Garrulous Gopal

Dr. T.V.Gopal is our faculty for UID( user interdace design). He is a senior faculty in our department and is said to be equally knowledgeable by a few, though the common opinion is that he is more a crack pot. He has authored books including TN state board’s higher secondary books for computer science.


Today we had our 10th lecture hour by this great man. But we still have not a basic idea of what the subject is all about and haven’t taken a line of notes as whatever he was telling us is not worth noting down or they don’t need noting down as everything is some sort of a fairy tale of how computers emerged or how important user interface is.

To give an example let me give you a micro briefed version of one of his stories, “I was traveling in train to Bangalore. It was 1998 and it’s the Kargil War time. Everywhere people are speaking about the war. I was also caught in the euphoria of Indian army’s advances. As soon as I got into my room in the hotel there, I switched on the TV and was skimming through channels by pressing the ‘+’ marked button near channels, looking for some channel where I ll get some news on the war. I suddenly realized that I went past by 4 channels after the channel I really needed. So I wanted to come back. As I have jumped 3 or 4 channels I was pressing the ‘-‘ button quickly in quick succession 2 or 3 times. Suddenly the channels kept changing continuously whatever I did it didn’t stop. I was panicked and I called for help. Then a hotel official walked in and enquired what happened I narrated the entire story to him and he said ‘Don’t worry sir you are not the first person to encounter such a problem. Many doesn’t know that if we press the ‘-‘ button twice in quick succession TV goes into ch-scan mode.” The point he wanted to make after more than 15mins of narration of this story with emphasis on his, euphoria, his urgency etc etc is that usually in Indian remote controls there is no such mechanism and the user interface should have been made in a commonly perceived way.

He has emphasized on this point with more than a dozen stories like this with each story lasting for more than 15mins.

At least in the last couple of lectures he started to speak about evolution of computers and the important role that user interface played in it.

I was just trying to be optimistic and I thought as a computer engineer I must know this and tried my best to give my ear to the history of computers. Shannon’s contributions and Bool’s theory were not bad a story.

Hope he doesn’t mind if I write these stories in the exam paper. Hey believe it or not seniors are betting that they scored good marks by writing better long stories than these in the exam papers.