Floppy Discs & Punched Cards

Perhaps I belong to the people who were the last to use a Punched card system to compute. I could run a small Fortran program that generated KWIC index entries. The program read titles, word by word, the end of the word was identified by the presence of a space; matched each word with a list of 10 stop words; suppressed index entries for the Stop words and generated indexes for all the rest of the words present in the Title. Surprisingly delightful! The program ran in one go. When my Computers Sir Mr. Sharbhani Ranjan Kundu told me that my program ran without any `bug' I couldn't beleieve. We used about 30 titles as input. We could have tried with more titles but there was no point in working further with obsolete systems. But we were thrilled about using TEXT input and making a simple program work for our specific need. This was in 1986, when I was doing Associateship in Information Science, in the then INSDOC (Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre, a CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research), New Delhi. Now INSDOC is NISCAIR. However, my first introduction to computers was in Sri Venkateswara University Computer Centre, in 1985 soon after completing the course period of my degree in Agriculture from the then APAU (Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University), Tirupati. that year the university computer centre offered certificate course in Computer Languages with Fortran and Cobal as options. I chose Fortran. It is during this course our Teacher and family friend Sri. Swamy garu, Professor of Mechanical Engineering laid a strong foundation in drawing Flow charts. Once the Flow chart is in place, clearly reflecting the logic, input and output, writing a program is just a matter of translation. My gratitude to the great Master who inspured me for the rest of my life and changed the course of my specialization, from Agriculre to Computers via Library Science. I enrolled myself in a Systems Analysis and Design Program from Annamalai University in distance study mode. I was very much convinced withe course material they were sending and the way the course has been conducted. I had also submitted a paper on "Use of Computers in Library Applications" for a conference in the same University. This was a review of work done in various areas of Library and documentation domain. Tailpiece: While returning from INSDOC I carried with myself the handsome book with Navy Blue cardboard cover and beautiful colour plates, that I fell in love with. Actually, there was no need for me to buy that book after completing the course but I was excited about the new knowledge gained and was keeping that book handy to show every one what a computer is, and how it works, even to fellow passengers in trains and buses. Back in those days people didn't have mobiles in their hands and people didn't mind looking into a colourful book that talked about computers. Demystyfying computers! I took it as my mission. Note: I somehow remember the author name as PC Saunders ...the book looked very similar to this one, but not exactly the one shon in this picture.