To help speed up the computerization in Burma, Saya Dr. Chit Swe (Founder / Director) mandated the “training & knowledge transfer” component in the UCC project.

• The component was awarded to Professor Harry D. Huskey (Past ACM President), who taught at University of California Berkeley (UCB) and University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC).
• Dr, Huskey is a computer pioneer, ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) Fellow, and CHM (Computer History Museum) Fellow.
• Dr. Huskey persuaded several top Computer Scientists and Educators to transfer their knowledge and expertise.

Experts for UCC Project

The following is a partial list of the experts provided by Dr. Huskey.

• Professor Anthony Ralston (SUNY Buffalo & Past President of ACM)
  Structured Programming
• Professor Peter Wegner (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island)
  Programming Languages, Compilers
• Dr. Malcolm P. Atkinson (Cambridge University Mathematics & Computer Lab)
  Supervised M.Sc. (Computer Science) students
• Professor Foreman Acton
  Numerical Methods, Author of “Algorithms that [almost] work”
• Professor Michael Stonebraker (UC Berkeley)
  Ingres (early Relational Data Base Management System)

RDBMS

• At UCB, Michael Stonebraker, Eugene Wong and Gerald Held designed and implemented INGRES (Relational Database Management System).
  They went on to found INGRES and several other DB companies (e.g. Postgres).
• Stonebraker won the prestigious ACM Turing Award (“Nobel Prize” for Computer Professionals) a few years ago.

• Dr. Htay Lwin Nyo, Sai Aung Thurein, Ko Kyaw Zwar Than, Ko Sein Myint, … implemented projects (based on INGRES and other Databases) on ICL under the supervision of Saya Paing and several other sayas.

Feedback

KMZ wrote :

In my line of work, prior to my retirement, Knowledge Transfer is one of the several criteria for the success of the Organization/Company. The others are “Documentation” and some mechanism to transfer/document “Tribal Knowledge”.

It was a major challenge for all of us, it was, and still is, a thankless catch up process in the very fast changing Internet. When someone from the management and/or product wanted some new features, the timeline always was ‘yesterday’. They almost always wanted it done ‘yesterday’ as we jokingly called it.

There are innumerable projects/processes we spent so much time could get shelved due to whatever reasons. Documentation and Knowledge Transfer became after thought. And when the key people moved on to other projects it became a nightmare for people who took over.

KMZ added :

There was a story told by Dr. Stonebraker where he learnt of the amazement on our faces when we saw his gigantic shoe. It was about the tough drill sergeant Stone and a small recruit called Stonebraker at the boot-camp. Since I was not a good story teller, I googled/binged Internet but none came up yet.

I believe Rafiul went to work for Stonebraker at Ingres when he moved to California. Htay Lwin Nyo told me about it when I met him. Ingres was eventually sold to CA, Computer Associates.

Editor’s Note :

One of my early assignments was to work with developers from Fujitsu and some subsidiaries, Computer Associates and some subsidiaries (including Ingres).