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:

• Prof. Norman C. Dahl, MIT, KIAP director. At KIAP 1961, 1962-1964 with Dorothy, Christian, Sabra. Deceased. See Rememberance by Arijit Bose
• Prof. Robert S. Green, Engineering, Ohio State. At KIAP 1964-1966.
• Jerry Vielehr, manager. At KIAP 1962-1964. Joined Coca-Cola; now in Milwaukee. Picture of Jerry Vielehr talking to Geeta Singh. 1964.


• Dr. Robert Archer, Case Institute. At KIAP 1963; now at Amherst. Picture of Profs. Erickson and Archer, Feb. 1965.
• Prof. Forman Acton, Electrical Engineering, Princeton. At KIAP 1964-1966; retired, now in Salem, NJ.
• Prof. Holt Ashley, MIT, Aeronautical Engineering. At KIAP 1963-1965. Joined Stanford in 1967, died 2006. Picture of Prof. Ashley, 1965..
• Glenn Battaglia, administrator. At KIAP 1963-1965.
• Prof. Arthur Bergen, Electrical Engineering, UC Berkeley. With Jane, at KIAP 1964-1965.
• Val Bergdolt, Mechanical Engineering, Purdue.
• Prof. Len Breen, Sociology, Purdue. At KIAP 1963-1965. Prof. Breen?, 1965.
• Prof. Wayne Brown, Mechanical engineering, UC Berkeley. At KIAP 1964-1965.
• Prof. Arthur Burks, Electrical Engineering, University of Michigan. At KIAP 1963-1965.
• Prof. Oscar Chavarria-Aguilar, linguistics, Univ. of Michigan. With Fran, at KIAP 1963-1965. Picture of Profs. Chavarria and his wife, 1964.
• Prof. Charles E. Dryden, Electrical engineering, Ohio State. With Rosalie, at KIAP 1963-1965.
• Prof. Charles Elliott III, Linguistics, Univ. of Michigan, At KIAP 1963-1965.
• Prof. Alve S. Erickson, Mechanical Egineering, MIT. At KIAP 1963-1965. Joined Foster Wheeler consultants. Picture of Profs. Erickson and Archer, Feb. 1965.
• Prof. Peter Fay, History, Caltech. With Mariette and children at KIAP 1963-1966. Died 2005.
• David Funkhouser, Librarian, Purdue. At KIAP 1964-1965.
• Prof. Arthur Gill, Linguistics, UC Berkeley. With Rosalie, at KIAP 1964-1965?.
• Donald Graham, Electrical Engineering, MIT. At KIAP 1964-1965.
• Prof. David Hazen, Aeronautical Engineering, Princeton. With Melia, at KIAP 1963-1965.
• Prof. Harry Huskey, Elec. Engineering, UC Berkeley. With Velma at KIAP 1963-1964. Started the CS department at UC Santa Cruz. Picture of Prof. Huskey, 1964. Se also the CHM Interview, pp.41-43.
• Gerald D. Johnson, Computer Engineer, U.C. San Francisco. With Judy, at KIAP 1965-1967. Joined IBM subsequently. Died 2012.
• Prof. Hazen. Aeronautics, Princeton. At KIAP 1965-1967. Picture of Prof. Hazen.
• Prof. E.W. Hutchinson, U.C. Berkeley. At KIAP 1963?.
• Prof. John Kelly, Mathematics, U.C. Berkeley, 1963-1965. Picture of Profs. Kelly and his wife Ying Kelly, 1965.
• Prof Ernest Leach, Mathematics, Case Institute. At KIAP 1965.
• Rudy Lehnert, Princeton. At KIAP 1965. Picture of Rudy Lehnert.
• Prof. Peter Mason, Physics, Caltech. At KIAP 1964-1965.
• Prof. Harry Mayhar?
• David Montenegro, Engineer, ESL/Technicolor, Los Angeles. At KIAP 1963-1965. Died 2011.
• Prof. Burton Moyer, Physiscs Deepartment chair, UC Berkeley. At KIAP 1965-1966. Died 1973.
• Nick Nichols, facilility mangaer. At KIAP 1963-1964.
• Jack Olcutt, Areonautics and flying instructor, Princeton. At KIAP 1963-1964; now in Morristown, NJ.
• Prof. Irving Rabinowitz, Computer Center, Princeton University. With Sandy and children at KIAP 1963-1964. Joined Rutgers University, died 2005. Picture of Prof. Rabinowitz at the 1620.
• Prof. William Schreiber, Electrical Engineering, MIT. At KIAP 1964-1966. See his Archival web site.
• Prof. L.A. Sheppard. MIT. At KIAP 1965-1966.
• Prof. William Shook, Civil Engineering, Lafayette Univ.? With Betsy, at KIAP 1965-1966 with Betsy.
• Louis Smullin, Electrical Engineering and Materials Science, MIT. At KIAP 1961.
• Ben Speaker, Purdue.
• Roger Vogler, facilility manager. At KIAP 1963-1964.
• Gio Wiederhold, Computer Center, University of California. At KIAP 1965-1965. Joined Stanford University. Picture of Gio Wiederhold at the groundbreaking of the library.
• Russell Wood, Boston. Architect. With Kitty, at KIAP 1963-1965.

There are various pictures of faculty at

• Gio's pictures of IIT Kanpur
• Irv Rabinowitz's pictures of IIT Kanpur
• Dave Montenegro's pictures of the buildings, faculty and staff at IIT Kanpur
• Rudy Lehnert's pictures of the Aeronautics faculty and staff at IIT Kanpur
• Visiting committee and trip to Khajaraho
• Wedding of son of Professor John Kelly
• friends

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.

• Gio's pictures of IIT Kanpur
• Visiting committee and trip to Khajaraho

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
   • Clay Perry had been a B-17 pilot during WW II and been a POW in Germany.
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

• IIT Kanpur Campus
• The The IIT Aeronautics faculty and crew involved in assembling ...
• Neighborhood and Kanpur city pictures.

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

• IIT Kanpur Campus and some faculty.
• Pictures of Kanpur and other cities Not yet indexed
• Pictures of friends in Kanpur Not yet indexed

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

• IIT Kanpur faculty and friends, IBM 1620 Computer classes and operations, IIT Kanpur campus, and town.

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.