At 2 A.M., I crawled off the plane in Bombay feeling miserable. British Airways whisked me through the diplomatic line and carried
my luggage out to the curb where I grabbed a shuttle to the closest
hotel I could find.
Twelve hours later, after an hour under a hot shower, I finally
felt up to a taxi down to Juhu Beach, south of Bombay, where I lay
in my hotel room for the next two days recuperating. Lying on the
floor, I spent my time reading marriage ads in the
Times of India and
watching Hindi films. Outside, the beach was teeming with people
riding horses, watching the horse races, or gathering around acrobats doing flips. Looking down, I could spot a row of Kalaghatta
stands advertising the cold, ink-black drinks known as the "poor
man's Coke" and thought to myself that a beer would be nice. Just
then, the phone rang.
"Mr. Carl, this is room service. Would you like some tea or
something to drink?" The idea of telepathic room service appealed
to me. I began to feel much better.
Monday morning, Dr. S. Ramani, director of the
National Center for
Software Training, sent a huge old empty
Tata bus to collect me. We
rattled our way through the swarming vehicles adorned with "Horn
OK Please" bumper stickers, past the shack which specialized in rewinding old fans, to the NCST headquarters.
My day with Ramani was a whirlwind of activity. Fascinated by
how to use networks to help his country, Ramani rapidly jumped
from ways to help the Indian Antarctic expedition to how to control
infectious diseases to railway reservation systems to ways to disseminate Indian news to graduate students overseas.
He would leap to the white board and draw a diagram, then call
out for his secretary to get certain staff members, then he would
grab first one, then two telephones and start placing calls to officials
and corporate executives for more information.
"Ramani, here," he said, calling the managing director of the
Press Trust of India, a wire service with over 1,700 employees. "I
have some ideas to discuss. Can you have dinner tonight at 9?"
The managing director had just gotten back from a trip to Delhi
to meet with the Prime Minister, but dinner was arranged.
Meanwhile, we discussed
ERNET, the Indian research network.
The backbone was built around hubs in four citiesBombay, Madras, Bangalore, and Delhiwhich were connected to each other by
9,600 bps leased lines running TCP/IP. Other sites all over the
country used UUCP into these hubs.
Over 70 sites in ERNET shared a single 9,600 bps satellite link to
UUnet for international access. Needless to say, I felt more than a
little bit guilty using Telnet to read my mail back in Colorado.
Low bandwidth, both domestic and international, was partly
due to India's economic situation and partly to some technical detours towards satellites instead of terrestrial lines. Unlike some
other countries I had visited, the underdeveloped Internet infrastructure was certainly not due to the lack of qualified engineers or
a demand among users. India has one of the largest cadres of scientists in the world and the computer scientists I met at NCST were
highly capable and fully aware of current developments in the Internet.
The economic situation was certainly a prime stumbling block in
putting together a real research network (let alone a commercial
service offering). The rupee had only just started to become convertible when I visited India and foreign exchange was at a premium. The U.S. half-circuit for the 9,600 bps line had been funded
by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
Even within India, getting phone lines was no mean feat. Lines
cost roughly the same as in the U.S., but average salaries in the U.S.
are an order of magnitude higher than in India. The telephone infrastructure in India was notoriously underdeveloped, with electromechanical exchanges (i.e., something has to move to complete a
circuit) still in operation in many locations. The wait for a residential line could easily take several years. Businesses pay a substantial
surcharge to cut the wait to weeks or months.
In rural areas, lines are so unstable that running WCP over
them could lead to endless retries. Even when the lines are operational, overhead of 500 percent is not uncommon. In fact, in some
areas the lines were so bad that ERNET used a novel "floppy-based
e-mail system." It turned out to be significantly more cost effective
when the line got bad enough to simply spool mail to floppies and
hire a courier to bring the diskettes down to the nearest hub. One
system manager in Kanpur was once observed going through this
biweekly ritual, neatly labeling floppies and stacking them into a
pile.
"These guys have no other business," he grumbled, "all they do
is keep sending mail through the day and night." Ramani showed
me the network management utility which showed 30 to 70 messages exchanged per courier run with one of the FloppyNet sites in
Kanpur.
