Invitation to Opening Ceremony
He was the first Dean of Engineering at the University of Rangoon. He also served as Professor of Civil Engineering. He is credited for the “Twinning” with the prestigious universities in the USA.
He earlier served as Principal of the Government Technical Institute (GTI) and Professor of Civil Engineering.
The commemorative issue of RIT Alumni International Newsletter for the first RIT Grand Reunion and Saya Pu Zaw Pwe paid respect to Sayagyi.
Sayagyi U Aung Khin (former Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and the driving force behind SPZP-2000) wrote an introduction to the special article written by Saya Dr. Freddie Ba Hli (the only child of Sayagyi U Ba Hli).
Dr. F. Ba Hli received his Sc.D. in Electrical Engineering from MIT. He helped Sayagyi Dr. Aung Gyi and Sayagyi U Min Wun, who were two of the first undergraduate engineering students from the University of Rangoon to be given State Scholarship as part of the “Twinning” program.
Dr. F. Ba Hli’s spouse Daw Myint Thwe is the sister of Sayagyi U Tin U (C), Sayagyi U Ba Than (M), Dr. Myo Tint (father of Ma Kay (EE93)), U Tin Htoon (A60), Saya U Myo Min (UCC) and U Thaung Lwin (EC66). Note that four are Past Captain and Gold of Rangoon University Boat Club.
Dr. F. Ba Hli has a daughter (Tin Tin Hlaing) and two sons (Tha Hlaing and Min Thet Htoo).
Ma Tin Tin Hlaing (UCC) is the spouse of Ko Htay Aung (Victor, EC80, UCC, nephew of Saya U Sein Hlaing (EE)).
Ko Tha Hlaing (EC83, UCC) stood joint first with Ko Thaung Tin (KMD, former Deputy Minister) in their final year. He, his father and his paternal grandfather form Three Generation of Burmese engineers who are sayas or alumni.
Min Thet Tun did not smoke or drink, but succumbed to lung cancer. He lamented why some people who drink and smoke lived long.
One day, the people on the UCC ferry shouted, “Saya Paing”. To their amazement, ICS U Paing (Saya’s father) came out.
Saya U Soe Paing is the second son of U Paing and Daw Oo Yin (Daughter of Sir Po Tha and Lady Tha).
Saya and his siblings Dr. Myo Paing, U Win Paing (Sayadaw U Wara, ChE70) and U Kyaw Paing (Putra Cup Player) are excellent golfers and Champions at RGC (Rangoon Golf Club) and BGC (Burma Golf Club).
Saya matriculated from SPHS (St. Paul’s High School) in 1956 along with U Ko Ko Lay, U Win Htein, Percy Maung Maung, U Than Se (Richard Khoo), and U Ba Min.
Saya stood 13th in Matriculation and was awarded Collegiate Scholarship.
Saya won two Gold Medals for excellence in the Intermediate of Science.
He scored the highest marks in the I.Sc. examinations.
He scored the highest marks in Mathematics in I.Sc. along with two other students.
Since the original endowment for the Gold Medals did not cover the rising cost of Gold, Saya’s family had to give K150 for each Gold Medal.
Saya rowed and coxed at RUBC. Saya won prizes including the Inter-Hall Fours.
Saya was selected as a States Scholar to attend Stanford University along with Saya U Ko Ko Lay and Bohmu Percy.
Saya received his BS and MS in EE (Electrical Engineering).
Saya did programming for his studies and also worked part-time as computer operator.
Upon his return to Burma, Saya joined the EE Department as Assistant Lecturer. His sponsor supposedly was UBARI (Union of Burma Applied Research Institute).
At a research congress held in the Main Campus, Saya presented a paper covering Digital Logic and Circuits,. Dr. Chit Swe was impressed. Through Saya U Nyi Nyi (EE saya, who moved to the UK), Saya Paing gained contact with Saya Chit. The rest is history.
Saya Paing would help Saya Chit with the UCC Project.
It would take a few years before the UCC Project got approved by UN and funded by UNDP.
