Gizmos & early users

Narendra Modi’s claim of having used a digital camera and email in 1987 has got him bad press because of the date, which is close to or before the beginning of their use anywhere in the world.  That may not be entirely undeserved. But one’s claim to be an early user of an innovation need not be questioned merely because the person is from India, not known for its receptivity to new devices (especially in the last century). 

I am almost certainly the first user of laptop computers in India and among the earliest in the world. In early 1985, I had begun an association with a Canadian engineering consulting company working on a project for East India Hotels. We struck an immediate rapport. In the Canadians’ Delhi visit in February-March that year, I initiated them into the intricacies of one-day cricket while watching live telecasts of the World Championship Series then being played in Australia (in which Ravi Shastri won an Audi car as the player of the series).

When they returned in April, one of them had a Toshiba T1100 portable computer introduced globally just days earlier, which he had bought right before leaving for India for Canadian $3,000. The covetous gleam in my eyes was evident to everyone, especially the leader of the Canadian team.  He persuaded his colleague to sell the machine to me for Rs 30,000 and voilà! I was the proud owner of this wonderful new piece of hardware within 10 days of its being on the market.

The Toshiba machine was technically not the first portable computer.  Some experimental devices had been on the scene off and on for about a decade.  But the Toshiba offering, fully compatible with the IBM PC, was “the world’s first mass-market laptop computer,” as its manufacturer most truthfully claimed.

A generation later, it can be called with some justification the dinosaur of laptops: It was slow, had only 256 kb RAM, no hard disk, used the then not readily available 3½” diskettes (the standard ones were the 5¼” floppies), had a monochrome orange display and limited graphic ability and bulky as well. Toshiba proudly and rightly said it weighed just(!) 4 kg and fitted into a briefcase (it did, but took up all the space). But in 1985, it was nothing less than a marvel.

I had a presentation to make to the Oberoi board, with such distinguished members as B K Nehru and Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw.  Although I showed the key numbers in an overhead transparency presentation, I had saved the sensitivity analysis on the laptop. The venerable board members were completely convinced when the “little” machine answered all their what-if questions with a few quick key strokes. The happy hour post the board meeting was entirely consumed by their eager handling of the computer.

A few weeks later, I had a meeting with Baba Kalyani of Bharat Forge. He used to come to the office after a morning round of the shop floor. That day he was a little behind the schedule. As I waited, his senior personal secretary wanted to know what was in my shoulder bag. I told her it was a computer. She did not believe it until I took it out and showed her. More than a decade later, I had called up Mr Kalyani’s office to fix an appointment.  I introduced myself and the voice at the other end said, “How can I forget you?  You introduced me to laptops!”

Late in 1985, I went to North America for a series of meetings and discussions. Although airport security then was not as stringent as it is now, I had to invariably take out the laptop every time and demonstrate that it was a computer, much to the great amazement of the security personnel. And if I worked on it during a long wait in the departure lounge, a crowd was sure to collect, oohing and aahing about the little wonder.

It was not just the hardware. The Canadians also gave me Microsoft Word, then just introduced. I found it much more user-friendly as compared to then Indian standard Wordstar and started using it immediately. People did not ask for soft copies of documents in those days, so I was spared the need of converting Word files into Wordstar. But I still think in Lotus 123 before building Excel worksheets!

So Mr Modi might be right in claiming to have used a digital camera in 1987, because Megavision started selling its Tessera camera then.  He could have picked it up in his travels abroad or one of his many admirers may have presented him one. But the first truly digital camera, the Fuji DS-1P, came into the market in 1988, a year after Mr Modi claimed to have taken Lal Krishna Advani’s digital picture. He could surely not have sent it through email, because the rudimentary, non-commercial services then available to select few anywhere in the world could not handle large picture files. Oh well, that would not be the first time when truth has been embellished a little and certainly not the last!