''Bastard, I'm too smart for you to pull this one on me.''-some Prof!<g>
TALES FROM THE INSTITUTES (int'l edition)
Students at the Indian Institutes of Technology learned how to make do with little and cope with a lot. Here are some stories of those formative experiences:
ON SCARCE RESOURCES:
Venky Harinarayan, one of four founders of Junglee.com, a Net browser purchased for $180 million by Amazon.com in August, is a 1988 computer-science graduate of IIT-Madras. When he went to Stanford University for his master's degree, he was stunned to have a textbook all to himself, instead of sharing a book with dozens of classmates. ''It was amazing,'' he says.
ON GRADING:
Harinarayan recalls the rigor of examinations, particularly those given by Antony Reddy, an electrical-engineering professor, whose system was simple: Every question had to have an exact answer--down to the fourth decimal place--or the grade was zero. ''We used to sweat bullets,'' Harinarayan recalls. ''Students made zeros all through the course, had to take it again, and had zeros again through finals!'' Another tough grader, Professor Swaminathan, who taught physics, would pepper exam papers with brutal comments pointing out what part of a problem the student got wrong--even if the final answer was correct. Swaminathan would write: ''Bastard, I'm too smart for you to pull this one on me.''
ON STUDENT INGENUITY:
Romesh Wadhwani, CEO of Aspect Development Inc., a leading supplier of the software used by manufacturers to monitor component procurement and product design, remembers the day in 1968 that IIT-Bombay got its first computer. The campus was funded by the Soviet union, so this mainframe was a Russian-built Minsk II that filled an entire floor of a building. It ran on a Russian operating system that nobody understood, and the manual was also in Russian.
So Wadhwani and two other students wrote their own operating system--and turned the behemoth into a primitive multimedia computer: They programmed it to play the Indian national anthem at the commencement ceremony. Wadhwani later studied at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, then equipped with Univac 1108, IBM 370, and Digital PDP mainframes. ''When they had problems with a Univac, to me it seemed like child's play,'' he says.
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