Saya Paing promised Saya Chit to recruit his top students to join the UCC Project, but the long delay of the Project to get funded made the task difficult.
Ko Tun Aung Gyaw (EC69), Ko Hla Min (EC69) and Ko Soe Win (EC70) joined UCC as Maintenance Engineers.
Ko Hla Min (Pauk Si, EP70) joined UCC as Chief Operator.
Ko Aung Myint transferred from the RIT EE Laboratory to join UCC as Maintenance Technician.
Saya transferred to UCC as Manager of Systems Division. He managed Maintenance Engineers, Maintenance Technicians, System Programmers and Software Librarian (to name a few).
Saya did another Masters (this time in Computer Science) at Southampton University in UK.
Saya would later manage the Operations Division as well.
Saya allowed Ko Aung Zaw and me to co-author Lecture Guides and Training Manuals for use at UCC.
Saya served as Project Manager / Advisor for UN projects in several countries.
For a detailed story of Saya’s life and work at RIT, UCC and overseas as a UN Advisor, read his articles in English and Burmese. They are available in SCRIB_D.
Saya wrote “Computer Ah Sa UCC Ga”
Sayagadaw Daw Saw Yu Tint (Alice, T69) was my classmate at RIT.
She and Saya Paing have hosted several UCC mini-gatherings at their house.
At one of the gatherings in 2007, Ko Po (U Htin Kyaw, Peter Wun) not only attended the gathering, but gave me a ride back home. He also briefly mentioned about his four-month detention.
After retiring from the UN, Saya would visit UK, USA and Singapore to spend time with his children and grandchildren.
During his trips to New Jersey, there would be several UCC-RIT gatherings.
Ivan Lee (Khin Maung Oo, M69) has hosted the annual RIT-UCC gatherings for a decade or so. He would invite Saya Dr. Aung Gyi and Ma Ma Emma to stay at his house. The timing is chosen to coincide with Saya Paing’s visit to New Jersey.
Saya is healthy, but he had two operations :
Saya meditates and plays golf. Saya stopped both activities when he had a minor ailment (hurting his back and leg). Per advice of Alice’s medical friends (MEHS Alumni), Saya had a surgery in Singapore.
When one is sending e-mail to specified recipients, one is pushing one’s message to others. The intended recipients may (a) welcome your message (b) defer to check your message (c) may ignore your message (d) flag your message as “junk” …
Some e-mail systems send acknowledgement for important messages. Some may ask you to verify for the first time. E-mail systems may maintain “Black lists” and “White lists”.
Some have multiple e-mails either with different email providers (e.g. Gmail and Yahoo mail) or even with a single email (e.g. one for private, another for business).
Some email systems provide encryption.
In one of my jobs, we could not specify sensitive information in e-mails.
Do not assume that your deleted e-mail is gone forever. There is logical deletion and physical deletion. Even with physical deletion, copies of the e-mail may still linger in one or more mail servers and backup devices.
Email providers will scan your e-mail (e.g. using AdSense or a Recommended System) to offer you targeted advertisements.
U Khin Maung Zaw (KMZ, EC76) wrote :
(1) One of the surprises we discovered while on an IBM mainframe system is that a small file which keep track of the email system had the heaviest activity. Part of this small checked the flags, like who in your distribution list had seen/viewed your message. We then acquired a SSD, Solid State Device, mainly for passing files and this email network file on SSD, and saw the high improvement in the overall performance.
Heard from the grapevine that, later email systems attempted as such but it did not scale well as the user population exploded.
(2) One of my directors at the time proudly let his subordinates know that he had no more than 20 messages in his inbox at any given time. Of course, he spent some time deleting them as they came in,
(3) In my last company, email system had come very close to abuse, thousand or more messages a day, and people spent hours a day just for going through daily mails, this is even with the files. There are many times that you could even go through messages from immediate manager.
Many of these messages originated from plethora of monitoring systems, hardware/infrastructural /applications, drove people nuts.
