The Spark

April 2023

Contents	Page
Editorial	191
Your Letters, Campus Reunions
Tributes: Professors Gio Wiederhold, Narsingh Deo, Yeshwant Waghmare	196
Remembering those who had helped establish the Institute
A Conversation with Professor Sanjeev Arora	202
A leading Theoretical Computer Scientist discusses his IITK days and current research interests
Advances in Theoretical Computer Science	210
Indian/Indian American winners of the Gödel,Fulkerson, and other major prizes
A History of the IITK Computer Centre	215
From the IBM-1620 in 1963 to the Param Sanganak today
Our Bits of That IITK	224
Stories and pictures shared by students and alumni
Antaragni '22	226
Images and highlights from the recent Festival

* Pages 1-188 refer to the Spark Diaries #1 -5, available at https://iitk.ac.in/dora/spark/

Editors: Anuradha Jagannathan, Aseem Shukla, Chilukuri K. Mohan, Shirish Joshi

Members/Contributors: Afraz Khan, Alpna Singh, Aman Kumar Singh, Amar Gupta, Amrita Tripathi Sheikh,Anurag Dikshit, Archit Gupta, Devendra Babbar, Gauri Sharma, Girish Pant,Gurpur Prabhu, Gyan Mehta, Harshit Kant, Ishan Singh, Jiya Yadav, Kajoli Banerjee Krishnan, Lokesh Bharati, Mukkai Krishnamoorthy, Navpreet Singh,Nirmal Roberts, Nivedita Dutta-Haran, Piyush K. Singh, Raman Bhatia, Roli Garg Wendorf, Samir Palnitkar, Sanjeev Arora, Shakti Chaturvedi, Shivanand Kanavi,Shreyash Nallawar, Shruti Agarwal Raina, Srinivas Budaraju, Sudarshan Lakvalli,Tarun Agarwal

Special Thanks to Professors V. Rajaraman and H. V. Sahasrabuddhe, DORA Kantesh Balani, and the Wiederhold family for their help with this issue.

Views and opinions expressed in The Spark are those of the Editors and Contributors and not those of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, unless specified otherwise.

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Reunion Season at IITK was a busy affair this year. As the campus reopened after the COVID break, alumni returned in large numbers to relive memories and catch up on the missing years. There were seventeen reunions over the four-month period; as the weekends filled up, some events were scheduled as mid-week affairs providing a continuous celebration from one gathering to another. Reunions ranged from the class of 2010 returning for a 10-year celebration to the Frontier Batch of 1963-68 coming back for their 55^th. Missed the 30-year celebration due to COVID? No problem… The class of 1989 were back for the 33^rd instead. We share a few pictures from these gatherings, and a lot more can be accessed at https://www.iitk.ac.in/dora/reunion

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And our thanks to the DORA team for the perfectly managed shows, leaving behind only fond memories of our visits…

Credits: The pictures have been shared by the DORA Office, IITK, unless indicated otherwise.

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Tributes
Professor Gio Wiederhold

Gio Wiederhold, KIAP professor at IIT Kanpur 1964-1965, passed away peacefully in his home in San Francisco on December 26, 2022. He was 86.

His achievements made an exceptional impact on the computing world, continued by the achievements of those whom he taught and mentored. His significance to IITK is because of his pioneering efforts in the development of computer education in India, where Dr. Wiederhold, along with a team of other IITK educators, procured computers, then developed and delivered CS and programming courseware that was taught to successive generations of teachers, computer scientists and engineers, so much so that much of India’s IT generation today can trace their technology heritage back to the tree that Gio helped to plant.

Gio spent a year at IITK, and, some years later, he served as a consultant to the United Nations Development Program in India, where the Indian Government approached him for his recommendations for setting up the National Informatics Center. His efforts greatly contributed to India becoming a leader in the global IT industry and to Indian technology professionals being engaged in IT efforts in countries around the world.

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Gio was passionate about the pursuit and sharing of knowledge. As an early pioneer in the fields of database and knowledge base management systems, Gio’s first textbook, Database Design KBMS he integrated knowledge-based technology with artificial intelligence concepts to provide intelligent and efficient access to databases.