Even in Bombay, local lines are not immune to problems. During the summer monsoon, 80 to 100 inches of rain can fall in 80 days
of the monsoon season, knocking out service for 7 to 10 days per
year. For this reason, the main international gateway had been located 20 km south of NCST in downtown Bombay. This machine,
Sangam, was located in the Air India building and was just a kilometer from the telephone company's point of presence, making it
fairly immune to disruptions during the monsoon.
A poor telephone infrastructure led Ramani and others in the
Indian academic community to look to satellites, particularly the Indian manufactured INSAT series. The satellites gave high bandwidth, used Indian technology, and needed only a dish on the roof
instead of depending on local infrastructure.
The original ERNET project plan from 1984 envisioned linking
the 8 large academic and research institutions together with 4.5 meter dishes. For 1.5 million dollars, this infrastructure would provide
multiple data paths, based on, of course, OSI protocols. By 1988, the
project had evolved to specify 64 kbps data paths for the transmission of voice. data, and fax.
The voice requirement would satisfy needs for voice broadcast
services for seminars, and would allow network management to
have their own voice channels. The data channels would be established using the X.25 protocols and very coarse time slots of 1 second or even more would be provided. The data channels were thus
suitable only for file transfer and electronic mail.
Although the project plans developed on schedule, the satellite
kept getting delayed. By 1988, though, some Indian students returning from the states started agitating for Telebit modems, capable
of running at fairly high speeds over voice-grade lines.
Anil Garg and some other NCST staffers began playing with
UUCP dial-up transfers. The first links were in Bombay between
NCST and a sister institution, the Indian Institute of Technology
(IIT). At the time, the only phone available at the IIT computer science department was located in the office of the chairman.
To transfer mail, Anil would call up the chairman of the department, apologize for the interruption, and ask him to place the phone
on the modem. If the phone was needed for voice sessions, then
e-mail would have to wait. Eventually, a set time slot on the telephone was allocated and, assuming calls got through, e-mail started
to flow regularly.
Over time, the terrestrial network started to grow. By 1991, with
a little prodding from Vinton Cerf, an advisor to ERNET, the network was based on leased lines and Cisco routers. In early 1992,
Ramani was in the midst of careful negotiations with the Department of Telecommunications to use a 64 kbps chunk of a new 140
Mbps fiber line to Delhi and maybe even to get a piece of the digital
microwave links to Bangalore and Madras.
Meanwhile, the satellite project was finally getting off the
ground, but its purpose had to be reevaluated. The terrestrial
ERNET was obviously much more suitable for interactive applications and with 64 kbps terrestrial lines coming in the foreseeable
future, Ramani was searching for a use for the satellites. Ramani
was hoping that the satellite WAN could supplement the terrestrial
network, perhaps being used by applications with a broadcast focus,
such as the distribution of news.
Over a lunch of aloo bhindi and carrot halwa in the NCST canteenequipped with a PC and custom software, of courseRamani
explained his attempts to automate the infectious disease units of
the local hospitals.
Bombay hospitals get several hundred admissions per day for
diseases ranging from dysentery to measles, polio, and hepatitis.
An estimated 20,000 deaths per year are caused in Bombay by diseases that are preventable by vaccination, boiling drinking water, or
other simple means.
When an admission occurs at a hospital, the admissions officer
fills out a slip and places it in a pigeonhole for one of Bombay's 23
wards. The slips are picked up and, within 24 hours or so, make
their way to public health officers in the wards who take appropriate actions. In the case of measles, for example, the health officer
might go to a child's building and look for unvaccinated playmates.
Ramani had been conducting briefings and otherwise pushing
people to computerize the process. He was hoping that a small
number of computers could easily cut out the 24 hour delay. More
importantly, aggregate information could be quickly examined for
trends. A cluster of hepatitis cases, when displayed on a map
would quickly indicate contaminated drinking water in a neighborhood. The information could be used to make special efforts in
those neighborhoods to try and convince people to boil their water,
at least for a while.
That afternoon, I FTPed my mail down to a local account to
avoid tying up the international link, then went downstairs to give a
lecture on the politics of standards. The audience of several dozen
people were all active in implementing standards or using them as
part of their work. This was certainly a sympathetic audience and
everybody laughed when I explained the theory the standards potatoes advanced that anybody "serious" about implementing standards could certainly afford to participate in the process. Somebody
came up to me after the lecture and explained how tough it was to
get foreign exchange allocated for buying documents, let alone taking trips to conferences and standards meetings.
