Flashback: DCM Data Products and my Information Technology Journey
In this blog, I want to retrace my journey into the world of computers and information technology. It is my tribute to BITS Pilani, DCM Data Products and CMC which shaped my future.
Individual experience has often been measured in years of work rather than its richness and diversity bringing personal, business and community value.
Back in 1977, as a young student at BITS, we all had “open access” to the IBM 1430, a midrange gifted by MIT to the university. Like most students, I did courses in FORTRAN (Formula Translation) and PASCAL and indulged in hobby programming. We wrote our programs on paper, punched into cards that measured “80x24 rows” and submitted to the operator who ran the bunch of all submissions twice a day. Through the glass walls, we could watch the IBM 1430 run programs crunch data and produce printouts on “Line Printers”. The hope was that there were no errors else, we had to fix the cards and wait for the next run. Not being the most disciplined student, I ended up in Bio-Sciences and later in Management. Early on I realized that the future of business administration lies in information management, hence I learnt COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) in my 4th year. Soon the IBM 1430 had a companion in the HP 3000 minicomputer with multiple terminals. That made it a lot easier to enter compile and run programs especially COBOL.
In 1978, IBM departed from India, refusing to dilute its equity to 49% and left behind a large pool of engineers. Out of these engineers, were born three companies that were the beginnings of the Indian Computer Industry i.e. DCM Data Products, ECIL (Electronic Corporation of Indian Limited) and Computer Maintenance Corporation of India. ECIL not only manufactured TVs but also designed and built mid-range computers that ran PL1, COBOL and RPG as a replacement for IBM machines. DCM followed the same path designing some of the first micro and mini computers in addition to its popular calculators. Its Galaxy/9 series ran COBOL, RPG and PL1 and offered a replacement to IBM 1401s. The DCM Daten/9 replaced the old punch card data entry machines. CMC took a different path by becoming the maintenance leader for all the machines left behind with no support. Shiv Nadar (ex. IBM and later DCM) formed HCL another pioneer in the Indian computer industry.
During the summer of 1983, while training at the Commerce Research Bureau, Mumbai as part of my curriculum, one of my tasks was to rank the top 1000 Indian companies by various attributes. It was a family run company with no clue about computers. I wrote a COBOL program and requested my dad to get it run on his office mainframe the Russian made BESM G6. It occupied an entire floor with an array of blinking lights and was fascinating to look at. That program was a success and my results were published in the CRB Magazine then. I also wrote a few programs on the Prime 450, a minicomputer. My school shifted my training to CMC Ltd. (Formerly Computer Maintenance Corporation). Here again, I developed several COBOL programs for the IDBI Bills Rediscounting System and executed them on the TDC-316 (Trombay Digital Computer) , a mid-range built by ECIL.
Upon graduation I worked for DCM and had the opportunity to understand the many machines that we designed and manufactured in India. Though I applied for Sales, DCM felt I would make a better system engineer.
DCM provided extensive training, the most exciting one being NEAT (New Entrants Advanced Training). This was a 2-month intensive training at Hotel Ashok and Samrat Delhi. Staying in a 5-star hotel and learning from experts was an envy of the industry at that time. Subsequently, DCM held regular employee training in Delhi. Training included Sales & Marketing, personality development, technology and business.
DCM had an array of product offerings. The DCM Spectrum Series of machines ran the CPM OS (Control Program for Microprocessors). Designing business programs for machines that only had 8”-256K floppy drives and 48K of memory was quite a challenge. These machines were based on the Intel 8085 and supported BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, DBASE, SuperCalc, WordStar to name a few. The DCM Galaxy/9 was based on DCM’s proprietary design but the next generation Galaxy/21 had an Intel 8086 with a 8087 co-processor. It supported 16 terminals with a maximum memory of 1 MB. The operating system MULTOS was a DCM modification to the Intel iRMX real-time operating system. DCM developed and supported BASIC, COBOL and multi-key ISAM (index sequential access method). Programming on Multos was tricky since it was an interrupt driven OS. The DCM Galaxy was a sturdy work horse. Our daily schedule included a visit to clients with high priority issues and then slowly winding the day with customer account visits. In a day, I sometimes was in 5 to 7 customer locations. Sometimes I chalked my schedule based on the breakfast, lunch and evening snack menu at each client since it was free and delicious. Due to the issue of dust, floppy drives and tape drives would have frequent issues. CRCC errors, line card failures, rats chewing cables up and data corruption were quite common.
Most often HCL DCM, ICIM (ICL India subsidiary) would all be competing for business and often it came down to the core processor, math processor, disk drive, floppy drive, line printer speeds and tape drive spec. Customers would ask for benchmarks such as sequential file R/W. sort/merge and matrix inversion. DCM’s newer models were based on the PC BUS and included the intel 80386 based Olympia/31, the 80486 based Zeus and the PS (personal System) series. The DCM minis and super minis exposed me to many flavors of Unix such as Xenix, System V and BSD. UNIFY (one of the first relational databases) and C Lang became the primary programming language along with DCM Basic and Cobol. DCM also introduced the Tandy Model-4 and programming on TRSDOS with its array of features was fun. DCM enhanced the micro with support for 5"-1Mb floppy drives, 25MB HDDx4 and a cassette tape drive. The Model 4 was the best selling model of 1985 in India. We introduced “Daisy Wheel” and “Dot matrix” printers to our line. New Winchester Disk Drives from Control Data Corporation were added. DCM represented the now non existent Control Data Corporation in India and we marketed the CDC Series and Plato Learning Platform. I had the opportunity to accompany our elite sales team when they visited prospects and competed against the likes of Cyber.
