Thoughts And Trivia

Information Technology has epochally transformed our Society. This tranformation is as seminal as the transformation of Society from Stone-age to Bronze-age. I am lucky to have been Witness to this transformation from the 2nd generation (discrete transistor circuits) Main Frames to present Web-enabled systems. I dirtied my hands with Machine Code, Assembly Level Language, FORTRAN, Cobol, RDBMS and now Web-enabled systems - paralleling India's journey from being 30 years behind to a front-line runner. What was it Like??

• 1969 - there were a handful of Main-Frames in India. A new one ICL-1909 came to IIT-Delhi. I learnt FORTRAN-IV and Programmed for my Graduation Project on "Simulation of Diesel Engines"


• Computers consisted of Large Cabinets with panels containing blinking lights and switches . These were housed in Large air-conditioned halls with cables running underneath false floor.


• Memory used be made-up of ferrite rings strung on cross wires - solid-state memory came in next generations. Being physical, these used be housed in huge cabinets. 12 KB memory was all that we had.


• Tape drives were huge things, about six-feet tall. I being only 5ft 3in tall, had to stand on tip-toes to load the tapes. Being sensitive about my height, I used to make sure there is no one around, before I did that. Vacuum columns kept the tension on tape constant.


• Line printer was huge and shaped like a Dodo-Bird. It made a racket while working and threw out printed paper like a demented demon.


• Fresh Input was thru Cards, but in IIT we used Paper Tapes. We were taught to read the hole patterns on the tape and the cards for corrections. Wrong portions of tapes were substituted with correct portions by manually splicing the tape. Tapes were punched on a teleprinter like machine.Later IIT acquired card reader and Card Punching machines. This looked like a major improvement


• We sincerely followed the steps of flowcharting, coding etc.


• Computers operated on 6 bit BCD Byte. Mostly computers had fixed word length of 8 bytes, but the computer , I worked on in Railway (IBM-1401) had variable length word, end being marked by a word-mark byte. Blocks of words were marked by Group-Mark byte.
  
• There were no Operating System or firm-ware in these computers. Only one Programme could work at a time. Multi-threading and Multi-tasking came in later generations of computers.

(To be editted)

Posted by Girish Bhatnagar at Saturday, September 03, 2005