After the lecture, I went back to my hotel and pressed (having
finally reprogrammed myself) the elevator's up button to go down
to the coffee shop. The coffee shop was playing a rousing polka
over the intercom, but I didn't see any kielbasas on the menu so I
ordered some samosas and sweet lime water instead.
That evening, Dr. Ramani picked me up and we went to a local
restaurant to meet Gourang Kundapur, managing director of the
Press Trust of India (PTI). Over a dinner of brains masala and tandoori cauliflower, we gossiped about Indian politics, a topic even
more complex than the politics of standards.
Tuesday morning, my driver took me from Juhu to Bombay to see
the railway reservation system at Victoria Terminus, one of the main
train stations and a Bombay landmark. Smack in the middle of rush
hour, we dodged goats tied to shacks on the side of the road, pushcarts loaded with potatoes, and cows that ambled along content in
the knowledge that they alone were safe on the roads.
My driver took what might charitably called a fairly aggressive
approach to driving. He clearly felt that the green light was an indication that he should have already cleared the intersection. Even
stuck behind several dozen cars, he would keep his hand on the
horn. The side mirrors were carefully folded flat against the car,
giving at least 3 inches of extra maneuvering room.
Arriving at the Central Reservations building, I entered a very
large room filled with an incredibly dense mob waiting for tickets.
Fighting my way up to the information counter, I was handed a
form before I could even open my mouth, then was promptly swept
along with the crowd.
The
Indian Railways system is one of the largest in the world,
moving 10 million passengers a day in over 6,000 trains. Tickets for
these trains come in 7 categories (e.g., express or local), 32 kinds of
quotas (e.g., foreigner or defense official), 100 types of discounts
(e.g., veteran or handicapped), and 7 classes of reservations (e.g.,
first class or first class air conditioning).
The old, non-computerized system had, although I had a hard
time picturing it, been known for incredibly long lines, which presumably meant that the lobbies must had somehow fit in even more
people than I saw. To make a booking, you needed to be in the
right line for the particular class of tickets for the particular train
you wanted to take.
Demand has always far outstripped supply for Indian trains, so
it was not unusual to have 1,000 people clustered around one clerk,
while the next counter was empty. An 8-hour wait in line only to
find there were no seats left was not unheard of.
Assuming you were able to fight your way up to the top of the
line and get the clerk's attention, the process still had no guarantees.
Complicated rate calculations, manual ledger books, and a host of
paperwork led to lots of errors. When you got to the train, you
might easily discover that there were duplicate bookings or that a
supposedly sold-out train had dozens of empty seats.
To find out about the new and improved system, I met with
officials from CMC, Ltd. the government-backed system integrators
that had computerized the reservations process. CMC had set up
five separate reservations systems for each of the five main regions
of India, centered in Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta, Hyderabad, and Madras.
Four of the five systems were based on VAXen. For some reason, Hyderabad had some small CDC systems. Bombay was typical
with two VAX 8650s and a 6310 clustered together. All the code was
written in FORTRAN and even the database management functions
had been locally developed.
The Bombay system handled 7 different reservation centers. Victoria Terminus was the largest, with 80 terminals, and the nearby
Churchgate station had 20 terminals. Muxes and modems linked
remote terminals to the cluster. A satellite office in Ahmedabad, 500
km away, linked 45 terminals over a series of eight 4,800 bps lines.
All told, around 200 terminals handled 50,000 to 60,000 transactions
on a typical day, with peaks up to 90,000 in the busy season.
For customers, the system meant that a reservation for any train
in any class could be made in any line. Just as importantly, far
fewer errors were made, since fares were automatically calculated
and it was much harder to double-book seats.