(4) When we first started in my last company, in late 90s, everyone (not in the executive levels) had the inbox size of 20MB. It became minuscule as soon as we had, notifications came every day to remove/archive the old messages. In the mid-2010s the inbox size was at 250MB, that’s in Office365.
by ဒေါ်မိအောင် Daw Mi Aung
Updated : Feb 2026
အမေပြောတတ်တဲ့စကားလေးတွေဟာကျမအတွက်တော့သင်ခန်းစာလေးတွေပါဘဲ။သားလေးရလာတော့ “မိန်းကလေးထက်ယောကျာ်းလေးကပိုအရေးကြီးတယ်” တဲ့။ အမေကလဲသားကိုပိုချစ်လို့ဒီစကားမျိုးပြောတယ်လို့ထင်ခဲ့မိတာ။
အမေနဲ့အဖေ ရန်ဖြစ်တတ်တာတော့မကြာခဏပါဘဲ။
အဖေကအပေါင်းအသင်းလဲများ၊သဘောလဲကောင်းပြီးအရက်လဲသောက်တတ်တယ်။
အမေကနဲနဲမှမကြိုက်။အဖေသောက်လာမှန်းသိရင် မျက်စောင်းတစ်ထိုးထိုးနဲ့ထမင်းလဲခူးမကျွေးဘူး။
သောက်တဲ့သူက မရစ်ဘူး။အမေကတအားရစ်တာ၊မပြီးနိုင်မစီးနိုင်။
တစ်ရက်တော့ အဖေအိပ်နေတာကိုကျောပေါ်ခွစီးပြီး သနပ်ခါးတုံးနဲ့ခေါင်းကိုထုတာ၊အဖေက “ဟာဒီမိန်းမတော့” ဆိုပြီးကျောကိုလှည့်လိုက်တော့ အမေလေ တစ်အိမ်လုံးပတ်ပြေးလိုက်တာ၊အဖေက အော်အော်ပြီးရယ်လို့ အမေက အဝေးကနေပစ္စည်းတွေနဲ့ ကောက်ပေါက်နေသေး။
(တော်တော်ဆိုးတဲ့အမေ။)
အမေက ပါးတယ်၊သူကသေးသေးလေး၊အဖေကဝတုတ်ကြီးဆိုတော့ပူးပြီးဘယ်သတ်လိမ့်မတုန်း။
တခါကတော့ အဖေက’ စတီး သားလှီးဓါး’တစ်ချောင်းတစ်ကျပ်ခွဲနဲ့ဝယ်လာလို့ ရန်လုပ်တာများလေ တစ်ညလုံး အိပ်နေတဲ့သူကိုနှိုး၊နှိုးပြီးတော့ကိုပြောတာ။
(အဖေက ချက်တာပြုတ်တာ ဝါသနာပါတော့ မီးဖိုချောင်သုံးပစ္စည်းလေးတွေဝယ်တတ်တယ်။)
အဖေကလေ ” မူးတာဘယ်ရောက်သွားမှန်းမသိတော့ပါဘူးကွာ” လို့ပြောရရှာတော့တာ။
(အရက်သောက်ထားတဲ့သူထက် သွေးဆိုးတဲ့၊ဂျီကျတဲ့အမေ)
ဝါတွင်းကျပြန်တော့ အဖေကလုံးဝမသောက်ဘဲ၊သတ်သတ်လွတ်စားသေးတာ။သိပ်သဘောကောင်းတဲ့အဖေ။
ကျမကအဖေ့သ္မီး၊အဖေ့ကိုသိပ်ချစ်တာ။
အမေ့ကိုတော့လေ၊အဖေမရှိတဲ့နောက်ပိုင်း မိန်းမသားပေမဲ့ သားသ္မီး ၅ ယောက်ကိုလူတန်းစေ့အောင် ထားနိုင်ဖို့ လှုပ်ရှားရုန်းကန်ရလို့ သိပ်သနားတာ။
ဒါပေမဲ့ အမေကအဖေ့ကို သိပ်ဦးစားပေးတာပါ။အလုပ်အကိုင်အတွက်စကားပြောရင်တောင် အဖေ့ကိုဘဲရှေ့တန်းတင်တတ်တဲ့မိန်းမမျိုး။ အဖေအလုပ်အကိုင်မရှိတဲ့အချိန်ကလဲ မငြိုမငြင်ထားတဲ့မိန်းမမျိုး။
တကယ်တော်တဲ့ကျမတို့အမေပါ။တစ်ခုဘဲ အဖေ့ဆီက အရက်နံ့နဲနဲရတာနဲ့ ရန်ဖြစ်ဖို့၊ဂျီကျဖို့ တာစူတတ်တော့တာ။
