PC'S PROGRESS: The original IBM PC of 1981 (left) and some of today's variants (top to bottom): The Indian hybrid PC: Mobilis -- the `desi' pocket PC, Simputer and the phone-based, I-Mate.

Bangalore : On August 12, 1981, International Business Machines (IBM) announced the launch of the ``smallest, lowest-priced computer... for business, school and home.'' The IBM PC 5150 cost $1565. It came with a green screen, 16 kilobytes of memory and no storage. To load programmes, the makers provided 5-inch floppy drives which stored 360 kilobytes each.

What made the IBM PC the world's most widely used computing platform was the company's decision to licence the software from an upstart outfit called Microsoft. Its co-founder Bill Gates reserved the right to sell the Disk Operating System, or DOS, to other PC makers. This saw the hardware of the so-called IBM PC cloned by hundreds of small and big players worldwide, creating a vast ecosystem that soon swamped the `other' PC design created by Apple Computers. The IBM-type PC today accounts for 90 per cent of the nearly 1 billion personal computing machines in use worldwide.

India's microcomputer

By coincidence, the 25th birthday of the IBM PC comes just a day after the 30th anniversary of HCL, the Indian Information Technology player who, perhaps more than any other company, was instrumental in enabling a whole generation of Indian students and professionals to get a `feel' for PC technology with hardly any time delay after its global availability.

Those were the heydays of import restrictions. Yet Shiv Nadar, HCL's founder-Chairman and his small band of executives who included Arjun Malhotra and Ajai Chowdhry (the latter is still with the HCL group as Chairman, HCL Infosystems) skilfully negotiated the `chakravyuha' of red tape to import whatever they could not make here and put together India's first desktop microcomputer.

Mr. Nadar recalls in a special communication to The Hindu : ``As the PC celebrates its 25th year, HCL takes pride in the fact that we shipped an indigenous product, at the same time or ahead of global IT enterprises... That was an era of proprietary standards... so HCL built its own Operating System and a Basic Interpreter language and shipped the first 8 bit processor-based computer, the 8CR, in March 1978. That came around the same time as Apple did and 3 years ahead of IBM's PC.''

Since then, HCL has remained committed to manufacturing in India. It was a path followed by other early PC providers in India — like Wipro, PSI, Zenith and DCM Data systems (the last no longer in the business). Today, the PC business in India is growing at a healthy 27 per cent, adding nearly 5 million units a year... a legacy of these industry players as well as thousands of nameless `assemblers' in the 1980s, who nudged a nation into the Cyber Age with products that provided them very thin profit margins.

When this correspondent put his eager hands on the keyboard of the first Indian IBM PC in 1983, the machine came with a free software package of the word processor, Wordstar; the spread sheet, VisiCalc (later Lotus 1-2-3); and the data base tool DBase-II. For almost a decade, that remained the total arsenal of the PC user — till Internet (and Windows) came and changed all that.

The latest PCs launched in India this month are fuelled by what are known as `dual-core' chips from Intel or AMD — two processors on a chip which are approximately 10,000 times more powerful than the Intel chip that fuelled that 1981 PC. India has now emerged not just as a consumer of PC technology but an innovator as well.

Simputer and Mobilis

In December 2001, the Simputer, a radically simple portable computer, was created by a small band of teachers and students in Bangalore. Sadly, lack of Government encouragement forced the concept to be reworked, so that today two versions of the Simputer sell mostly to Government departments and the services sector, leaving untouched the rural masses it was meant to empower.

The other innovative India-made PC format was the Mobilis, a sort of desktop-laptop hybrid, unveiled by the CSIR just over a year ago. It is yet to reach shop shelves as a commercial product. Meanwhile, just as Internet connectivity is finally reaching the vast rural hinterland, the engine to access it is itself under threat from an even more compelling device for self empowerment: the mobile phones.

Worldwide, the cellular phone has already outstripped the PC, selling over 2 billion. In India, the unshackling of the telecom sector from government monopoly has seen mobile phone numbers ramp up very quickly to over 100 million today. PC and telephony applications increasingly merge in hand-held devices like the iMate and other `smart phones,' which permit emailing, short messaging and surfing the Web.

Who needs a PC when one's phone can do most of what a desktop or laptop PC does? In its 26th year, that may be the greatest challenge that the personal computer faces.

How to do what it does best — in a way that will still offer what canny Indians, facing a choice of mobile phones and smart handhelds, would deem to be `paisa vasool.'

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