Oddly enough, there was a downside. On the old system, it was
possible to gauge your approximate chances of getting a ticket by
the size of the queue and your ability to step over people and get to
the front. On the new system, it was much harder to estimate your
chances, since you competed with people all over the city. Monitors
were posted at the stations indicating how many seats were available on the more popular runs, but the Chief Commercial Superintendent told me he was certainly receiving complaints from people
unable to get tickets
The huge excess demand for tickets made scalping a profitable
business. Ticket sales were limited to 4 to 6 per person to prevent
scalping and each ticket had imprinted on it the name, age, and sex
of the passenger. An ID was not required to ride the train, but conductors attempted to make sure that the holder of the ticket had at
least some resemblance to the data on the ticket. The main result
was that scalpers had adopted more sophisticated inventory management techniques.
While the seven main reservation centers in the Bombay region
were online, smaller stations still used electromechanical teleprinters
to communicate with Bombay. The messages would be received on
slips of paper, a clerk would key in the data to the computer and
send a message back to the station which would issue the ticket.
Recently, data from a few teleprinter sites had been fed straight into
the VAX. Hooking teleprinters to the VAX allowed properly formatted messages to be automatically answered. Not quite an interactive terminal, but much quicker than the old system.
This same message switch was being used to connect the independent systems for each region. When I visited, each center had a
few terminals for each of the other regions, allowing a Bombay passenger to book passage on a train originating in Calcutta. Hooking
those lines into a local VAX instead of a terminal would provide a
way for one system to be a virtual teleprinter to a remote region.
After my briefing, my hosts insisted on showing me their machine room, which we entered via the washroom. Afterwards, I
rode back out to Juhu, passing a line three blocks long waiting to
enter the temple of Ganesh, the god with the elephant head.
Wednesday, Ramani sent one of the NCST jeeps to pick me up. The
jeep was prominently adorned with "Govt. of India" on the front
and back. NCST is not technically a part of the government, but
Ramani explained that the labels made parking significantly easier.
I spent the day at the edge of the Ramani cyclone, periodically
leaving to check on my FTP jobs, which were downloading source
code for utilities that I thought might be useful to NCST. By the
end of the day, netfind, perl, traceroute, and WAIS had all made it
over the link.
The only thing I really wanted to bring down was the code for
Cleveland Free-Net. A Free-Net is typically linked to Cleveland
over the Internet and has a local bank of modems for public access.
Ramani and I couldn't see how NCST could meet this requirement,
but wanted to see if there was some way that the Free-Net concept
could be applied in India.
Unfortunately, Free-Net wouldn't let us do that. Public access or
nothing. People in India rarely had PCs and modems at home, and
adding substantial traffic to an already saturated 9,600 bps link just
didn't make any sense.
WAIS had no such arbitrary administrative restrictions, however.
While ideally a WAIS client accessed servers all over the world, it
was certainly technically feasible to run an isolated WAIS world on
an Ethernet, providing a local information environment. Running
WAIS with the NCST LAN was useful as a way for building up
local expertise and seemed to fit right in with another current project.
NCST was taking the wire service from the Press Trust of India
and feeding it into a VAX. There, the news feed was automatically
broken up into individual items and fed into a local USENET news
group. Every Friday, one day's worth of news was posted globally,
providing information on Indian politics, sports, and culture to
graduate students and professionals overseas.
Once the news hit the VAX, applications like WAIS might be an
interesting method for searching and reading the news. NCST programmers were also developing their own sophisticated applications for sifting through information, such as a stock and news
monitor that was built on SCO's Open Desktop.
All these fancy user interfaces made me curious how the news
got produced. The next day, I went back into Bombay to visit the
headquarters of the PII. We drove past a police officer on a chauffeur-driven scooter and ended up at Flora Fountain in the center of
India's banking district.
The Uco Bank building, where PTI was located, was a few
blocks away from where my driver left me off. He waved his arms
vaguely in the proper direction, and I headed off down the street.
Every block or so, I would stop a policeman or a rickshaw-wallah
and say "Uco Bank Building" a few times.
I happened to be clutching a few random notes in my hand and
every time I stopped to ask for directions, the person would grab
the paper out of my hand and scrutinize it for several minutes. The
notes had nothing to do with Uco Bank, but after a while the person
would look up and wave me on down the street.
This method apparently worked because I soon saw a sign for
the Uco Bank Building. I found it interesting that no matter which
paper I had in my hand, it would be grabbed and examined. With a
chuckle I thought of
Cliff Lynch, one of the more active members of
the library automation community. Cliff is famous for always
clutching a stack several inches thick of business cards and scraps of
paper. It would have taken him all day to get directions.
