Advent of computer age in my forties fascinated me so much, that I forgot my field of specialisation and got addicted to this ever changing field of technology. I had experienced old style programming in Fortran and Basic during my Ph.D. work at IIT Kanpur during in 1973-76, where we used to type on punching cards and submitting our card deck to in charge of computer lab and waiting for day or two to get answer. Many a times we used to get stack of pages with errors and whole exercise was repeated till a proper output is obtained. My research work did not require use of computers and in fact my guide was against unnecessary use of computers. But the novelty of computer drew me to try some programs at that time.
After I returned to Sangli in 1976, there was a long gap for many years, when I had no access to computers.
After 1980, college received grant to purchase Omni main frame computer from Bangalore which had capacity of two 80 MB harddisks, which we thought to be enormous at that time. College decided to send 5 faculty ( one from each department) for training of this new computer. Prof. Yardi ( Electronics Dept.), Prof. Shiyekar(Applied Mechanics Dept.), (Late) Prof. Sajanikar(Mechanical Dept.), Prof. Sane(Mechanical Dept.) and myself(Civil Dept.) were selected for the purpose. We were trained for one and half months in Bangalore in computer hardware, Unix and COBOL.
After the computer became operational, (Late) Prof. N. R. Phadnis started computer diploma courses in our college and I joined the team as a faculty. We were teaching Basic and COBOL at that time. Our courses were heavily loaded with information about history of computers, hardware information and system engineering. My wife, Sou. Shubhangi completed the Basic course and took one month class of computer programming in Marathi for students of Savarkar Pratisthan at Sangli in 1985
College also undertook software development work of university examinations and I joined the team. DOS system was the king at that time, windows was yet to take birth.. We were using Wordstar Nondocument files for storing data and basic programming for processing it.
Basic, Wordstar, lotus and Dbase III were considered to be the necessary for computer literate at that time. FORTRAN was reserved mainly for research or design purposes by technical people. We started Suyash Compuers at Vishrambag in partnership of Sou Shubhangi with Suhas Khambe and Miss. Kulkarni. Well known doctors, business men and lawyers took training in our class. We used to do thesis typing work, developing small software programs for businesses. Billing system for M/S Shaha Medicals and salary program for Shri. Gajanan Mills were our achievements.
Basic was the first language I learnt. I liked it and was comfortable with it so much, that I developed a confidence to use it for solving any problem. It has become the backbone of my understanding of computer programming. Even today, I interpret any language through its equivalence to basic. COBOL. was the main programming language in business world. It was called as Verbose language, which meant that it was like normal English sentences, understandable to anybody. Its architecture was elaborate but systematic. It worked on UNIX platform and required compilation unlike basic which was interpreter language. There were four sections - Data Section, Input Output Section, Working Storage Section and Procedure Section.While teaching the subject, I used to compare it with office, where there are cupboards for storing files representing Data Section, Working table as working storage section, Inward and outward trays as Input output Section and the actual work as procedure section. We did examination software development in COBOL, but were comfortable with basic as it was easily manageable on PCs with low memory and data storage on floppy disks.
When I had chance to visit Bangkok in 1987, I purchased Commodore-64 computer which was based on 65280 (?) chip other than usual 8080 processor. Novelty of that computer was that it could be used with TV as monitor. I purchased many books of commodore programming and computer games and enjoyed in developing small programs.
Government of India, under computer education awareness program, distributed BBC computers to schools and our college was given a task of training the school teachers. BBC computers were very popular as they had colored monitors and many educational programs built into it. We could write any type of programs and draw graphics on these computers using simple BBC basic language. We used to go to schools and set up their computers and train the teachers.
After 2/ years we learnt that there was major fire in Chandigad, which destroyed large scale BBC chip manufacturing facility with a result of stoppage of the Govt. scheme. Incidentally at the same time, IBM computers took entry in Indian market and
BBC computers became obsolete.
We purchased computer in the house from Lotus computers and started working on it with a zeal.We steadily changed our platforms from DOS to windows, Basic to Visual Basic and Dbase III to Foxpro.In 1992 after we shifted to our new house, due to sudden eruption of my illness, we slowed our progress and shifted Suyash computers to our house and later closed it. Recovery from illness took almost 5 years and again we started thinking of taking a venture in this field and finally established Dnyandeep infotech Pvt. Ltd. in 2000.
Year 2000 brought bright future for Indian IT personnel. Memory was a costly item in those days and developers tried to reduce memory requirements to minimum required. Much before 2000, software developers realised that they have made mistake of keeping 2 digits for storing year and it would pay havoc in business transactions and time related activities world over the value of year will turn 0 after 99. This Y2K problem, generated ample opportunties of employment in IT sector and thousands of people were employeed to correct the programs. this also ushered the growth of many IT companies in US and speculators poued money into it. IT became suddenly a rich and prestigous business. Though the bubble burst after some years, the status of IT remained high.
Unfortunately India was still struggling with poor infrastructure and connectivity problems and majority of population was unaware of the new opportunities created by computers and internet. Language was also a big hurdle in the IT development in India except few major cities. We tougt of providing these services by starting NetCafe at Sangli.
Our Computer Netcafe was inaugurated by Retired Prof. D. P. Sakhadeo in Nov. 2000 in his bunglow near our house which was taken on rent by us. Our netcafe experience was not encouraging as we were not getting time for actual work. We closed it and started again training classes and software development work.
Initially, we launched our company website www.dnyandeep.com. Our focus of clientele was Sangli and inner urge was to use Marathi for software and website. Hence we started working on websites www.mysangli.com and www.mymarathi.org both in Marathi medium. Initially we used Shivaji free font but changed later to iLeap and then to dynamic Shri Lipi font. We were also developing software for Sanskrit education.We spent hours and days in learning and teaching html and developing different software in visual basic.
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