PCs
In 1982, TIME magazine named the PC as its “Machine of the Year” (instead of naming a “Man of the Year”). An excerpt: “There are some occasions, though, when the most significant force in a year’s news is not a single individual but a process, and a widespread recognition by a whole society that this process is changing the course of all other processes. That is why, after weighing the ebb and flow of events around the world, TIME has decided that 1982 is the year of the computer. … TIME’S Man of the Year for 1982, the greatest influence for good or evil, is not a man at all. It is a machine: the computer.”
I am certain that the cover story influenced my father to purchase a computer in 1983 for his office. It was a decision that changed the trajectory of my life. I was in college (11th standard at St. Xavier’s College). With free time on my hands, I would go to my father’s office and write software. Here is what I had written on my previous blog in 2004: “I remember using my first PC in 1983-4. I remember getting a ZX Sinclair home but didn’t use it much. At the same time, my father had also got a computer at work. It was very expensive (Rs 200,000 or so, when the dollar was Rs 8 per dollar). Since we couldn’t find a software programmer who would stay long enough (!), I decided to learn BASIC programming, and would go after college and write programs on it. [I] wrote many interactive games then: one that simulated a one-day cricket international (remember that was the time India had won the Cricket World Cup), Monopoly, and a game I called MinderMast (guessing a 4-digit number in upto 10 tries). The computer was my life then – that was how my love affair with technology began. Till then, I wanted to follow my father’s footsteps and become a civil engineer and build bridges and buildings. The computer in the office changed my life.”
I learnt some theory about the digital world during my IIT years, and did some low-level assembly language programming for a communications project. Computers came back into my life at Columbia University during my Masters education. That is when I started writing software seriously, something I continued at NYNEX, and then the early days of my entrepreneurial career. I wrote (along with my co-founder Sanjay) a multimedia database in 1992-3, and then an image processing software (Image WorkBench) in 1993-94. None of these succeeded commercially. By then, the next revolution was already underway – and I had already started thinking about how I could play a part in it.