I went up the rickety stairs to the PTI offices and met Gourang
Kundapur. Over cups of sweet coffee, he told me the history of PRI.
Formed as a cooperative for small and medium newspapers in the
early part of the century, the service was taken over by Reuters before the war. When the British left in August 1947, Reuters also
pulled out and PTI was formed as a non-profit cooperative.
The news is gathered by over 400 journalists spread in 135 offices throughout the country. Before automation began, stories were
typed on a teleprinter and punched to paper tape. The paper tape
was fed in and the data went over a 50-baud line to one of four
main centers.
In 1980, when Ramani began acting as a consultant to PTI, the
entire network of 100,000 km of 50 baud lines was based on manual
switching. The data came into a regional center and a tape was
punched. A subeditor edited the story, and a new tape was be produced.
The tape then went to the transmission room, where an operator
flipped switches to indicate which lines should be active, and the
story was sent out. If the story had wide enough distribution, regional centers got the data, punched a tape, and sent it out to their
local clients.
The obvious places to computerize were the four regional offices. PDP 11 systems were installed with custom code to terminate
the teleprinter lines, acting as a switch and also providing an online
editing environment for editors.
Connecting teleprinter lines turned out to be no mean feat. Each
line transmitted at a slightly different speed. Custom boxes were
developed that adjusted the speed to an exact 50 baud, manually at
first and later automatically. The code from the PDP system was
later ported to Xenix, with the Xenix system acting as an editing
environment and a backup to the message switching function of the
PDP.
While the regional offices were fairly well automated, Mr. Kundapur explained that it was not quite as easy to get rid of the teleprinters or even the 50 baud lines. The 50 baud lines were available
to the press at 1/6 of the cost of normal lines, and, while it was
possible to drive the lines at higher speeds locally, this would not
work in remote areas.
People were another consideration. Electromechanical printers
were noisy and dirty, but they had been used so long that people
knew how they worked. Old-time journalists were not quick to
adapt to electronic teleprinters (i.e., a dot matrix printer and a keyboard), although the mechanics tended to love the new systems as
they required air conditioning.
For larger sites, teleprinters had been replaced with PCs or Atex
systems. A custom device was built by a PTI subsidiary which adjusted the incoming voltage, changed the speed to 300 bps, and converted 5-bit BAUDOT code to ASCII, allowing most computers to
easily accept a teleprinter feed.
PTI didn't have the most hi-tech system in the world, but it illustrated how to work in a technically challenging environment and
still get work done. The system was continuing to move forward,
with the central code being ported to an 80486 running UNIX and
TCP/IP to link regional centers being investigated.
I got back to NCST in time for a quick lunch of baingan ka
bhartha, a delicious eggplant dish similar to the Middle Eastem
baba ganouj, accompanied by flat chapati bread. That afternoon
and the next day I spent giving lectures on topics as diverse as
WAIS and high speed networking and meeting with NCST students
and staff. Saturday, Ramani and I got together to talk about standards.
Ramani was chair of a key committee in the Bureau of Indian
Standards (BIS). One of the challenges in India was training large
numbers of engineers, both for developing local systems and to
stimulate the growing software export industry.
Training engineers meant giving them the information they
needed and that meant giving them access to standards. BIS had
been grappling for several years on how to distribute information,
and online standards was high on their list. Ramani's committee
had already decided that dissemination of information was a key
priority.
Would Ramani be interested in posting standards for the Indian
community? "In a minute," Ramani said without any hesitation at
all.
This was the second place that felt that training people was
much more important than playing international politics, and it was
obvious that many other countries would post standards if the data
were available.
It was obvious to me that I should get off the road and get busy
preparing data, a task I couldn't do very well from an airplane. Before I could go home, though, I had one more stop to make.
I reported to Bombay's international airport for my 3:30 A.M.
flight to London, Chicago, and Madison, Wisconsin. After seven
stamps on my boarding pass, three in my passport, a special line
and three stamps to clear my computer, a half-dozen luggage
checks, and several lines with no apparent purpose, I was on my
way.