B. J. RAM RAO

The Intel 8080, the first real microprocessor that ushered in the microcomputer revolution was announced in April 1974. That year, I was an Inter Sc. Student at SIES, Sion, Mumbai. The following summer in 1975, I joined engineering college.

I was at Manipal Institute of Technology from 1975 to 1980. Back then the institute was under the University of Mysore.

One of my father’s colleagues at BARC, introduced me to computers in Diwali 1975. He suggested that I apply to the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) for hands-on training in computer programming during the summer vacations.

Back then, BARC had a Soviet BESM-6 (БЭСМ-6) mainframe.
БЭСМ stands for “Быстродействующая Электронно-Счетная Машина” “Bystrodeystvuyushchaya Yelektronno-Schetnaya Mashina”, meaning, “High-speed Electronic Calculating Machine”.
The BESM-6 was a 9-MHz, 1 MIPS, 48-bit machine with 60,000 transistors and 170,000 diodes.

That year, in 1975, Paul Allen and Bill Gates wrote their BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair, the first hobby microcomputer and founded what would become Microsoft.

At college, we were studying numerical methods.
In the summer of 1976, I wrote my first computer program to implement the Newton-Raphson root-finding algorithm to find the roots of a polynomial. At BARC,  I used the powder-blue IBM Type 029 and Type 129 key punches to produce decks of Hollerith cards with Fortran-IV source code. A deck was submitted for batch-processing overnight and in the morning a 132-column drum-printed output would await in my pigeon-hole in the varnished plywood rack at BARC North site.

Back in the late seventies, computer architecture was implemented with TTL chips and MSI logic. As an engineering student at BARC during the Diwali-1976 holidays, I learned to program in assembly language on an ECIL 16-bit TDC-316 mini. The TDC-316 was inspired by the PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC),Maynard, Massachusetts.

In 1976 DEC announced their first 32-bit supermini: the VAX series. Suddenly the current 16-bit machines were outdated. Data-General immediately launched their own 32-bit effort to beat DEC to market. They called it the “Fountainhead Project”. However, two years later in 1978, the VAX 11/780 was released. Fountainhead proj. mgmt. had failed to beat DEC to market. DG then killed Fountainhead and launched their “Eagle Project” a crash 32-bit effort based on the Eclipse. Tracy Kidder's 1981 book, “The Soul Of A New Machine” described these travails. The book won the Pulitzer. The DG Eclipse MV/8000 was finally delivered in 1980, the year I graduated.

Going back, the September 1977 issue of the Scientific American, was an eye-opener. I convinced my college librarian to let me borrow the library reference copy long enough to photocopy it.

In 1977, photocopying was a laborious expensive process.
The plain-paper xerographic electrophotocopier was the size of an autorickshaw. And I had to travel to the next town: Udipi to access it.

Each page to be photocopied was mounted on an easel. Then the photographer would charge a selenium-coated photo-receptor plate with static electricity. He would then place the plate into his bellows-type view camera and photograph (shoot) the page. The plate with an electrostatic image would then be placed in an aluminum box and dusted with fine black toner powder. The toner would stick forming an image on the plate, which would then be placed in a “fixer” along with the paper. A heat-fixing process would cause the toner to adhere to the paper.

Using this wonderful machine, I copied the current Sept.’77 issue of the Scientific American. That photocopy marked a watershed in my engineering ambitions. It inspired me to build a career on the microcomputer frontier.

Computer design has made great strides since the Intel 8080. An ever-increasing amount of functionality is integrated in-silicon. CPU-design battles are now fought with large gate count, IP-based, bus-intensive system-on-chips (SoC), designed using SystemVerilog.

The essential spirit of the high-tech industry, the feverish pace, the mystique, the go-for-broke approach to business continues, as the industry pursues mind-bending technological innovations with new generations pouring out of the engineering colleges.