The Century, Past And Future

When you sit down to write your

experiences and views at the turn of a century, you are deeply conscious that this opportunity comes only once in a hundred years! And when it also happens to be the dawn of a new millennium, the realization is even more intense. I therefore can’t help taking the liberty of going down memory lane.It’s an amazing experience! Almost feels like passing through a museum! I can clearly recollect the early afternoon in a London office in the late sixties when a new electronic calculator was brought for demonstration. No pocket ones those days! It was the size of a small portable typewriter with bright red glowing digits. Every time you calculated, the red lights in the digits danced like crazy before coming to a halt. Looked impressive to those who were still on slide rules and Facit mechanical calculators! Our office had an IBM 360 mainframe. We used it by submitting data sheets of our problems in a fixed format. The keyboard operators in the computer service department keyed in the data and in three to four hours’ time, depending on the queue, we got the output sheets! An error in the decimal point or a field required a resubmission–and another four hours to complete. No terminals yet! Still Fortran IV e and f levels.

Back in India in CMERI, running a program meant a deck of data punch cards sorted twice from the output bin for intermediate punch cards before I could even see the face of the output result! Our in-house ICL machine had programming panels that our expert used for actually connecting terminals through cables. This was done just as the old PBX machine operator used to plug in cables to connect telephone calls. If we narrate these bizarre things we worked with, a 22-year-old today would think of us as a crazy bunch beyond comprehension. But then, that is the basic nature of knowledge. It can grow exponentially but not vertically. It has its progression and all must take the journey.

When I came to my present company, 13 years ago, there was just one computer. Today it is hard to find a company without even one PC! The advent of PCs and networking changed the face of our work environment within no time. The XTs, ATs, Pentiums, Celerons, Pentium IIIs and a host of developments followed. And it all happened at such lightening speed, it was as if they were waiting for ages to descend on mankind and shatter away the shackles of inefficiency. Communications, wireless technologies, imaging, storage and retrieval devices have been creating miracles with ever-diminishing size and enhanced performance. The incredible speed of development has removed the mental block about ‘limits’ and taken us to the realms of the ‘limitless’. Sophisticated software development riding on the automobile, aerospace and process industries took huge strides in the areas of technical analysis, data management, business processes, knowledge management and research activities. I am waiting for the day when I could communicate through a universal voice command in a small bug attached to my jacket lapel. I could compute and execute while driving on a highway with a display on my dash board in a totally wireless regime. And all this through that super-infoway of internet that has brought about the

erevolution.

We can justifiably call the last decade of the 20th century ‘the decade of enabling technologies’. The IT infrastructure has thrown an unprecedented challenge in every walk of life to harness it to the fullest extent. A lot has happened but I have a sneaking feeling that out of the three components that make the full picture–PPT (People, Processes and Technology)–the ‘P’s have found it difficult to keep pace with the ‘T’. Are we seeing an ever-widening gap between them? Are the efforts in changing the mindset, training people, facilitating applications and harmonizing PPT at the same pitch as development of hardware and software? Is IT developing into a shooting ‘comet’ leaving everything behind or is it a ‘Sun’ carrying all the planets around it, moving forward in the galaxy at a phenomenal pace?

The greatest challenge in the new millennium would be to identify with the new eculture and handle its fallouts. The technology will need to bring the benefits to the teeming millions and not create a divide between the techno-elite and the techno-ignorant. The internet would dismantle the barriers to knowledge and eliminate differentiations based on hierarchy, age, gender, caste, creed and culture. Knowledge will reign supreme. All technologies and

infrastructures would be available to everyone as easily as ‘pay and park’ on the internet. The techno-society of the new millennium will need to handle the rapid human obsolescence and diminishing premium on experience due to radical and fast changes. We may face challenges of large heads on narrowing shoulders with intelligence overtaking the world of feelings. In the world of netizens the value of emotions and touch would have to be protected from cyber cafes, efriends, web-companions, net-bazaars and ecommerce.



I am confident humanity will make all the right moves and create a real happy world in the new millennium. India with its ancient belief of superiority of brain over brawn would carve a niche for its new generation in the arriving
knowledge-world.