Looking back

Reading Swaroop's account of his involvement with Linux in college made me look back to my college days. I joined the Model Engineering College, Cochin as a B.Tech student (CS) in 1992. The PC had not yet become mainstream in India and there were just a few guys in class who had even seen a computer before. We got started with MS-DOS and simple programs in Turbo Pascal (running on real 8086 machines) - I still remember a cute program which plotted a sine wave on the screen using the `*' character!

If I remember it correctly, it was during our second year in college that we got to see Windows for the first time - that too on a huge monitor which was used for doing some kind of CAD stuff! It was quite impressive for us newbies - one memory of this period is a thick book on Windows programming with the `OWL' (Object Windows Library) - for some reason, I didn't quite like the stuff written in that book.

We had a Unix lab which ran on a big 486 machine - the OS was SCO. Lot's of dumb terminals were connected to the server and we had a good time playing tetris and writing stupid little shell scripts. The Unix lab was mostly used for teaching compiler construction (LeX/Yacc) and systems programming (IPC, shared mem, semaphores etc). Some seniors also used it for doing database projects with Ingres.

The college management was at that time quite liberal when it came to purchasing equipment; around the same period we got introduced to Windows, there arrived in the lab a Silicon Graphics workstation (running the amazing Irix operating system) and a DEC Alpha system. The SGI machine was real cool - it came with a small movie camera - you could take your photo and put it up on the photo login page - click your photo to log on to the machine! Most of us guys who were really interested in computers soon realized that the `Windows' stuff was absolute crap and there were *much* better things in the world.

One day when we tried booting a machine in the lab, it simply displayed two character on the screen:

LI

We found this new OS quite interesting. Nobody had worked on it before and it was fun to discover things by trial and error and experimentation (something which I believe many `new-generation' students are unwilling to do in the age of `Googling'). There is one bookshop in Cochin called `Mindstorm' whose owner was an enlightened chap - he arranged us a book which was a collection of documents taken from the Linux Documentation project - we had something to go by. We soon had a small network running and tetris gaming shifted to machines on this network.

We had a mini project coming up - networking was something fascinating at that time and we decided to do some TCP/IP stuff using the new OS. I had read an article in IEEE Computer about `Computer Supported Co-operative Work' - the idea is that you share things like a whiteboard over the network - you draw something,others on the network can see it real-time. We learnt a bit of Xlib programming and some socket stuff from the amazing Steven's book and cobbled up a program which was trivial but impressive in its output.

I got hooked to h/w interfacing with Linux when I wrote a simple user space driver to interface an ADC card and read data from it - this was originally done as an exercise in the hardware lab on MS-DOS but soon got `ported' over to Linux. The networking craze even made us write a `networked' CRO which acquires data from the card and distributes it to clients over the n/w. Simple stuff, but thrilling to a beginner.

The main project was an `extension' of the mini project - we decided to add some audio and video to our earlier program. The video data was obtained from the camera on the SGI machine and was distributed to client Linux systems over the network - our knowledge of X was feeble and we found that the display couldn't update itself fast enough. Then we used some kind of mmap trick to gain direct access to the video mem - the plotting was now quite fast! Looking back, it was an absolutely stupid program, but at that time, we were quite excited about it!

Coming back to Swaroop's article, I note that the single most important point in our favour at that time was a teacher who was good enough to let his students experiment with new things. Prof.Jyothi John was a pioneer in this regard and helped us set up perhaps the first Linux lab in Kerala. I have (unfortunately) lost all contact with Model Engineering College, but I hope the current group of students are as passionate about GNU/Linux as we were in those `good old' days!