35 Years of PCQuest

While the pilot of PC World India came in January, the first official edition was launched in July 1987. We subsequently became PCQuest and this July we have officially entered our 35th Year. In 1987 India was still a few years away from Liberalization. There was no World Wide Web. Floppy disks and Intel 386es ruled. (The 586 was the now distant Pentium) Computers were hallowed and kept in closed AC dust free environments. You had to remove your shoes to enter the “Computer Room”.

In the last few decades, PCQ was always there as a pioneering figure informing our readers and guiding the industry. We were the first to champion bulletin boards, the precursor to chat rooms. The first to give a CD and subsequently DVD with any magazine. The first with a Linux initiative for India. The first with the concept of PCQuest Labs, which became CyberMedia Labs. And so on and so forth.

It’s been a great era for Indian technology. The Personal Computer transformed the country in the 1980s while desktop publishing led to tremendous benefits across all industries. The Internet came in the mid-1990s even though the ecommerce blast would come much later. It was also the time of the telecom revolution.

On the eve of 2000, the Y2K crisis led to a good number of doomsday scenarios for the world but it ended up making India an IT services superpower. While desktops and laptops gave villages a miss, not so the smartphone which dominated every aspect of India’s geographies and social classes and could be called a true rural revolution.

Finally we had the Covid Era which was a time of technological acceleration or techceleration. No touch technologies. A supersized WFH culture with true collaboration. Smart healthcare. Ecommerce domination. It all happened. And much more. The 2020s will truly be the Decade of Technology because it has pervaded every industry and vertical, big or small, and every human being flung across all the far corners of the globe. We will come out of the Covid Crisis with technology.

So we will use the next year to look at both the magazine themes of the yesteryears along with India’s tech journey. We will ask industry experts to share their journeys. We will walk down memory lane and look at the key events of the 1980s and 1990s, along with all the progress made in the new millennium. We will also take a look at the road ahead.

But most importantly we want to interact with our most valuable assets: Our readers down the ages. So please do Tweet us your memories at our handle @pcquest with the hashtag #PCQ35Years