Pictures from Gio Wiederhold's Stay in India

October 1964 to October 1965

Construction of this web page started 22Dec.2004. Last updated 3 Feb. 2012. Additional information and photographs are most welcome. Pictures from the 1970's were provided by Shirish Joshi.

Gio Wiederhold spent a year (Oct.1964-Oct.1965) at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT Kanpur) as a Visiting Professor, assigned to the IITK Computing Center and its Department of Electrical Engineering. (There was no Computer Science department then). IIT Kanpur was organized by the Kanpur India Assistance Program (KIAP). sponsored by US AID. Participants were Caltech, MIT, Princeton, Purdue, and the Universities of California and Michigan. Gio's stay was during the second year of full operation.

A book on the history of IIT as been written by E.C. Subbarao: An Eye for Excellence, Fifty Innovative Years of ITT Kanpur; Harper Collins Publishers, India, 2008.

Some background about IIT Kanpur is on a Wikipedia page.
Kanpur is located in Northern India, on the Ganges river. It is roughly a third of the way between (New) Delhi and Kolkata (Calcutta) along the Great Trunk Road. The campus of IIT Kanpur is a few miles northwest, at Kalyanpur on the Delhi side of the Great Trunk Road. Many Railroad lines cross at Kanpur.

Gio Wiederhold was also able to make many friends, enjoy Indian music, and travel around India during the the summer break. Some photographs have been scanned in and and follow the IIT Kanpur material.

IIT Kanpur Specific

The Computer at the time was an IBM 1620, with 20K characters, of storage. One of Gio's responsibilities was to acquire a `large' IBM 7044 32K (36-bit) words machine, with a `huge' disk storage (20M words?) for that time. His successor, Jerry `Fuzzoots' Johnson actually saw the machine arrive and handled the installation. In 1968 an IBM 1401 arrived to provide input-output services.

Gio did not do much photography them, he only had a miniature camera, but many of these photographs are being scanned in and may be of interest. But others have provided photographs as well. Little of the campus existed then, and Gio actually lived in town, as did much of the other faculty.

Other visiting faculty and staff during the early period of the KIAP program at IIT Kanpur, with estimated dates of stay:

There are various pictures of faculty at

Many are not identified. When they are, I'll add the pointers to the faculty list above.

I also received some pages of a report on the Computer Center of IIT Kanpur from Ross Bassett of North Caroline State University, namely pages 108-113 of the IIT Kanpur bulletin. It lists the staff of the Computer Center -- there was no Computer Science Department then. Page 113 deals with Aeronautics (p. 113 extract).
The KIAP October 1965 report to USAID, 5 pages, may also be of interest. It includes details of the copmuter systems at that time. Plans included a shared file- input-outpit sytem with some on-line access, similar to the system Gio installed at UC Berkeley around 1962.
Ross also provided scans of a series of articles written by the leaders of Indian Computer Science on occasion of the January 1970 meeting of the Computer Society of India, in Madras. The authors are Lt.Col. A. Balasubramanian (Electronics Commission, GoI), Prof. B. Nag (Jadavpur Univ) (died 2003), Dr, Matthai Josef (TIFR), Prof. R. Narasimhan (TIFR), Prof. Vijay Rajaraman (IIT Kanpur), and Prof. K.S. Hegde (Guindy Enineering College). Copied from the [Hindu, Jan 8, 1970] newspaper.

Prof. Harry Huskey published an autobiography: Harry D. Huskey, His Story, Book Surge Publishing, 2004. I scanned in the pages of Chapter 13, dealing with his stay in India:
page 77 50%, getting there, joke on Jerry Vielehr; 100%
page 78 50%, housing, Vishnapuri 100%
page 79 50%, Kanpur Club, Kalyanpur 100%
page 80 50%, IBM 1620 100% and a Picture of a DC-7
page 81 50%, Khajuraho 100%
page 82 50%, Taj Mahal 100%
page 83 50%, Kashmir 100%
page 84 50%, Katmandu, leaving, visitor plans 100%

IIT Kanpur photographs

I split my photographs into several sets. More are to come, but the IIT Kanpur set is all I have for IIT specifically.

There are also pictures of IIT and Kanpur, provided by other, below.

Visiting Commitee

Professor Harry Huskey, UC Berkeley (prior year at IIT Kanpur) organized an advisory commitee, and several of the most distinguished computer scientists of that time visited IIT Kanpur, including

  1. Dr. S. Barton, CDC, Australia
  2. Dr. S. Beltran, Centro de Calculo, Mexico
  3. Dr. John Bennett, Univ. of Sidney, Australia
  4. Dr. L. Carter, SDC, Santa Monica [Carter report on Information Science]
  5. Dr. David Evans, UC Berkeley
  6. Dr. Bruce Gilchrist, SBC - IBM, New York; much later Columbia Univ.
  7. Dr. Sigeiti Moriguti, Univ. of Tokyo, Japan
  8. Dr. Clay Perry, UCSD
  9. Dr. Adriaan van Wijngaarden, Mathamatisch Centrum, Amsterdam
  10. Dr. Maurice Wilkes, Univ. Math. Lab., Cambridge

See Pictures from the meeting and their trip to Khajuraho showing several of the Committee members.

More IIT Kanpur

I received in May 2006 pictures from Rudy Lehnert, made during his stay in 1965. The collections are

I received in December 2006 slides from David Montenegro, made during his stay from 1963 to 1965, which were scanned in. The collections are

I scanned in August 2009 slides and photographs from Sandie Rabinowitz, made made during Irv's and Sadie's stay from 1963 to 1964. The pictures relevant to IIT Kanpur were be placed on-line 3 Nov.2009. The collection is

These pictures are available for friends

Wedding of Bijoy Chatterjee and Joya Banerjee
Trip to Calcutta (Kolkata), via Bodhgaya and Jamshedpur No pictures yet.
Wedding of John Kelly jr
Trip through South India with Jerry Vielehr. Only a few of the pictures have been scanned in.