He authored and co-authored more than 400 published papers and reports on computing and medicine. He was the primary advisor to 36 PhD students and assisted with more than 50 other PhD theses. His first PhD student, the late Dr. Hector Garcia-Molina, led the growing database group at Stanford University where he was chair of the Computer Science Department from 2001-2004.

While kings may be judged by the geographic areas of their kingdoms, we applaud Gio for his professional work in large scale computing, and its broad impact and applicability: he played a pivotal role in the rapid growth and broad adoption of computer science in India and globally, over several decades. While he has left us, he and his work will be remembered and appreciated for ages to come.

Complete details of Dr. Wiederhold’s life and career can be found in Wikipedia at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gio_Wiederhold
The obituary is here: https://www.forevermissed.com/giowiederhold/about
A list of his citations: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=fJiGhkoAAAAJ&hl=en
Stories of Gio’s adventures in India can be read at: https://iitk.ac.in/dora/spark/issue-2/#Wiederhold

Contributed by Amar Gupta (BT, EE, 1969-74) and Shirish Joshi (BT, ChE, 1973-78)

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Professor Narsingh Deo

Professor Narsingh Deo, a former faculty member at IITK who had made invaluable contributions to computational graph theory and computer science education, passed away on January 13, 2023, in Winter Park, Florida after a brief illness.

Prof. Deo was born in Raniganj (Bihar) in 1936. He earned a B.Sc (Physics) from Patna University, followed by a Diploma from IISc, M.S. from CalTech, and Ph.D. from Northwestern University.After several years of working in industry (at the Burroughs Corporation, JPL, and Britt Electronics Corp.), he started teaching at IIT Kanpur in 1971, and served as the Head of the Computer Center for two years. He also co-organized a well-attended workshop on Computer Science Education in 1973, which provided templates of several courses, and resulted in the creation of an extensive bibliography.

After seven years at IIT Kanpur, he moved to Washington State University (Pullman) where he chaired the CS Department, moving later to the University of Central Florida in (1986), where he served as Millican Chair Professor and the Director of the Center for Parallel Computation, until his retirement in 2017.  He returned to spend several sabbatical years at IITs during this period.

Prof. Deo had taught rigorous courses on Computational Graph Theory and Computer Simulation, which attracted students from multiple disciplines.These courses led to two widely acclaimed textbooks he authored, titled Graph Theory with Application to Engineering and Computer Science, and System Simulation with Digital Computers.He also co-authored Combinatorial Algorithms: Theory and Practice (with E.M. Reingold and J. Nievergelt), a treasure trove of the state of algorithms for enumeration problems, computational problems in Graph Theory and backtracking algorithms; this book is a graduate-level textbook, still used today. He was also particular about implementation aspects of graph algorithms, and co-authored Discrete Optimization Algorithms: With Pascal Programs (with M.M. Syslo and J. S. Kowalik). His excellent expository writing style was treasured and emulated by his students.

Prof. Deo had received many accolades over the past six decades. He was a Fellow of both ACM and IEEE and served as the President of the Forum for Interdisciplinary Mathematics.He continued to be active in research, and recently published an article in the Journal of Computer Society of India. He had advised over 20 Doctoral students and many Master’s students. He set an example to his students with his dedication to teaching, hard work, meticulous attention to detail, and exemplary standards for research. He had exacting standards and pushed his students to excel. He imparted his extensive knowledge to students, and mentored them late in their careers, generously supporting them with his time and wisdom.

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Prof. Deo had a wide circle of friends. He was quick-witted and was well-known for his humorous quips in conversations. He often used his good sense of humor to smoothen awkward situations. Whenever he gathered with friends, he regaled them with many anecdotes. A few years ago, when others were bemoaning a friend’s death, he quoted Yudhishtira’s response to Yaksha’s question in Mahabharata: “What is surprising? Death is certain, and yet every minute we act as if we will live forever.”

Prof. Deo will be missed by his students and his many colleagues.

