The First Computer Comes To India...

Professor and head of the Electronics and Communications Unit of

ISI, the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta, Dr Dwijish Dutta Majumdar,

smiled weakly as we shook hands. At 53 he was bespectacled, hair brushed back,

slightly heavy in the middle which you notice only when he stands up. There were

at least 40 kgs of paper on the table, much of which had strong bearing on

fields as diverse as image processing to pattern recognition and artificial

intelligence to multi valued logic of fuzzy mathematics.

Dr Majumdar or DDM, is an institution within an institution. In

the next three hours, he took us on a conducted tour of what should be a

compulsory subject in initiating every computer professional in India.

No. It was not just the first 'computer for India to be

brought here in 1995, it was the first in Asia, outside Japan. DDM lights up a

Wills Navy Cut cigarette and adds that ISI had the distinction of developing the

first Indian analog computer as well. Nehru came to meet the computer that

solved a 10 x 10 single precision matrix in 90 minutes. It was built with

military disposal.

The first of the two digital computers in India was also

installed here. Towards the end of 1955, came the HEC-2M, a giant piece of

equipment that set sail from England in two crates. Nobody knows how much it

weighted but, yes, it took about two months for ISI people to install the 1K

memory, tube-based system. It was not the days of manufacture by hundreds and

thousands. This was specially crafted and designed by Professor AD Booth at Birk

Bak College in the UK.

Two young people were sent by Prof Mahalanobis to get trained by

Prof Booth himself in installing and managing the equipment.

One was Prof MM Mukherjee and the other was Amaresh Roy. Could I

meet them, I enquired, breaking DDM's nostalgia. He stopped for a moment.

Looked out of the grey December window. No, Mr Roy is no more and Prof Mukherjee

has left the country and now lives with his son in the USA.

The HEC-2M was a 16-bit machine. With 16 instructions. It

operated in machine code with its drum memory of 1024 words. Some of the double

precision was there with 32 bits registers. It did not have a printer or a tape.

It used punched cards and gave out punched cards, till ISI fixed a printer. Was

it part of a grant? DDM recollects, "It was purchased. I think it was

around Rs 2 lakh and you know what Rs 2 lakh was in 1955!"

Housed in an air-conditioned space of about 300 square feet, the

HEC-2M 'worked'. Scientific problems poured in from all parts of the

country, including a lot of work from the Defense, mostly for trajectory

analysis for artillery cannons. DDM remembers lovingly, "It most became the

National Computational Center of India."

In 1958, with a grant from the UNTAB (United Nations Technical

Assistance Board), ISI got a computer named after the mountain range of the

country of its origin—URAL. It came from Russia with a few things over the

HEC-2M. Also, unlike HEC-2M, it was accompanied by a team of Russian engineers.

HEC-24, posing with the late Professor Amaresh Roy....

It had a 32-bit word size, a horizontal magtape, a punched

celluloid tape, 2 Kb of memory and a printer that made "ridiculous

sounds".

At this point Ashok Dasgupta joined in. Now 52, he is one of the

few who can offer a firsthand account of the feelings of the '50s. Dasgupta

was connected with both HEC-2M and URAL from "opening the packing box"

that came by ship.

Yes, there was a formal celebration but he cannot recall the

details. How was it to be associated with India's first computer in 1955?

Dasgupta took a puff of his Regent Regular and informed us that his family took

immense pride that he was associated with the only computer of the country.

Today, Biswanath Das is graying. In 1956, he was a peon in the

ISI Computer Group. Thirty years after, he is still with DDM, now in the

Electronics and Communication Sciences Unit. Das peered through his lenses and

suddenly his unshaven face lit up in ecstacy. "Oh, you are talking about

URAL and HEC-2M? Yes, I was there and we worked late nights for them. We were

very happy with their arrival, and particularly with that of HEC-2M." For

Das and for many others, it was not 'the' URAL or , 'the' HEC-2M. In

recollection, they are almost like family pets who were around for such a long

time. Both were used well till 1964 when IBM installed the 1401 here. And with

that event, India's first two computers were given a rest.

Could one go and see them, I enquired. For a moment all three

people became disturbingly quiet. They were dismantled and thrown irretrievably

in some godowns long back, I was told. Today it may not be possible to rearrange

them beyond bits and pieces.

ISI has never thought of keeping any memento around it, like

possibly the first card punched by it. "I had thought of making a museum to

preserve them but it could not happen. If someone comes, I am willing to trace

them from wherever they are and give the remains from preservation," a

pensive DDM remarks. Ingratitude to history ins firm-wired in the basic fibres

of the nation,



but possibly readers will come forward to help.

Before going to the archives to trace a few photographs, I

decided to give the search a try. Winding through damp corridors we landed up in

a long tin-roofed godown which partly is a workshop and partly a junkyard.

Covered under heaps of cobwebs and dust accumulated over years of neglect, lay

buried metal remains of many discoveries, prototypes and tools used in basic

research. I had almost given up the search when a jubilant DDM shouted with joy—"Look,

there is HEC-2M". I could not even go to a foot away from it in the pile of

scrap, with cobwebs hanging like tentacles of death. From where I stood, the 6

x 4 HEC-2M looked like an oversized PABX panel with the switches, instructions

and a voltage meter still clearly visible. God forbid, if DDM is not around for

some reason, nobody will ever know where it all began-because India's first

computer will not be identifiable by the scientists of today.

HEC-2M-Once Premiers and Heads of States used to come and see

it. Today it is resting desolately it heaps of allied scrap—like one more

skeleton in a technological graveyard.

Subroto Bagchi





Dataquest, January 1985



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