If you studied computer science in India, you've almost certainly experienced two things in a computer lab.
One: being asked to remove your shoes before entering. Two: writing your program in a notebook before you were allowed to touch the keyboard.
For most students, it felt like arbitrary discipline. Strict for no reason. Slightly annoying.
It turns out, neither of these is arbitrary. They're traditions that trace back more than 60 years — to the very beginning of computing in India.
It Starts at IIT Kanpur
In the 1960s, IIT Kanpur received an IBM 1620 mainframe — one of the earliest computers used for academic programming in India.
This wasn't the kind of machine where you open an IDE and hit Run. Programming worked completely different back then.
The Punch Card Problem
Students wrote programs using punched cards. Each line of code was physically encoded by punching holes into specific positions on a card. A complete program was a stack of them.
Now imagine debugging when every typo meant creating a brand-new physical card.
These cards weren't cheap either. They had to be imported from the United States, which made them scarce and expensive. Trial and error wasn't really an option.
So students were required to plan, structure, and verify their entire program on paper first. Only after that were they allowed near the machine.
The "write your code in a notebook before lab" rule wasn't about discipline. It was about necessity.
The Shoes
Early mainframes like the IBM 1620 were extraordinarily sensitive. They needed air-conditioned, dust-controlled environments to function reliably.
Dust was a genuine operational risk — especially in India's climate. One practical solution: ask people to remove their shoes before entering the computer room.
Simple, effective, and completely sensible in context.
A Tradition That Outlived Its Reason
What's remarkable is that modern labs use none of this hardware. No punch cards. No fragile mainframes. No dust sensitivity that a pair of shoes could meaningfully affect.
And yet, students across India still write code in records before lab sessions. Shoes still come off at the door in plenty of institutions.
Most people assume it's just college rules. A quirk of administration.
In reality, they're participating in a tradition inherited from the earliest days of computer science education in India — quietly surviving for over six decades without anyone explaining why.
Sometimes, what looks like an outdated rule is actually a piece of history that forgot to introduce itself.
Did your college have these rules? I'd genuinely like to know if the shoe thing was regional or everywhere.
— Cheers, NP