Contributed by Mukkai Krishnamoorthy (MT/PhD, EE, 1969-76, Faculty, EE/CSE, 1976-79) and Chilukuri K. Mohan (BT, CSE, 1978-83)

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Professor Yeshwant Waghmare

Professor Yeshwant R. Waghmare, a much-loved former faculty member of IITK’s Physics Department passed away on January 27, 2023. A nuclear physicist respected in the scientific community for his academic accomplishments, he was also a well-loved teacher, and a mentor for generations of students who appreciated his approachable and communicative personality. During his career at IITK, he served as Head of Department of Physics, as Dean of Student Affairs, and as acting Director. Among other responsibilities, he was President of the prestigious Indian Association of Physics Teachers (IAPT) since 1999. This organisation, along with Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai, selects the Indian students’ teams for the International Olympiad in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. He is survived by his wife Mrs. Anjali Waghmare and daughter, Dr. Ruta Waghmare.

Prof. Waghmare received his M.Sc. from Bombay University in 1958, and Ph.D. in 1962 from Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, both in the area of Nuclear Physics. He worked as assistant research scientist with Nobel Laureate Mrs. Maria Mayer at the University of California. He then was a Research associate at M.I.T., before joining IIT Kanpur in 1966, where he served as a member of the Physics Department faculty until his retirement in 1997. He was subsequently a Visiting Professor in IUCAA, Pune and was Emeritus Scientist in Physics Dept., University of Pune, during 1998-2002.

He has written over 80 papers and directed 13 Ph.D. theses. He has also written 18 books on Nuclear Physics, Reactor Engineering, Classical Mechanics, Quantum Mechanics, and Theory of Relativity, to name a few. He was a Senior Associate of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy), and Visiting Professor in universities worldwide, including the USA, Britain, France, Germany, Israel, Australia and Switzerland. He was actively involved in promoting scientific education at all levels, through his books and his interactions with students.

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His ties with Maharashtra have been long-standing. He was a Fellow of Maharashtra Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Sciences. He was Vice- Chairman of Maharashtra Education Society, Pune. Among other positions, he was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Indian Institute of Education (IIE), Pune, which is committed to taking science and technology to rural areas, and welfare of rural women.

Professor Waghmare shared his passion for physics, history, and philosophy, in writings for the lay public, where he would enliven his text with historical anecdotes. Courteous and gentlemanly, he was a lover of music, and a keen sportsman. An excellent cricketer, he frequently opened the batting for the Faculty teams, and could strike boundaries at will. On the personal front, he extended his warm hospitality to many of us IITK students over the years. His office was always open, his smile always welcoming. He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts and condolences go to his family.

Professor Waghmare visiting the 14 Trees Foundation near Pune in 2022. 14 Trees is a charitable organisation, started by IITK Alumni, dedicated to building sustainable, carbon-footprint-neutral eco-systems through reforestation

Contributed by Samir Palnitkar (BT, EE, 1986-90) and Anuradha Jagannathan (MSc, Physics, 1975-80)

 

 

 

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A Conversation with Prof. Sanjeev Arora

Sanjeev Arora joined the IITK CSE Program as the JEE #1 in 1986. After two years in Hall II, he transferred to MIT where he graduated with SB in Math with Computer Science in 1990. Sanjeev went on to get his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 1994, on the hardness of approximation problems, under the guidance of Umesh Varizani. While at Berkeley, he also interacted with Madhu Sudan (IITD) and Rajeev Motwani (IITK), with whom (and others) he shared the 2001 Gödel Prize for work on the PCP theorem and its applications to hardness of approximation.

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After we moved back to Jodhpur, I remember an excited friend telling me around 1981 (so I must have been 13) that a local kid (I can’t recall the name) had been ranked in the top 30 in India in the IIT exam and was going to study “Computer Science” at IITK. I believe this was the first time I heard the term Computer Science. It felt oxymoronic and hilarious, because my general impression was that a computer (which I had never seen) was just a big and fast calculator.

Spark: What was IITK like? Memories from your two years there? Ragging stories? Cultural Festivals or other activities? How did you get involved in the Spark?

SA: Ragging was terrible, and I got singled out for bad treatment. Some of the most awful weeks of my life. But after those few weeks were over, it was fun to hang out with my “band of brothers” in my wing. From the start, I got seriously involved in festivals and other cultural activities on campus.

We started a little rag magazine in Hall Two, possibly in first year itself. I don’t recall what we called it, but it was a few pages of cyclostyled material. The team initially consisted of Suman Palit and Me (Espee and Essay), with some help from friends. At some point LV Sudarshan (Elvis) joined our efforts. I recall showing the rag mag to a few faculty members and some of them (e.g., MM Oberoi) mentioned that it reminded them of the Spark. That’s when I dug up an old issue of Spark; I don’t recall where I got it. We decided to revive Spark. The IITK Cul Secy was enthusiastic and provided financial support.

