On Wednesday 14 October 2009, Karthik Shanmugam wrote: > Hi Edwin, > > Yes, I agreed with him. > September 1984 RMS began to work in GNU Emacs eventually to develop 'Free > OS' at the same time in India 1984 November, Indian Government announced > NCP(New Computer Policy) ... This is the historical, technical and > political gap ... When a guy in the US talked about 'Free OS' India was > relaxing import conditions ...
I presume you are berating the removal of import restrictions: Because at the time we had a licence permit raj that bred corruption and promoted inept manipulators as "industrialists". One did not require any of the basic skills - technical, financial, marketing, administrative - just the readiness to grease palms. If it wasnt for this "relaxing" by the late Rajiv Gandhi, you would not be sending this email. Digging holes and filling em up was after all the cornerstone of economic policy till then. Businesses and the privileged within that eco system must face the blast of competition - cooperation being one method of competition. Any barrier only strengthens those within and further depletes those outside. The biggest opposer of computerisation was the left trade unions - the guys on the inside having fun at the expense of 70% of the populace ekeing out an existence on the outside. > In 1984 many Indians visited many companies > in the US, the UK and Canada et al ... They failed to visit MIT ... If they > heared about RMS and MIT, Indian IT business would be different ... Any > history is history ... TCS in 1984 (and almost every other large vendor i knew of ) wrote it's applications on unix and cobol. The small guys did it on DOS. Everyone always offered the source code (or rather the source was kept with you on a bunch of floppies), as every application was customised. BTW afair the source code - in assembly - for DOS was available at $100~150 and DRDOS was a lot cheaper. There was ROMDOS too - two Eproms with dos or an add on card with EPROM and some ram - no need for floppy or hdd. Networking was thru the serial port, with 16 port serial concentrators used quite often (you saw them at the airport booking counter) and novell netware, then the defacto standard. In 87 a seminar was run by the ERTL on graphics and the main focus was X. Most of us were throughly pissed off at this resource hog and wondered why the seminar did not focus on assembly graphics routines (which everbody used anyway), it being very fast and with a minimal memory and disk footprint. So open and free (though not for redistribution) was the norm. At the time India did manufacture a lot of hardware in competition with Taiwan. ANSA industrial estate in Mumbai had atleast 4 motherboard and peripheral card manufacturers. Unfortunately we did not remove the administrative bottlenecks and by 90 the technologist were all dead. BTW most addon cards came with a manual that also listed the internal registers. Writing to the chip vendor got you a whole set of manuals and schematics - no mile long NDAs to sign. You see innovation can grow anywhere and one must have no restrictions whatsoever in bringing in those innovations, least of all by dumb officials. This apart from the need for first class administrative and infrastructure facilities. Right now we are again likely to miss the bus as the government refuses to remove the man in the middle - it's own self. Infact we continually see them removing individual freedom in favour of a new bunch of manipulators. Thus FORD motor company can import a 1980 mothballed plant from Oz, but you and i cant import a second hand car. And with stupid schemes like UID we see the government trying to repostion themselves firmly in the middle. -- Rgds JTD _______________________________________________ network mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fosscom.in/listinfo.cgi/network-fosscom.in
