Disclaimer:
Issued in the interest of Fake News and Alternate Facts. The following contents are based on the suspect memory of the author who does not accept any responsibility for fake news. Lapses in memory are overcome by creative licence.
Dear Alumni:
This article is about POWER. No, it is not about political power, or social power, or muscular power just the normal stuff supplied to computer systems.The sun was shining, birds were chirping back in 1971 when I first ventured into the ICL 1903 computer room of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). This hallowed temple was located on the 8th floor of Nirmal Building (India’s first office high rise at the reclaimed land at Nariman Point, Mumbai). For the benefit of the younger readers, it should be clarified that ICL stood for International Computers Limited, which was a British company, later acquired by Fujitsu of Japan, and has since joined the “Dodo”
The sun was shining, birds were chirping back in 1971 when I first ventured into the ICL 1903 computer room of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). This hallowed temple was located on the 8th floor of Nirmal Building (India’s first office high rise at the reclaimed land at Nariman Point, Mumbai). For the benefit of the younger readers, it should be clarified that ICL stood for International Computers Limited, which was a British company, later acquired by Fujitsu of Japan, and has since joined the “Dodo”
The room was quite large and not only housed the ICL 1903 “main frame” with four tapes drives, and two large printers, which could take 165 characters stationery, as against the normal 132 characters width. There was a card reader. (Here, I have to go back to the “caveman” days of data processing, when one captured data by punching holes on to a thick paper card which was 80 columns by 12 rows in an offline mode) and a single IBM card-punching machine. Then, there was a room for the ICL field engineer, who was more or less a captive part, as the machine gave many problems and needed a round the clock “nanny” service.
In addition, there was a windowless room with a huge machine that whirred noisily.
This machine, I discovered, was a motor generator (MG) set. Again for the benefit of those younger readers brought up on AA size batteries and dinky little power adapters, an MG set takes dirty power from the public utility and converts it into clean and stable electric power. This sanitized power fed the ICL machine.
However there was no such MG set for the two IBM 1401 computers which were located on the same floor and were nicknamed “Able”, and “Baker” and they seemed quite happy with the unfiltered raw power supplied by BEST, much like the hardy souls grown used to Mumbai street food.
I was told that the ICL 1903, nicknamed “Charlie” was “third generation” and a more sophisticated machine, and like all sophisticated beasts, required “filtered” power just as our NRIs required bottled mineral water.It seems that the Calcutta Electric Supply Company (CESC) imported the ICL 1903 initially for its own data processing needs. Now, that was very risky and ill considered move because CESC had a very strong communist union; and in those days the unions were dead against computerization, as they feared
It seems that the Calcutta Electric Supply Company (CESC) imported the ICL 1903 initially for its own data processing needs. Now, that was very risky and ill-considered move because CESC had a very strong communist union; and in those days the unions were dead against computerization, as they feared loss of jobs. On top of that, Kolkata (Calcutta in those days) was the bastion of the Communist Party of India. So the project never took off and the computer lay in cold storage for a year, gathering dust, which by the way proves that even cold storage in Kolkata is dusty.
Somehow, ICL managed to convince TCS to buy the machine, and take it off their hands. That required permission from the Department of Electronics (DOE), the nodal agency for computer imports – remember those were the bad old days of Licence Raj. But there was a catch (always a catch); because foreign exchange was involved in importing the computer. In those days, foreign exchange was scarce and imports were allowed only for essential items, and computers were considered as luxury items such as perfumes, fur coats, and sports cars. (Those were the days, my friends, when having a computer spelled sheer class – the ultimate status symbol for a company!) So, as a last resort, TCS suggested that it could use the ICL computer to export software expertise. The DOE then got greedy and asked for exports twice the import value of the ICL computer over a five-year period. An onerous requirement – as in those days nobody expected an Indian company to export anything except raw cotton, handicrafts, and jute. Thus was born the great software export promotion policy of the Government of India.
But now to get back to the original story! Since the machine had gathered quite a bit of dust in the Calcutta godown, ICL was worried about the computer’s ability to provide error free service, and so, to play safe, it insisted on TCS installing the MG set. This set was not only expensive, but was very heavy and had to be lifted up by a heavy duty winch and cables. As the beast was being hoisted to the 8th floor of the Nirmal building, the cable snapped, and the set crashed onto the roof of the show room of the Kerala Arts and Craft Company (KAIRALI), which was on the ground floor.
Needless to say, everyone panicked and customers of KAIRALI thought that an earthquake had struck. Fortunately, no one was hurt, and the roof of the showroom duly repaired, and the MG set consigned to the scrap heap. Mr Kohli, who was India’s top power engineer at the time, and also General Manager of TCS opined that, as Tata Electric supplied very reliable power to BEST, an MG set was not really be required. In his earlier avatar Mr Kohli was Deputy General manager at Tata Electric.
The ICL 1903 was, however, unaware of the reputation of the Tata generated power. It kept tripping up intermittently and the blame-game began.
Today, we see the blame-game being played out under the public glare of TV, Internet, WhatsApp etc. Whenever there is a disaster the blame game starts, media blames the politicians, who blame the bureaucrats, who blame the public sector, who blame the weather forecast department and so on.
Well, in those early days of the computer industry, if something went wrong, then, first you blame the software guys, who then blame the hardware guys, who in turn blame the environment. So this is what happened with the ICL 1903.
We were experiencing what are called random transient problems. Which meant, that the same problem could not be repeated under similar conditions. So, it became very difficult to nail the problem and fix it. So consequently, the best thing to do – human nature being human – was to shift the blame on to someone else.
First, the ICL engineer complained of too much dust, so one’s shoes were not allowed. This did not help much, though it did give the impression that some very important and hush-hush work was going on.
Next to be blamed was the air-conditioning; so Voltas were called in. Air-conditioning was fine; so now what?
The ICL engineer had to think of something, and voila there was the culprit – an innocuous IBM punch card machine, which was interfering with the finely tuned electronics of the ICL 1903. An investigation took place, which absolved IBM as it turned out the punch card machine was manually operated and it did not emit any destructive electronic signals!
So, as a last resort, the engineer complained of varying voltage supply in input power. So once again the MG set was acquired and installed!
I don’t quite recall if the transient problems were ever resolved, but just as all irritants, like headaches etc we learned to live with the idiosyncrasies of the machine and ultimately got quite a bit of work out it. Finally, the machine paid for itself and fully justified the bold decision to acquire it in the first place. Some very prestigious and complex projects such as BOMBAY Telephone billing and directory printing, Bank of Baroda inter-branch reconciliation system, SSC results processing and printing, BOMBAY Municipal billing applications to name a few, were executed on the ICL 1903.
The machine had a memory of 6k words and each word was 24 bits. At that time it was considered a luxury. Compared to the IBM 1401 computers the ICL 1903 could perform dual programming and that meant two jobs could be run simultaneously!
Most programs were written in COBOL, but for some of the complicated jobs requiring more machine-level operations we wrote the programs in the ICL native language called PLAN.
Knowledge of the ICL software also enabled TCS to develop expertise on converting programs written for the ICL machines to be run on the machines of Burroughs Computers, USA. This way TCS helped Burroughs replace ICL computers and enabled TCS to earn valuable foreign exchange which, in turn, helped meet its software export obligations!
After ultimately paying for itself, the 1903 system was replaced by a more powerful ICL 1904, which in turn was replaced by more powerful Burroughs machines, thereby ending the association with ICL.
Jayant V Pendharkar
Jayant (TCS 1971-1979 and 1996-2010) is the Secretary and a Governing Body member of Fortess. Connect with him here.
