Saturday 22 August, 2009

Anniversaries

Last year was the 40th anniversary of some of the important events in Vietnam and also the 40th anniversary of important demonstrations, sit-ins and student occupations of college campus buildings in several countries -- as a part of the civil rights movement against racism and the anti-war movement. This summer brings the 40th anniversary of both the Woodstock music festival (I was also there) and the invention of the Unix operating system.

According to an article by Mark Ward published in this morning's Business Line, Unix was developed at Bell Labs after a joint effort by AT&T, MIT and GE failed miserably to build an ambitious multi-user system called Multics. Ken Thomson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs consequently with a lot of time on their hands decided to persist and it was in August 1969 that Thomson apparently wrote the core components of the operating system, shell, editor and assembler. It sort of helped that his wife was away visiting her family for a month.

The software started running on a DEC PDP7 and by the early 1970's five people were working on the OS which had been named Unix by Brian Kernighan who wanted to contrast Unix with the failed Multics. As they say the rest is history but the details can be interesting and software has played a large role in what is called globalisation. As far as I can see Unix has been crucial for the development of the Indian expertise in information technology. Although like almost everywhere the pioneer programmers used all kinds of assembly languages and Fortran on hardware from IBM, it seems to me (and I may be wrong) that it was the installation of the DEC PDP computers in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other scientific installations that really spawned a huge number of Unix and C-language programmers in the country.

For the most part the DEC PDP-10's came to the Institutes with Unix (and thirty or forty binders of documentation) but very little application software. And there were many young students and academics who were ready to spend days and nights and weeks in those tube-lit super-air-conditioned computer labs ready to learn Unix and to write all kinds of applications. I think that many of these students became formidable programmers and researchers. We met some of them during the 1970's and early 1980's in the course of the discussion of computers and non-Roman languages for the purpose of typesetting in Indian scripts. Publishing system developments in America were similarly influenced when an MIT grad student was motivated (and financed) to build the Atex editorial system that ran on the DEC PDP system.

Friday 21 August, 2009

This was the title of our first experimental blog

To be honest I have been too ambitious over the past couple of years and instead of just blogging tried to set up a whole set of blogging systems. The whole thing became a project together with the project of renovating our several websites. As could be expected it became an endless struggle while blogging has become like personal computing -- personal. In the meanwhile Facebook has arrived and then twitter and here I am just beginning my serious blogging while the rest of world is already going to the post-blog era. A bit like writing about printing when the whole world has gone to the radio, television, Internet, cellphone, blog and twitter. Nevertheless, it is interesting to try and span these communication and broadcast technologies -- there must be a continuum and hopefully one's evolution in dealing with it can be made somewhat interesting.

Since I decided two days ago to just do it rather than wait for some bespoke and perhaps ideal solution I realised that the tools are not only marvelous but also easily accessible. I confess that I have taken the help of one of my young colleagues who is tolerant of my sometimes beleaguered activities. In the process we have actually started two more blogs -- one for colour management and standardisation and the other for publishing. That leaves me with the problem or opportunity of what to do with this blog. I think it will be best if it is used for general topics that include some of the business issues such as the decline or pressure on print prices, the human resource issues and also environment and green printing. These are issues which are discussed at least on the telephone every day with the readers of our trade magazines.

Originally envisioned as a kind of CEO blog, my colleagues advised me a few weeks ago that the blogs that would be successful for our business would be those that are technical or 'how to' blogs. So we have done with the two other blogs started yesterday but in this one I hope and the blogging team will tolerate my continued obsessions with the Indian economy and the Delhi traffic which I see as a metaphor for both chaos and change.

Wednesday 19 August, 2009

Are we finally getting somewhere?

There is an old Laurel and Hardy movie where the two protagonists are carrying luggage and trying to find their way out of a maze (a gazebo made of hedges). After a great deal of going back and forth and around one corner and another and they come to some kind of a signpost. We know they are hopelessly lost but one of them says, "Now we're finally getting somewhere!"

This a bit like what I am feeling after trying to become a blogger for the last 20 months. We have made many fits and starts and are now more or less realising that its simpler than we thought. The technology is not that tough (after all every one is doing it) and that all the features that we need to create blogs for our print community are easily available and downloadable.

We expect in the next few days to invite our industry friends to take part in this and one other blog which will be a how to or technical blog on printing, colour management and standardisation. So instead of these sporadic sputtering get ready for day to blogs and comments from the print community in India and Asia.