Soon the IBM PC made its way into the Indian market with Minicomp leading the way. We were behind but soon introduced the Intel 8080 based Tandy 1000 and Intel 386 based Tandy 3000 supporting MSDOS and Xenix. The graphical monitors were a far cry from the 24x80 green screens. I had the opportunity to install and support a variety of software such as VersaCAD, Vianet, Lotus series, VisiCalc to name a few. In 1986, I had to demo Cartography to then Minister P Chidambaram and Anil Lakhina. Using some hacks, I was was abled to plot India, Maharashtra and Pune, and overlay that with location of primary health centers , public schools etc. using the digitizer pen and pad on Versacad. I installed several of the first Devanagari micro i.e. DCM Siddharth based on ISCII and 8085/86.
Being a field systems engineer allowed me to learn, experiment and support a wide variety of hardware and software. These included interfacing our machines to other computers such as Digital’s PDP 11, Data General, Sperry, VAX 8800, ICL 2904 mostly via the serial interface for data exchange.
During one of the corporate training, Professor Shiv Gupta, Prof at Wharton School and a mentor of Dr. Vinay Bharat Ram introduced us to Operations Research tools. I had the opportunity to convert his code for application development on the PC. These included the travelling salesman problem, linear and integer programming, plant location etc. Venkateshwara Hatcheries was a client and I worked with their engineers to develop the LP model to solve the feed-mix that produced the most optimal chickens and eggs. Later, I worked on a similar exercise at Deccan Sugar Institute, Pune to apply LP to maximize sugarcane yield.
The precursor to many of today’s IoT devices were the PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers). These were industrial sensors and transmitted data over RS 232 and RS 422. Under Dr. Sunder, our R&D expert and Pune Branch Manager, I learnt a lot about the DCM Data Logger and the DCM MICON (an industrial process control system with 8 PLC channels which could be daisy chained to 8 more) creating a formidable replacement for old control rooms. Each MICON was roughly 2’ in length and 1 foot wide. The MICONs were manufactured under license from Powell Systems, Houston. One of my first assignments at DCM was to trouble shoot and support the DCM Data Logger at NCL (National Chemical Labs, Pune) having some application issues. Later, I followed Dr. Sunder on various MICON installations at Garware Nylons, Pudumjee Pulp & Paper and Century Enka.
The APRICOT (Attendance Production Information Control Terminal) was another notable product. They consisted of small badge readers that recorded BCD encoded badges carried by employees and workers and transmitted them via multiplexors to a computer. Badge Readers would converge into a multiplexer connected to the host machine. Real-time attendance capture, labor reallocation and time management applications were built around this technology. I worked with our R&D to optimize the device drivers on the field and develop applications. At Bajaj, I integrated the APRICOT with the Digital VAX 8800, a very modern mini computer at that time.
As a field system engineer, I covered over 50 customers across 3 states. The customers came from a myriad of industries such as sugar mills, dairy farms, defense, banks, mining and shipping, small business, automobiles, universities and engineering. A systems engineer had many responsibilities including new installation management, developing committed applications mostly alone or in a pair, installing and modifying off-the-shelf DCM applications, integration with third party hardware and software, writing device drivers, sales support, customer training; anything under the sun. This forced the Systems Engineer to be on top of business and technology. My first assignment at DCM was to develop computations for Tata Memorial Cancer Research Hospital. Subsequently, I was involved solo or with my systems manager in applications ranging from MRP, BOM, Purchase, Inventory, Plant Management, Sugar Cane Accounting, Labor and Attendance, Transportation, Bus Ticketing and many many more.
The experience at DCM lead me to exciting consulting engagements. I became proficient in C, RDBMS, SQL and the internals of the Unix OS. One of the most exciting engagement was a hardware upgrade of the TI PAC 20 IC Tester with a SPARC motherboard from MIZAR. SPARC (Scalable Process Architecture) was a RISC Processor developed by Sun Micro. It was quite challenging for me and my colleague — my background in bio and business, and his in hotel management. We burnt a lot of EPROMs while programming changes to the BIOS and SPARC Monitor code and developing device drivers. The support from Russ Keenan and Steve Comen at TI was invaluable. This was a major success and boosted our confidence. At TI, I wrote several drivers including a “shared memory segmentation manager” and a VT100 emulator for the SPARC workstation. Programming graphical interfaces in SunView and Motif was new and exciting.
With the advent of RISC based machines, my next assignment leads me to work on the IBM RS/6000, an AIX based platform. We developed transportation applications on Ingres, a new RDBMS with support for C, SQL and ABF. These RISC based UNIX systems were quite powerful delivering exceptional performance. That exposure ended me in Telecom and my consulting stint at Nortel allowed me to develop applications in C++, Visualwave SmallTalk, Oracle and Java on the Apollo Domain and HP workstations for the Nortel Meridian switch.
I will end this blog with one more experience at MCI in 1996. Getting trained and working on the TMN 6000 (RS/6000 supporting Telecommunication Management Network) gave great insights into ATM , Frame Relay, SONET and developing sub-net managers to intelligently manage networks. IBM had a fantastic product called Agent-Manager Framework with support for GDMO (Guidelines for Development of Managed Objects) a telecom standard , making it an ideal platform to develop subnet managers. I developed some of the core objects like Network Element, Network Element Profile, Audit and Audit Profile.
Someday, I will write another post covering the post 1999 period. I think I can go on, but if you made it this far, you must have an interesting story to tell.