold as a fully Yugoslav product. IRIS engineers adapted MS-DOS into their own IRIS-DOS, and the BIOS had our letters š, č, ć, đ and ž built in.
Then came a PC XT. Importing one was forbidden in Yugoslavia, so in 1988 he went to Klagenfurt in Austria and carried one home himself. A Commodore 64 and a ZX Spectrum joined later.
Most kids got their first computer from a store. Mine came from my father’s work.
Starting over
In 1992 the war moved us from Sarajevo to Lajkovac, a small town in Serbia. He started over. He brought one of the first personal computers the town had seen, and real computer literacy came with it. Through that machine and the curiosity of our neighbors, we met half the town.
On the side, he wrote serious business software, alone, in plain procedural code, long before OOP. His clients swore by it. Selling was another story. He never found a partner for that part, so the software stayed useful and the numbers never worked out.
The professor
He became a professor at the technical school. His students remember him as the man who brought innovation into their classroom. He built PC interfaces with his own hands and wrote three technical books, and one book of prose. Enthusiasts and students still search for them and buy them today. He was both a software and a hardware guy, which is a rare thing.
In 1999 he built a website with his lessons, exercises, and interfaces, free for anyone. It is still online today, 27 years later: vojo.milanovic.org.
What stayed
He passed away on New Year’s Eve of 2023, from complications of a lung disease. Far too soon.
The basics I use every day are his. Fundamentals before frameworks. Reason through everything. Learn by building, not only by reading. Take nothing for granted, because it can be gone overnight.
He regretted that the business never grew, and he never regretted the freedom of doing his own thing. He stayed an optimist through everything. He was proud that his computers made a programmer out of me. He gave us his time.
His name was Vojo Milanović. In a bookstore in Serbia today, his books sit on the shelf next to mine.