(ကျမအသက်ကြီးလာတော့ အမေ့ကိုမေးကြည့်မိတယ်။ အဖေက အမေနဲ့ရမှအရက်သောက်တတ်တာလားလို့။အဲ့ဒီတော့” မဟုတ်ပါဘူးအေ၊လူပျိုထဲကသောက်တာပါ”တဲ့။
ပြီးတော့ “အမေ့ကိုယူပြီးရင်မသောက်တော့ပါဘူး”လို့ပြောသတဲ့။ ငြိမ်းငြိမ်းတို့ပြောပြတာကတော့ “ညည်းအဖေမူးလာရင်တစ်လမ်းလုံးပြည့်အောင်လမ်းလျှောက်ပြီးဝင်လာတတ်တာ၊ ဒါပေမဲ့သိပ်သဘောကောင်းပြီးရန်မဖြစ်တတ်ဘူး”တဲ့။ ကျမလေ အော်ရယ်တာ၊ ယောကျာ်းစကားများယုံလို့အမေရယ် လို့တွေးမိသွားတာပါ။
အမေပြောတဲ့ယောကျာ်းလေးပိုအရေးကြီးတယ်ဆိုတာဟုတ်မှာ။တကယ်တော့ အိမ်မှာဖူးဖူးမှုတ်ခံထားရတဲ့သားအငယ်ဆုံးအဖေဟာ နေ့တဓူဝသောက်စားခြင်းမရှိတော့တာ၊ အမေ့ရဲ့လိမ္မာပါးနပ်မှုတွေကြောင့်ပါ။
အမေပြောတယ်လေ၊ ယောကျာ်းလေးဘယ်လောက်ဆိုးဆိုး၊မိန်းမကလိမ္မာရင်ဆွဲခေါ်နိုင်တယ်။ မိန်းမ မလိမ္မာတာရလို့များတော့ယောကျာ်းက အဝိဇိတောင်ကျနိုင်တယ်။”တဲ့။ ဆိုလိုတာကတော့ ယောကျာ်းဆိုတာမိန်းမက ဝတ်ချင်စားချင်၊လိုချင်ရမက်ကြီးရင် ဓါးပြလဲဖြစ်နိုင်တယ်၊သူခိုးလဲဖြစ်နိုင်တာမို့ပါ။
မှတ်ချက်။ ။အမှတ်ရတာလေးတွေရေးတာမို့ဝေဖန်နိုင်ပါတယ်။
by Hla Min
Updated : Feb 2026
U Khin Maung Zaw (KMZ, EC76) set up three GBNF pages on ex-RIT.org web site :
I used GBNF in the last stanza of my poem “SAYA PU ZAW PWE” for SPZP-2000. The poem was reprinted as the Back Cover of Swel Daw Yeik Sar Saung for SPZP-2000. It was only reprinted by the Class of 69 and Combined 1st BE intake of 64 and 65.
The GBNF list is maintained by U Aung Min (M69) and team.
There are 138 entries in the GBNF list. About 20 succumbed to Covid.
About 320 students entered the first ever 2nd BE in 1964. The list includes a few seniors who took sabbatical in their study and ended up as our classmates. Over 40% of our former classmates have passed away.
There were 13 EC69ers. The following have passed away :
Several EPers are also GBNF. They include
Due to the decline of health of 69ers, the group chose to have two Golden Jubilees : the first in 2014 to celebrate the admission to RIT, and the second in December 2019 to celebrate the graduation of most members in 1969.
