Influencing & guiding generation's tech choices

I still remember that day clearly. It was getting late; but that was nothing new at the Labs.

- KRISHNA KUMAR

KRISHNA KUMAR

Former Editor, PCQuest. The first one to head PCO Labs

We were used to working into the night. Divya Mahajan, then a student at IIT Delhi was working with us. As it was getting late, his father dropped in, and we got chatting. Divya's father was clo at NIIT and I was curious on what all new things he was doing. Oh! I am setting up an intranet. The pride and excitement in his voice was unmistakable. Those were early days of the internet. Corporate networks mostly ran on Novell Netware and Sun's Solaris was the predominant Unix flavor. Digital's Vaxes were still popular. VSNL (remember giasdloi anyone?), Sify and the like were the ISPs. Networking those days did not mean TCP/IP!

Intranets were new, so his excitement was natural. But soon, the excitement and euphoria in his voice gave way to the frustrations of the implementation. An intranet runs on this new thing called TCP/IP. How do you get it running on diverse operating systems and hardware? How do you decide what IP addresses to assign? Where do you store files in the network? What software do you run, once you get the machines talking to each other? Issues that are no brainers today were showstoppers then!

Be it the individual buying her first PC or the corporate deciding on which software to implement and how, PCQuest was invariably their guide.