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Spark: How about academics? First two years were the core curriculum. Did you take any CSE Dept classes? Any Professors who left a lasting impression?

SA: I liked the core curriculum, and in hindsight I love it even more. We moved through a lot of material in those two years but a lot of it has stuck around in my mind and sometimes made more sense years later. It makes me a more complete scientist today.

I took two CS courses in year 2 (Intro to Programming, and Data Structures), which were OK but not great. At that time the CS dept was struggling due to the departure of most of its eminent founding professors.

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The department consisted of half a dozen Asst Profs. I was not very attracted to CS at IITK. I had nice interactions with quite a few non-CS faculty (eminent chemist MV George was one of them). I read Gödel Escher Bach, a fashionable book on campus that was considered profound. (Though in hindsight -- having worked in both theory of computing and AI! -- I find it overwrought and verbose.)

Spark: Tell us about the transfer to MIT. How did you apply? Was it on a scholarship? Did IITK Profs help you? You got all the credits transferred… presumably that was not an issue since they had set up the curriculum and were familiar with it

SA: A cousin of mine (four years older than me) had attended MIT as an undergrad. I learnt about the application process (SAT, AP etc.) from him, and also learnt that MIT gives need-based scholarships to everybody who’s admitted. I was attracted to the idea of going to the US and trying to do research (in what exactly, I didn’t know --- Physics seemed coolest at the time).

Also, thanks to my IIT-JEE performance I had 1 lakh rupees in award money, which in those days was worth over USD $10K. This seemed like enough of a nest egg to let me go to the US without imposing a financial burden on my parents. (Aside: later when leaving for the US I discovered that foreign exchange controls allowed me to take at most $750 dollars out of India! But it turned out all fine; I didn’t need much money due to the full scholarship package.)

I applied for a transfer to MIT in my freshman year. The application process was not hard -- I went to Delhi for a weekend to write SAT etc., and IIT profs were kind enough to write recommendation letters. I got in at the end of my freshman year, but there was some issue with the financial aid application (it got lost in the mail!). MIT was kind enough to delay my admission by a year. So, I arrived at MIT after finishing 2 years at IITK. I took along documentation about my coursework (syllabus, text etc.)

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and during my first week at MIT I went around to profs who gave me equivalent MIT credit. A couple of weeks after arrival I found a job assisting a research project. Everything worked out smoothly.

Spark: You are probably the only person who has had first-hand experience of both IITK and MIT UG classes. Which one was harder and had more intense competition? We believe MIT had stopped assigning letter grades for first year classes in a bid to curb competition and suicides…

SA: A difficult question. At MIT the average undergrad took 4 courses/term whereas at IITK the requirement was more like 6/term. MIT courses went deeper into the material and had more interesting problem sets and labs. The TAs at MIT were excellent, and the Profs were generally superb –though I felt the IITK Profs had been quite good too.

I’d say the top 10% of MIT students were better in many ways than their IITK counterparts. I attribute this not to any inherent difference in ability but to the fact that IITK’s culture looked down upon “Maggus”. At IITK you had to play a cool “Bakait” who is cruising through classes without sweating. At MIT there was no shame in being passionate about topics and being deeply excited by your coursework.

But the median MIT student was weaker than their IIT counterpart. This is to be expected based upon numbers: MIT is one of 5-8 top US universities and back then admitted 1000 freshers each year, whereas all IITs put together admitted 1500 from a country of one billion.

Many MIT undergrads were stressed in their lives and overworked, but this had also been true at IITK.

Spark: Was the nature of the educational experience different, e.g., relative emphasis on theory, math, programming, course projects, term papers, exam structure, industry interactions?

SA: The biggest difference was that at MIT you were free to figure out your own education plan (including what field to major in). At IITK, you of course had essentially no flexibility. I recall holding the MIT coursebook in hand when I arrived and feeling “I am free to take any course in this book, and also attend lectures in any of them, whether or not I am enrolled in the class.” Most MIT students were studying things that interested them. They would shop around for the best classes and professors in the first couple weeks of the term, which of course had not been possible at IITK. This freedom (and many other freedoms in your personal life) was a learning experience in itself. By the way, most top universities in the US offer similar flexibility. (At Princeton you only declare your major after 2 years in most cases, and after 1 year in Engineering.)

