My Computing - 8

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One of those days when I was in the IBM 1620 Palace, the front plate glass door opened and a grim-looking young Lecturer entered and the Boss got up, smiled and welcomed him...a rare sight...we mortals were all sneaking through the back door and avoided the Boss like the very Devil. The young man had a deck of red cards in his hands unlike the cream ones of us janata. The Boss took the deck from his hands and inserted them in a special slot where the cards were read at lightning speed and the Execution was finished in 5 minutes and a rare Printout was delivered to the young one, who left as grimly as he entered.

Amidst hush-hush we learned that the young one writes his Programs straightaway in the Machine Language that short-circuits Precompilation and Compilation...verily the supergeek!

Amalendu also had his own reputation as a specialist front-door geek. My friend NP told me this typical Amalendu Story:

Apparently NP had an IEM problem of computation and sought Amalendu's help with the 1620. Amalendu wrote down the program in record time as he had to go to the KGP Station in the evening to catch the 6.20 Local to Cal. NP offered to drop him as a pillion on his scooter. They entered the 1620 to a right royal welcome by the Boss and the janata were asked to step aside as Amalendu inserted his deck into its slot. As he was in a hurry, the deck fell down on the floor and got dispersed like a pack of dropped cards. Amalendu stooped and picked them up with both hands as if they were so many potato chips, and pushed the deck back into its slot. And NP asked him why he didn't check if the cards were in their proper order. To which Amalendu replied with a smile: "Let the Precompiler check it...it is its duty."

The deck rushed through the Precompiler but got stuck in the Compiler and Amalendu tried to sort out the problem in his Program, but it didn't work out. The train time was nearing and so NP told him to postpone it to the Monday morning after he returns from Cal. And as they were passing through the tunnel at Dhobi Ghat, Amalendu shouted: "Stop!" and asked NP to U-Turn and get back to the CISS Building...because it flashed on him where the syntax error was. They returned and in a few minutes the thing was rectified and in another 10 minutes the Printout of the Result was delivered to NP. They raced to the Station and Amalendu caught the 6.20 local as it was easing out of the Longest Railway Platform in the World.

Within a couple of months of my engagement with 1620, I had a deck of about 100 cards with holes in them (and a few virgin ones I pilfered from the Palace). I used to keep the deck discreetly on my work-table for visitors to see and wonder and ask what they were. But, within a couple more months, everyone was having his own deck and it became passe'. One day Chinta, the youthful 'high' sweeper, asked me if he could have those cards. I knew that Chinta is not interested in anything in life that can't be converted into ethanol, but wondered how this deck could give him his dose of high. And asked him. And he said there is money in it. I gathered later on that Bus Companies were buying used 1620 cards at a throwaway price, getting them cut into 1 cm x 5 cm pieces by the bookbinder's guillotine, and using them as bus tickets in place of the expensive multicolored printed manifold paper. Within a year every Bus Conductor had a stack of these punched cards clipped in his left hand and was punching holes in them with his hand-held punch...one hole for the first stage, two holes for the next stage etc. And in the Exit stood the Cleaner who would tear each of them into two and throw them on the ground. In due course, all the roads of all towns and cities in India where buses plied were littered with torn IBM punched cards...the term 'ecological disaster' was not yet invented.

My last IBM 1620 story has to do with the Science Congress held at IIT KGP in the first week of January 1970:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2010_12_01_archive.html

I was asked to man the makeshift Registration & Welcome Counter in the Office of the B C Roy Hall, along with two more youth like me.

The initial interest in a weird place like KGP was lukewarm and they expected, extrapolating from the response in the first few months after the ad, that there would at most be 200 delegates. And some Geek offered to arrange the names of delegates as they paid the Registration Fee by Money Order in the alphabetical dictionary order. And the Diro was impressed that we can show off how 'modern' we were. As the stream became flood, names beyond the first three letters went awry...Sastry and Saswat were ok in the beginning but when Sashank came, it got sandwiched between. And then anything after the first letter got garbled; and finally Sastry and Mistry got inverted and the whole 9-page printed document, each page having about 100 and more names, was a mess.

When they delivered the 1620 (Shamefaced) List of Delegates, we three in the BC Roy Office decided to hang it up in the Notice Board outside, just to ward off the rush for a few minutes when everyone would be hunting for his name outside instead of jumping straightaway on our heads. Meanwhile we split the 9-page List into 3 parts and each of us mugged up our 3 pages so that the moment anyone rushes in and says: "Prashant Bhushan", the concerned one of us would point out his name in the 7th page 20th line triumphantly. Bidhan Mohanty (of the Ukridge fame) escorted a young pipe-smoking Professor from SINP and when he saw the garbled List outside, he asked Bidhan which computer we were using. And laughed: "IBM 1620? It can never arrange 1000 names...We have the latest CDC and I organized the PTP International Conference without a hitch last month," and puffed away. Bidhan fell silent and escorted his esteemed guest fuming into our Room and when we asked his name, one of us opened Page 6 at once and pointed it out to him in the 23rd line. The Visitor was stunned and exclaimed: "What is the need of CDC when you have such smart guys at IIT KGP!"

Bidhan stood me a Coke later on.

In the second week of January 1970, I fell into the orbit of SDM like a free electron getting trapped around a proton in the First Few Minutes, and My Computing came to an abrupt end for the next 20 years.

By the time I was into it again, our IBM 1620 got first cannibalized and then sold as scrap perhaps...

But it remains a symbol of my pristine youth and romance...much like the Steam Engine...


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