My Computing - 4

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Within a month of my joining IIT KGP on May Day 1965, my friend Chari (a senior Teacher-Trainee in ChE) and I made bold to climb the steps to the First Floor of the (now defunct) CISS and see the famed IBM 1620. Neither he nor I knew what was 1620 with it, but he was one better. He asked me to expand IBM and when I couldn't, he told me secretly its expansion extracting a promise that I wouldn't divulge it to one and all since it was a topical quiz question. I then learned that IIT KGP is different in more ways than one from my alma mater AU, where as the Poet sang: "knowledge is free..." Well, in our AU, knowledge, however scanty, was practically free but we had to fight for Facit Machines and Remington Typewriters...here it is the other way round.

As soon as we landed on the last step, we felt overawed like Wordsworth when he saw that pond with those ten thousand sudden daffodils. The whole of a Hall was filled up by this air-conditioned Dino. There was a huge plate glass door through which we could see a big console, very like the cockpit of a Jumbo Jet (which I never saw), switches, keyboards, blinking red, blue and green 'jewel lamps', with a guy (Boss) sitting in front of it with his back to us and fiddling with it (console, not his back), a huge machine (think tank) with red hot glowing tubes, surrounded by a couple of subsidiary slaves with revolving transparent disks; a behemoth printer whining, half a dozen mini-typewriter-looking gadgets that we came to know as 'punching' machines, the works...

We looked at one another and decided to try and barge through the glass door; hearing the squeak of which, the Boss turned back, scowled and growled: "GET OUT!" Chari, having been around at KGP a year earlier to me, simpered: "We are teachers," a half-truth. The Boss then howled: "No bloody teacher is welcome here unless he has a prior appointment." We retreated hastily and hit a senior Assistant Professor of a sister Department we had been introduced to earlier. This guy just pushed the glass gate, walked to the Boss, put his hand on his (Boss's, not his own) shoulder, smiled, dragged a chair and sat on it, fiddled with the console switches, got up, went round tweaking a switch or two here and there, the Boss all the while following him like that Mary's Little Lamb. It looked as if the problem whatever with the machine got solved by our A.P. and they drank tea from a flask as a toast.

We then understood that there were 'geeks' even then, before the term became popular, and they were welcome everywhere unlike goons like us. And felt humiliated.

It is a different matter that after a decade, the CSE Dept and Computer Center came up in the ground floor of the Cryogenics Building and bought its own more powerful, but Russian, Computer called (heaven knows why): Riyadh; and our Boss’s IBM 1620 was getting deserted; and after another decade when the IBM PCs started arriving on every table, it was abandoned, and our Boss (who we found out was a Technical Assistant trained to handle only the IBM machine) got reverted to his parent Department where his services turned out to be superfluous, and he took to cycling on the streets hoping against hope that his erstwhile fawns would recognize and smile at him...he even visited my room once...his son had developed a backlog in Physics I...

I guess there is a lesson there...the Caterpillar in Alice would have said it is called a 'lesson' because less and less people are learning it till it is too late.

I then bragged to my Research Scholar friends who were still struggling with their Facit machines at AU that IIT KGP has an IBM 1620. Within a week, I got frantic envelopes seeking my help with their horrid computations, saying that they could at best compute the field gradients of the nearest 20 neighbors in 3 sweaty months, but they heard that IBM 1620 can handle 200 neighbors in 10 minutes. I laughed up my sleeves, since we had absolutely no idea whether our series converges at all unlike the harmonic one (1+1/2 +1/3...) ...but I thought I was well out of it and so shouldn’t throw cold water but help them as best as I could. They sent their data to me and I went about it earnestly.

I wrote down the steps on a sheet of white paper in my (highest level) language and started hunting for folks who could convert it into what was then called bombastically Fortran – II of which I had no idea. I visited Thackers and found he didn’t stock any book on the topic. His showcase was filled with Feynman Volumes, Berkeley Series, Resnick-Hallidays, Maugham’s books…but nothing on computer languages.

Two decades later, the same showcase was filled from top to bottom with bulky but cheap books on Java, dBase, and their sisters but no Feynmans. I don’t know what that showcase displays now. The Teachers there got a 100% hike in the last Pay Commission (that I narrowly missed) and their entry-level salary is 100 times mine was. And, since all compu and other books are available online (except the mighty RSS-GPS Lecture Notes, the first author of which is happily upstairs and the second is down below busy blogging on a daily basis), Thacker must be stocking expensive imported children’s books for the rich campus tiny tots. I myself entered a bookshop in Secunderabad the other day while waiting for my son to park his sedan and found lots and lots of children’s books and bought one for Ishani.

It is titled: Ganesha, and has only about a dozen pages. But they are all stiff and the paper glossy and it has great pictures and stories of Ganesha and on an impulse I bought it for a whopping Rs 200 and gifted it to Ishani. She took it to her mom asking to tell her its story and after half an hour lost all interest in it. I find it nowadays here and there on the floor perhaps used to swat bees that tend to encroach our high-living sixth floor lives.

My D-i-L told me that a couple of months back when they were in Nellore, she found Ishani ‘reading’ a piece of soiled newspaper:

“Bethwin you ann me and litthle Ishani; Granpas thall thales for Ishani and frinds; Chatthy essays for naughthy Ishani...”

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