Hi everybody, especially Connie,
First of all, apologies for not being around for a while. I was kind of busy with miscellaneous obligations...
I promised Connie to write something about the history of my involvement with Persian computing. This is the first part in a series of posts. It acts as an introduction to establish the context and background. As such, it is not fully about Persian computing per se.
OK, here begins my story as a life in the history of Persian computing:
1. Pre-history
In the early eighties, during my high school days in Tabriz, I was obsessed with thinking about the meaning of life and my mission in life, playing with cats, studying geometry and modern physics (Einstein, Heisenberg, etc.), shooting with my air rifle, throwing knives at any wooden target, touring the city on my bicycle, building shelves and cabinets for the family and friends, building and tweaking hand-made Hi-Fi for my sister, building small steam engines with my cousin, trying to build gunpowder-propelled model rockets with my best friend, and other weird stuff. Those days I was totally unaware of girls, my appearance and my (lack of) social behavior. Back then, I barely knew computers existed, they where completely absent from my world. This period of my life coincides with the period of war, full-scale embargo, terrorist attacks, and the government treating anybody who wasn't an insider like the enemy.
I barely thought about what career I would like to pursue, but was inclined to become a mechanical engineer. Then I graduated high school in 1984 and immediately took the university entrance exam and landed in Sharif University of Technology as a student of civil engineering. It was quite a surprise and disappointment for me. I disliked civil engineering, but I did a foolish thing and put it as my first choice because of the pressure from teachers, friends and family. I was quite confident that I wouldn’t be accepted in Sharif University. I was really surprised when I learned that I had the 14th grade for the position. I expected the others to do far better than me.
So, when I arrived at my dorm room, I wasn't very enthusiastic. What I found there didn't help either. I found a stinky mess in the room with three depressed guys who were hit by the Cultural Revolution and closing of the universities for almost two years, not to mention mostly arbitrary changes to the course syllabus and the fact that the room was designed for two students not four. I was dragging my foot when it came to studying civil engineering and was in the verge of dropping out of school and going to the war front when I discovered the joy of programming and computers.
It was the second semester and we had a basic programming course on FORTRAN 66. We were punching cards and putting our deck of cards in the queue to be batch processed by Control Data CDC-6000 mainframe remaining from the seventies. We would get the printout of the program source and its output a few hours later. All of my programs ran correctly in the first try and my teacher kept all of my projects as outstanding examples of good solutions and stylish programming. He kept asking me whether I had prior experience with computers and refused to believe that I didn't.
After that course, my life was changed forever. I started spending most of my time in the computer science department, computer lab, and its library. I continued the rest of my days in the university barely passing my courses in civil engineering and focusing my energy on programming and computer science instead. For those who don't know: I didn't have the choice of changing my study, because of the very limited capacities and the sheer resistance of the authorities thinking they are saving me from ruining my career...
I was introduced to home and personal computers in this period. The first personal computer I used was NCR Decision Mate 5. It was a wonder in its time: A generic MS-DOS machine with two 360K 5 1/4" floppy disk drives and an astonishing 256KB of main memory with high resolution eight color 640x400 pixel display (some of them with bilingual keyboard and Persian character set). I felt like the master of the universe sitting at DM5 and programming with Turbo Pascal 2.0. After a while, it was overshadowed by IBM PC AT clones assembled by Iran System with high resolution monochrome displays and a different built-in Persian character set -- yes, the same infamous Iran-System character set [2].
It was in 1986 when the cover of a magazine in the library grabbed my attention. The title was "The Mac Is Back" with a picture of Mac Plus and LaserWriter on its cover. I read about Mac and its graphical user interface and WYSIWYG display and got hooked without even seeing a Mac in person. It took two more years until I finally started working on a Mac.
During the above period I wasn't aware of Persian computing and didn't realize its importance. It took me working part time in a business environment, namely Sabir Co., [1] to realize the issue. It was 1988 in Sabir that I got introduced to Pishkar and Sayeh of Sina Soft [3]. Read their history in Shabakeh Monthly issue 39 [4] to get the outlook of Persian computing from an even older and different perspective.
My involvement with Persian Computing as an influencer began with my career in Sibestan, the first independent marketing company of Apple Computer Inc. in Iran. The story of Sibestan is the subject of the next part. I can't promise when I'll write it, but I hope it will be soon.
Endnotes:
[1] Sabir is a government owned company specialized in dam construction.
[2] What I am referring to as a "character set" is actually a "glyph set". I am using the wrong term to emphasize how it was perceived then. The concept of glyph vs. character was unknown to most people at that time, including myself.
[3] Pishkar was a basic word processor with support for a limited set of dot-matrix printers and was bundled with a hardware (an 8-bit ISA card) that would hack into the display ROM of the computer and replace the native character set with Pishkar character set -- or more accurately glyph set. A special hardware was needed for Persian support, because the commonly used graphics cards at that time (CGA, MDA, Hercules Mono.) couldn't handle downloaded display fonts. EGA cards were very expensive and usually implied a CRT upgrade. The card also doubled as the copy protection scheme for the software. So, they continued to bundle the card after EGA or even VGA cards became the norm.
Sayeh was a later derivative that provided services for semi-transparent simple Persian input into existing DOS applications. The funny thing is that the glyph set in Sayeh was not fully compatible with that of Pishkar because of some limitations in the existing applications that couldn't deal with a couple of code points used in Pishkar's glyph set.
The main difference between Pishkar/Sayeh glyph set and Iran System gyph set was that Iran System was strictly mono-spaced and one byte per glyph but Pishkar/Sayeh used special tail glyphs to better display wide glyphs (using two glyph parts). The reason that ultimately Iran System prevailed was its relative simplicity from a programmer's point of view. From a user's perspective, Pishkar/Sayeh solution was preferable because it was much more readable.
[4] From a historical perspective, the articles in that issue are very interesting. I found out about them on the list (there was a post by Saber Soleimani). The articles are not officially online, and I am not aware of any other online options for obtaining it. If you are interested and don't have access to the articles, please let me know.
- Hooman Mehr
P.S.: Am I too far off topic? Too self centered? Please provide feedback.
P.S. 2: Roozbeh, and other old-timers: How about starting to write down your own memories concerning history of Persian Computing as well?
_______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
