1/ FAST ICS Karachi, class of '92. That is what we looked like, 29 years ago.
The bankers are at the back. The CIO's in middle, the hackers on left, the 3.5 GPAs, primarily women on right.
Only one made it to a PhD program. Most picked up a second degree. 6 still code.
2/ FAST in 1989, the year we started was 2 bungalows, 3 class rooms, one lab with a 64 bit IBM Mainframe, a library, a PC lab, a volley ball court, a canteen, faculty offices and a common room.
Across 3 batches you could barely count 70 people on campus on good days.
3/ Didn't need anything else to deliver kick ass CS education in Karachi in the 80's and keep the kids happy.
The 3 year program attracted mavericks from all across the country and turned them into different kind of stars.
What did we do in terms of course work?
4/ In 6 semesters we wrote a simulator for M-68000 at microcode level, an OS with a boot loader and a compiler on top of it.
Some used dredging data from Port Qasim for a graphical channel depth optimizer, others wrote a functional Romanized Urdu NLP processor in Prolog.
5/ I did a BAM Neural Network for predicting stock prices + a line detector for AutoCAD architectural drawing.
Started working with C in 1990, while my class still worked with PASCAL. My group partner almost ran me over with his car when I told him I had written our OS in C.
6/ It was a different world, but those two bungalows were magical and so were our class mates, our seniors, our peers and our instructors.
Without FAST Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, right at the start, there wouldn't be a thriving technology industry in either of the 3 cities.
7/ Some went back to teach. I taught as an adjunct from '95 to '97. We all taught as mavericks.
To pass the Software Engineering course that I ran, you had to find your way to my office and install your final project on 4 random selected PC's. If the install failed, you failed.
8/ Software Engineering (SE) final was not a paper final. We tested "It works on client machine" vs "It works on my machine" principle.
When I announced the testing process, there was a riot in my class. I had been teaching for 3 years and the then dean knew and trusted me.
9/ It was the same reaction we had when our OS instructor told us we would simulate a CPU at microcode level and then write an OS for it.
When we went to the same dean he said:.
"You are here to study CS, this is CS. Stop complaining and start building. You don't have time."
10/ We shared two labs and 3 class rooms with 80 students. That is all we had.
Dr. Dobbs and Byte were our window to the world. There was no internet and most of us had no desktops at home. The city had just started to burn.
We felt blessed, not shortchanged.
11/ And yet with the little we had, quite a few of us went forth and changed our little part of the world.
Home bred, but good enough for the world.
Not just our batch, but most batches before and after.
You would surprised if you found out all that we did.
12/ And yet in history you see today there is no mention of earlier days, of our many benefactors, of the men and women who made FAST possible.
Perhaps it is there, hidden deep inside a sitemap, but I couldn't find it.
Thank you from all of us. You know who you are.
13/ Share your history and your memories of your campus.
Honor your peers, your classmates, your teachers and your professors.
Sometimes its good to look back and be grateful for how far we have come from those early days.
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