 At MIT I also greatly enjoyed some interesting coursework on literature, music, creative writing etc. and loved the discussion-based learning used in those classes. They left a big impression on me, and I stayed in touch with some of those professors for many decades.

At MIT, homework/labs determined a significant fraction of the grade and received a lot more care and attention from both students and faculty. (Again, this was possible only because of the vast pool of well-qualified graduate TAs.)

At least a third of my fellow MIT undergrads were doing some form of independent work/research outside of coursework. Most got an hourly stipend for it (either from a professor’s grant or from MIT’s UROP fund). Of course, it was a treat to hang out with a research group of grads and postdocs; they treated me well, and I played softball with them (which requires a skill set not too different from cricket).

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Spark: Did you feel well-prepared for the MIT courses, due to the preparation provided by IITK courses?  Was there an undergrad project/thesis?

SA: Yes, IITK had definitely prepared me well for handling the MIT curriculum.  The MIT courses were also very well-taught.   My area of specialization was Mathematics with Computer Science.

A thesis was not required for my major and I did not write one. But I did research with one or more professors for my entire time at MIT, and also wrote a paper for a top venue to which I contributed significantly. (This paper probably helped me get into all the top grad schools after I graduated.)  I also took a few advanced grad courses in my senior year from world experts, and these courses were a blast. In my senior year I got a research grant to do some independent research (related to P vs NP) and found some great advisors who were very generous with their time and attention. My two years at MIT were a great time intellectually (both in and outside class).  They helped build up my skills and confidence, which let me hit the ground running (academically and socially) in Berkeley later.

Spark: Tell us about Grad studies.  You joined Berkeley.   What area, who was your advisor?  Thesis topic?

SA: In my first year I was primarily having a good time and exploring research ideas.  I took a few courses (including courses outside CS such as creative writing) and made good friends. I met my future wife, who was a grad student from Germany in another department. It was an intoxicating time.

My research area was theoretical CS and my advisor was Umesh Vazirani. He had a hands-off approach but was available whenever I needed him. He told me I was free to find my own research problems. I learnt a lot from him over the four years. Some of the other professors, especially Richard Karp, were also very generous with their time and attention.

Spark: How did this lead to the Gödel Prize?  Tell us about your interactions with Madhu Sudan and Rajeev Motwani.

SA: When I was in my first year of the PhD, a couple of papers appeared which in hindsight were a clear precursor to what was to become the PCP Theorem. Several professors (including my advisor Umesh) found them very interesting but at the same time quite mysterious. At least one of the papers was written very sloppily.  I spent some months thinking about this pair of papers and became a local expert on that topic. Several senior grads would talk to me to understand what was going on in those papers.

At the start of the 2^nd year, I met Muli Safra, a coauthor of one of the two interesting papers (I had known him a bit at MIT where he had been a postdoc) and he and I immediately started an interesting discussion. He was a postdoc at IBM Research, about 1.5 hours away, but he would regularly come up to Berkeley and we would work out new ideas. Things progressed rapidly and within a few months we had a significant new advance which we wrote up.

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A few months passed,  and my office-mate Madhu Sudan (we shared an office because we were both students of Umesh Vazirani) had an interesting idea, namely that if my work with Muli could be extended in a certain way, this could lead to an inapproximability result for the NP-hard problem 3SAT. Madhu had been discussing this with Rajeev, who had been a grad student at Berkeley some years earlier, and was by then an Assistant Professor at Stanford. We met a few times to work out more ideas, and pretty soon had made more progress. We had a manuscript and word got out informally, and Lund and Szegedy of Bell Labs (who had been working on similar things and had independently discovered some of the same results but were stuck) called us to contribute a significant new idea. We and they realized that putting everything together gave what is called the PCP Theorem; and this was my second paper of that year. Those 6-7 months were an amazing time of my life.

So, the collaboration with Rajeev happened because he was friends with my fellow graduate student (and collaborator) Madhu Sudan. Later I got to know Rajeev better and had some other interesting research discussions with him.

