Reminiscence around the dawn of the computer era (v1.0)

 

I was in the computing profession right around the dawn of the computer era – at-least when computers emerged into the commercial space.

In 1963, the first commercial computer in any educational institution in all of India arrived at my alma mater at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK). This was an IBM 1620. IITK was the top engineering university in all of India. It was built-up with American collaboration and many eminent American professors from great American Universities taught there at-least for a while. A walk down memory lane on its arrival at that time and early history of computers in India is recounted in https://iitk.ac.in/dora/spark/.

In 1967, The second commercial large computer of any educational institution in India (the first was a CDC6600 at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) – a IBM 7044 arrived at IITK. It used an IBM 1401 for input/output. It had fast and huge memory (2 microsecond, and 32K – large and fast by standards then). A short while later, an IBM 1800 arrived. There was also a used PDP but I never used it.

In 1965, semiconductor pioneer Gordon Moore, predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two year while costs would stay about the same. This was the true dawn of the computer age. Moore’s Law was proved right. As computing power became greater and cheaper, digital innards replaced mechanical ones in nearly everything from cars to coffeemakers. Today's computer in your pocket is more than a thousand folds more powerful than the big machines of that era.

I joined IITK for my bachelor’s in electrical engineering in 1970 and worked with all three computers. My Bachelor’s project was enhancing a large commercial electrical Circuit analysis program that ran on the 1800. I also worked with a Physics PHD student for some time helping him model and visualize complex physics simulations in DYNAMO (or was it GPSS? don't remember).

In 1975 I arrived at University of Hawaii for my master’s in electrical engineering and encountered my first IBM Mainframe – a IBM 370. I used it but spent more time on a home-grown time-sharing system that the dept had. One memorable thing was the undergraduate lab class I ran as a TA to use an Intel 8080 chip, which had just been released, to build a full-fledged computer. A short stint as a research assistant convinced me industry was a better fit for me than academia and that set me up on my way to a successful career in Silicon Valley.

Throughout my education, although I was an electrical engineering graduate, I took every opportunity I could get to work on computer hardware and software and taking courses on these. I was fascinated by computers. When I graduated, I went straight to a software job and never worked a single day as an electrical engineer.