As a student, at Royal College Colombo, I always wanted to be a Flight Engineer when I was a grown man. It didn't materialize, sadly, mainly on account of my injured left eye caused by a sporting accident in school when I was just 14.
Math was a great love of mine and it kind of spurned me on to look deeper into the science. Teachers like Mr Rupesinghe (Rupperty), Mr Arasaratnam (Arasa) and Mr Gulasingham (Thosay) contributed greatly to my love of math since my young days. Dad, of course, had his own expectations and wanted me to follow in his footsteps and turn out as a Civil Engineer. All Fathers expect the same, I guess?
The British Council and USIS libraries were great haunts of mine in the 60s where I spent many hours in study and reading. Here is where I found my first love. Computers! Dad believed it was science fiction. So did many other elders in the island, then. Diving into the deep end, I found Binary. Wow! So fascinating. Two simple digits, 0 & 1, depiciting two states of electric signals, off and on. Amazing! And all we needed was the decimal digit 2 and raise it to powers, starting from 0 upwards.
Eventually, I was thrown into the Banking Sector to seek a profession in 1969, what with the heavy pressure from Dad and also all my Uncles and Aunts. Banking was hip. Fathers would love to give their beautiful daughters to a banker in marriage. Many were the marriage brokers whom I caught taking a quick peep and making inquiries from my bank colleagues during that era, hoping to make a quick commission on my honeymoon. I was lucky not to fall for any of their traps even though the returns could have been economically beneficial.
Computing still haunted me, day in and day out. I spent loads of hours at the two libraries reading and digesting the science in a manner I have never done to anything else in my life before. I could imagine the world running on bits and bytes in the future. I wanted to be an integral part of it. How do I get there? Million Dollar question!
The answer was with IBM in Colombo. Two great gentlemen, Mr G Santhiran GM and Mr Shah Razack of the Rotary Club of Colombo West, who organized a training program for Computer Programmers, bailed me out. They gave me an aptitude test and I passed. Being part of a small group of 25 candidates to study Computer Programming in Assembler Language at IBM was as good as being accepted at Stanford or Harvard for me, then. I was on my way.
How can I forget the BALR 12,0 instruction right at the top of the Assembler code that we were taught to write. Branch and Link Regsiter (BALR) defined the register number containing the subroutine that the program had to branch to when it executed. Ahhh BALR was beautiful.
This is how it looked on the coding sheet:-
BEGIN CSECT
BALR 12,0 /* Load address of SR into */
USING BEGIN,12 /* register 12 and tell the */
SR 5,5 /* assembler to use this as */
/* the base address */ Beautiful, huh? Brings back so many wonderful memories of all the code I wrote thereafter, on punched cards, testing, debugging, and re-running them on the giant IBM System 360/20 that we were given access to at the Central Bank, Insurance Corporation and Peradeniya University, to play on, while learning.
The bank job went on until 1979 in order to keep me from starving, especially after marriage in 1974. The Brit Management were too old fashioned to think of automating the operations of the bank in the early 70's. They continued with their massive hand written ledgers and their NCR Class 32 Accounting Machines making a clatter and din all day long.
Frustration was on the top of my list. I had to get out and find an IT environment, now!
February 1979 made me quit the bank job. Just like that. I had spent 10 long years in that black British hole. Dad and Mum were aghast. So were all my friends and relatives. No one quits a lucrative bank job after 10 long years of service. Only mad men do. OK, so I was mad. Suits me. Makes me happier.
The local HP agent, Metropolitan Agencies, were establishing their first ever IT products and services operation and the Director, Mahendra Ambani, chose me to head it. What more could I have asked for? It was fun and rewarding, both career wise, mentally, and also financially. They paid me three times as much as the bank did. Huh! Who said banks were the best paymasters? Bull! Life was great.
We wrote programs in HP Enhanced BASIC and also in MONROE Assembler language for a Litton Industries Computer that the company, Metropolitan Agencies Ltd, represented in Sri Lanka. I was beginning to feel the water now. A lovely lass called Shashi, who had just returned from the US exchange program had returned to Sri Lanka and joined us as my Assistant. She was a fast learner and did very well thereafter and was able to take over the tasks and activities from me when I had to leave. Another chap from Central Bank, Mohamed Faleel, also joined us in managing the administrative stuff that was required to provide the services, mostly to banks and financial institutions.
November 1979, was more or less like D-Day for my Computing career. I had only spent 9 months with HP. The sand dunes of Arabia were calling me. The temptation was irresistible. I had to go and experience it myself.
The Yanks had stepped into Saudi Arabia in the 1930's, on the invitation of the then King AbdulAziz Al Saud, and had been prospecting for oil in Dhahran. The poor Brits, who were the masters of the world then, tried hard to win the deal but lost out when they offered the old King, payment in Indian Rupees based on the British East India Company they had established to manage their colonies in Asia and the Middle East. The wise King opted for US Dollars against the stinking Indian Rupee.
I still remember stepping into the Pakistan Airlines flight on Nov 12, 1979, that took me to Karachi. The next morning I boarded a Saudia flight to Dhahran. The heat and the sand were the first things that hit me in the face when I was picked up at the airport. It was like driving through a sea of brown with small patches of brush growing here and there on either side of the roadway.
Working, as an Analyst/Programmer for SAMBA (Citibank) Technology in Saudi Arabia was the beginning of my entire life's wonderful IT career.
Bits and Bytes, here I come! Nothing could stop me now.
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