Spark: Tell us about the move to Princeton…  The second Gödel and the Euclidean Travelling Salesman Problem.  And the Fulkerson prize…   about the approximation ratio for graph separators, the results obtained and why they are relevant

SA: The PCP Theorem showed that computing approximate solutions to many NP-hard problems is itself NP-hard. But it didn’t apply to all NP-hard problems. I became increasingly interested in actually trying to compute approximate solutions to classic problems like Traveling Salesman. By this point I was an Assistant Professor at Princeton and had lots of free time for research. At some point I began to suspect that the Euclidean traveling salesman problem may be very easy. This hunch was the motivation to think in a very different way, quickly discovering a very simple approximation algorithm that got a (1+epsilon) approximation. Somehow people missed it all this time (problems like Traveling Salesman and Steiner tree had been studied since the 19^th century).  It was a lucky break, especially since the following year I managed to improve my algorithm to run in near-linear time.

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The work on graph separators started during a sabbatical at Berkeley in 2002. Umesh Vazirani and Satish Rao told me about an interesting idea for this classic problem. Their idea seemed deceptively easy at first but turned out to be quite hard to make precise. I devoted the following year and a half mulling over it. Satish Rao came over to Princeton for the summer the following year, and we made some progress, and we also met up again with Umesh to work some more. Finally, by late 2003 we had our breakthrough algorithm. Over subsequent years it ended up motivating various new research directions in geometric embeddings, approximate flow algorithms, cut problems etc. That led to the Fulkerson Prize in 2012.

Spark: Wow! Congratulations! That is quite a remarkable set of accomplishments, and we look forward to reading more about your future research. Do you visit India? Have you returned to IIT Kanpur? Given any seminars there? Would you like to return as a visiting faculty?

SA: I visited the campus in January 1990 to catch up with friends before we all graduated in May. After that I have only visited IITK once, in 2014 for the Silver Jubilee reunion of my batch. (IITK does not have any record of me -- they don’t maintain records on people who drop out of the program). My batchmates included me in the reunion. It was nice to be back for a couple days; would love to go back again.

Spark: Your advice for IITK students?

SA: Do not hesitate to be idealistic and aim big. You are among the smartest people of your generation. There is a lot more to life than the 1 crore job that your parents and friends consider the epitome of a successful life.

 

 

A picture of the 25th Reunion of the Class of 1990 at IITK, Dec 26-28, 2014, with Sanjeev visible in the top right corner. Picture Credit: DORA Archives

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Advances in Theoretical Computer Science

Over several decades, IIT Kanpur’s CSE Department faculty and students have developed a strong reputation for their fundamental contributions to Theoretical Computer Science. They follow in the tradition of mathematicians who don’t need expensive equipment or well-funded laboratories to come up with brilliant ideas. Substantial progress instead requires sustained and well-focused research on a clearly defined problem, withstanding the diversions of everyday personal and professional life.  The long tradition at IITK of encouraging such research by young faculty and students has borne many fruits, in the form of international recognition. 

We have compiled lists of known Indian / Indian American awardees of the best-known awards in Theoretical Computer Science; IITK has clearly been the most successful Indian academic institution in this regard. Of course, IITK faculty and students have also won many awards in other areas of Computer Science and Engineering, not listed here

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A History of the IITK Computer Centre

 

The IITK Computer Centre (CC) was established in 1963 in Western Labs as a part of the Department of Electrical Engineering. It moved to its present building in 1968 after the arrival of the IBM-7044. Computer Science was recognized as an independent department of the institute in 1983.

The IITK Computer Centre, 1976.  Picture Credit: Shirish Joshi (BT, ChE, 1973-78)

 

The IBM-1620, IITK’s first Computer, was acquired in 1963.  It was used mainly for teaching the TA 306 (First course on Programming), EE 560 (Analog and Digital Computers), and EE 611 (Software Engineering) classes.  An IBM 407 accounting machine, with a card reader and printer supported the 1620.

 

By 1965 the IBM-1620 was operating at full capacity with long lead times to get results, and it became necessary to upgrade the machine.  After much deliberation an IBM-7044 was selected.  However, the new system with its drives required a considerable amount of space which was not available in WL and the CC building became a necessity.

