Sandeep Deb's Home Page
Softwares
  Ah softwares...
 We had two computers in our school. They were quite ceremoniously housed in a a small room, which was kept under constant temperature control. There were strict instructions for us kids to remove our shoes before getting inside the room. It was 1985 and it was 35 students versus those 2 computers. I was never too enthusiastic to get a feel of those machines and it was easy to get lost amidst 35 struggling students and enjoy the cool conditioned temperature of the room.

 A few years later, I had my joust with computers once again. This time I was in my engineering college and "computers & logic" was a 4 grade course. There was no escape this time and that too from Fortran-77. I spent a miserable 6 months trying to ensure that my lines begin at the 8th column. It was going to be C the coming semester. A mixed feeling of elation knowing that Fortran-77 was gone, fear trying to anticipate the scorch of the unknown C. Before packing off my bags for the summer vacation, I invested some money to get a copy of Gotterfried's C from Schaum series. I still remember that morning, I was reading the first chapter which had an example of 'Towers of Hanoi'. Mr. Gotterfried had spent almost two pages explaining the problem. To me the problem was almost unfathomable with my fragile mastery of flow charts. At the end of the second page, the code for the algorithm was presented.... it was approximately five lines of code. The magic word was 'recursion'. It took me couple of hours to sink the concept in, but after that there was no turning back. C was beautiful!

 Those were the DOS days and the world was open. I learnt programming like a hungry little beast, voraciously drowning every piece of knowledge I could come across. The world opened up to TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident programs) and it was an absolute thrill to watch mysterious forces take control of the screen and make characters fall like rain drops. I learnt assembly, 8086, all about PE format, self modifying programs. It was a status symbol to be qualified as a virus writer in those days when my fellow classmates were struggling with the towers of Hanoi. After crashing my computer a couple of times, I steered my interests towards graphics and computer graphics it was for the next few months - from projections to splines, from transformations to pixel manipulations, I did it all. Every few weeks, the world would open mysteriously wide. I could see my computer science batch mates struggling with compilers.... oh it was fun. I had my own cute little compiler (code named Walrus), I had my own solid modeling programs, I had my own 3D aircraft simulator.

 Nostalgia :). Well, I present here some of the programs which I have written over the ages. Some of the select few that I am still proud of. I hope you enjoy them too.