U Ohn Khine (M70) reported close to 130 entries in the GBNF list of the Class of 70.
Tommy Shwe, Cho Aye, Peter Pe and Thaung Sein (Steeve Kay) were among the Top Ten students from the class. They are now GBNF.
Over 450 students entered the first ever 1st BE.
Most of my sayas and sayamas from PPBRS have passed away.
Among my PPBRS classmates, Myo Set (son of actor Tha Gaung Gyi) was the first to pass away. He perished in a car accident. Myint Sein (Veda) and Myat Hla Sein (Movie Tech) are among the recent GBNF from PPBRS.
Most of my sayas and sayamas from SPHS have passed away. Sayadaw Beatson (Physics, Boy Scouts) is still active and strong.
Among my SPHS classmates, Min Thaw (Gilbert, SPHS63) is among the early ones to pass away. Dr. Myo San (Freddie), Aung Thu Yein (Brownie), Tin Tun, Maung Maung Kyi, Aung Kyi (Arthur Kyi), Khin Maung Bo (Alan Saw Maung), Aung Chaw (Victor) are among the GBNF from SPHS63.
Several of my sayas, colleagues and former students have passed away.
CO Hla Min (Pauk Si) is an early GBNF from UCC. U Aung Zaw, Daw Nge Ma Ma Than, U Maung Maung Lay (Ah Ba), U Aung Myint and U Maung Maung Gyi are among the recent GBNF from UCC.
One should have Samvegha (sense of urgency) after hearing the sad news. When my namesake Hla Min (Pauk Si, SPHS64, EP70) passed away in his mid-thirties, we were shocked since he seemed strong and did not wear jackets (mandated for UCC employees entering the Computer Room). He would often be seen in sport shirts. He passed away with a few months of being diagnosed with liver problem. The consultant doctor was Dr. Min Lwin (Maurice Hla Kyi, SPHS64, IM71). Ko Pauk Si was not a drinker, but other causes inflicted his liver. I became a Tone Kyaw when two government departments where I had given Guest Lectures on Computers and Applications tried to send me “Lwan Thu Pan Khwe” လွမ်းသူ့ပန်းခွေ
U Han Sein (C69) became a Tone Kyaw when the Organizers of the 30th Anniversary of Graduation inadvertently listed him in the GBNF list of the Class of 69. The organizers were unaware that U Han Sein was detained by the authorities after the 8-8-88 event. He resurfaced two decades later with the declaration of Amnesty.
Saya Dr. Tin Hlaing (M63) became a Tone Kyaw when his namesake Saya Dr, Tin Hlaing (formerly of Maritime Studies) passed away. Some alumni had to revoke the wrong announcement.
by Hla Min
Updated : Feb 2026
My cousin nephew Myo Kyawswar processed some old photos.
The seven sisters :
by Hla Min
Updated : Feb 2026
In 2015, RIT (Rangoon Institute of Technology) Alumni had a Reunion in Los Angeles. It was a two day event — Reunion Dinner at Knott’s Berry Farm and a Farewell Brunch.
by Hla Min
Updated : Feb 2026
Frederick Thetgyi (M69) hosted the trip to Philadelphia.
by Hla Min
Updated : Feb 2026
Saya U Tin Maung Nyunt, Ko Thein Naing (Patrick) and Ko Myint Swe attended the Baby Shower for our daughter-in-law.
We now have a grand daughter and a grand son.
She is holding my elder son.
The photo shows
Burma celebrates the Burmese New Year in mid-April. Thingyan is the associated Water Festival.
For logistics, the San Francisco Bay Area celebrates Thingyan in May.
He is my mom’s youngest brother. He worked for IBM Burma before moving to the USA.
We visited him in Maryland in 2015.
Sadly, he passed away on Sept 29, 2025. He was 96+ years old.
My aunt taught Psychology at Rangoon University. She studied Library Science in the USA. She retired as Head of the Burmese Collection at the Library of Congress.
Their elder son is a medical doctor in Texas. Their younger son is a Civil Engineer in Maryland.
They were taken in
HlaMin 