 

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1964: Three members of the Pioneer Batch (1960-65) -- RC Jain, VS Narang and Aditya Jain working on the 1620 in WL. Picture Credit: Pioneer Batch Golden Jubilee Collection

Professor V. Rajaraman, who helped establish the CSE Programmes at IITK recalls:

The CC building had been planned in the master plan of IIT/K along with the library. A KIAP adviser worked with architects Kanvinde and Rai in planning it with a basement for air conditioning compressors, motor generators, and a telephone exchange. However, this building had a lower priority and was not ready for the 1620 when it arrived in 1963. The purchase of the 7044 was delayed till July 1966 so that this building could now be completed, and its construction was expedited.

 

In July 1966, the CC building had been completed, but its air conditioning system was not functional, and placing the 7044 there could have damaged the machine.  We were able to squeeze the 7044 along with the 1620 into Western Labs. In early 1968, we placed the 1401 in the new building in one of the corner rooms with local air conditioners as a temporary solution. For a few months input was fed to the 1401 which created files on the tape. The tape was then transported physically to Western Labs and fed to the 7044. The results tape was taken back to 1401 and printed there!

Eventually, the air conditioning system became available, and we moved the 7044 and 1401 into the big hall and the 1620 into the small hall. The institute had three functioning computers at this time, including the 1620, which was subsequently sold to SAIL.

 

The system was configured as a 1401 I/O computer plus a 7044 number cruncher with a 20 MB RAMAC disk (the largest in the world in 1968!) that was to be shared between the two computers.  Due to OS issues between the 7044 and 1401, the RAMAC disk was eventually replaced with tapes for transferring data between the systems.  The 1401 would read cards and then input the files on the tape, and 7044 would take them, compile and compute and put output files on the tape which would then be printed by the printer attached to the 1401.  Students used to submit the punched card input in the morning and typically get the output the next day. Much greater care had to be taken to avoid syntax and logical mistakes before submitting the program.

 

Unit Record Equipment machines were used to mechanically process the Hollerith punch cards.The cards provided the programming inputs to the computer before terminals became available in 1980. The 1401 was configured with 5 disks of 2MB each, 6 tape drives (shared with 7044), printer, card readers/punch and the RAMAC disk on 7044.

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1977: Some views of the Computer Centre as it looked in the 1970s with the card punch machine, the IBM 1311 drives (used to transfer data between the IBM-1401 to the IBM-7044), and an overview of the facilities. Below: The Computer Room, circa 1977. The IBM-7044 is visible on the left, and the 1401 on the right. The student in the picture is Prasanna Mulgaonkar (1974-79). (Pictures: Shirish Joshi)

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Several specialised Computers such as the IBM-1800, PDP-1 and TDC-316 were added in the early 1970s.  The IBM 1800 computer was used mainly for process control and was not for general use. It was used by select departments (EE, ME, and ChE) for their process computing and control theory needs.

The PDP-1 computer was donated to IIT Kanpur by Stanford University. It had limited time-sharing capabilities and was mainly used for academic purposes, and hardware and software development projects done by UG and PG students. It offered a Space War video game and a song playback and was a major attraction for people (whether faculty, students, or visitors to IITK) visiting the Computer Centre during those days.

The TDC was a minicomputer from ECIL that we got in 1978. It was a 12-bit single address machine. Fortran and Assembler languages were available for users. It was mainly used for UG and PG projects as well as for assignments in some of the CS courses (OS, Compiler etc.).

The IBM-7044 on the left and PDP-1 on the right

In the IBM 7044 console area, on the left is Nirmal Roberts, Principal Engineer, CC, along with a student, Narendra Kale, MT 1976.  Operating the PDP-1 is another MT student, MV Rao. Picture Credits: Nirmal Roberts

 

The next major upgrade was the addition of the DEC-1090 mainframe computer in 1979, which was IITK’s first time sharing computer. This computer had interactive terminals and punched cards were finally phased out at this stage.

 

The DEC-1090 replaced the IBM 7044/1401 Batch Processing System. Compared to the mainframe, it occupied only a small amount of space in the computer room and there were a lot of empty spaces as the magnetic tape units were now gone. The room had just the computer, the console, and the printer. All the Card punching machines were replaced by interactive terminals.

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