How PCQ became a Market Maker

By Prasanto K Roy, MD, FTI Consulting, Former Editor, PCQuest & Former President & Chief Editor, CyberMedia

It was a hot and sunny day in the summer of ’95. A colleague and I had stopped by for a quick chicken-rice lunch at a busy spot in ‘Asia’s largest IT marketplace’, Nehru Place. The cheap-and-cheerful place also served rajma-chawal and boasted three tiny but tall round plastic ‘dining’ tables to share with strangers – standing only, no chairs.

Our table companion had several cardboard boxes with him, and, I was happy to see, two copies of PC Quest. It was our first issue that carried a CD-ROM on the cover, the first magazine in Asia to do so. I was curious: why two, and what would he do with the CD, which had the entire IBM OS/2 operating system? We got talking. He was delighted to know I was the editor of PC Quest. He was an IT dealer, with a shop in the next building—and he was suddenly flooded with orders for CD-ROM drives, five of them just that day. He insisted we visit his shop. We had some very sweet and milky tea there.

When we introduced CD-ROMs on the cover of our 45,000 PC Quest copies, that was more than the total number of drives in India that could read those disks. Our cover CD-ROMs, quarterly at first, then monthly, sharply drove up sales for CD-ROMs. It was early days for the Internet in India, and downloading a full CD worth of software—over 500 MB of it—took several days over dial-up modems. This was also a reason the CD-ROM issues sold like hotcakes: hoarded, stored, exchanged, and “sold in black” at twice the cover price. Readers quickly got access to shareware, freeware, and sometimes commercial software that companies decided to give away, as IBM had. Later, we moved on to 4.7 GB DVD-ROM disks, and the quantum of software exploded.

Then we started shipping a curated ‘PCQuest distribution’ of Linux every year on the cover-mounted CD. That began and drove Linux use in India in the late 1990s. Linux was light, robust, and free, and made a terrific server, rejuvenating an old 386-based PC that would struggle to run Windows. For the next two decades, every Linux user in India would remember PCQ Linux and the team of regular contributors and columnists that would put it together each year, led by Atul Chitnis and Kishore Bhargava. Those half-dozen odd folks were already well known on the BBS circuit: the electronic ‘bulletin boards’ that pre-dated the Internet. Atul had created a program called CyberNet and set up on it the PCQ online BBS. All this got thousands of readers to buy modems – to dial up into maybe three BBSs out there.

And it was on us to test dozens of modems: Zyxel, US Robotics, Motorola… our makeshift lab in our South Delhi basement office echoed those distinctive modem dial-up squeaks. When we moved into CyberMedia’s own building in Gurgaon as the first occupant of a now-crowded Sector 32 institutional area in 1999, the largest area in it was kept for a new PCQ Labs that gradually got stocked with test equipment, including my favorite, an HP digital storage oscilloscope.

And so we crossed the millennium bug without the world ending, into a new era. A couple of other magazines had started giving cover CD-ROMs, but our disks, and especially the annual PC Quest Linux distributions, had made a major mark – finding their way into the IITs, government departments, and defense labs. Our frequent ‘shootouts’ reviewed popular equipment – ‘20 Modems Tested’, ‘The Annual Mega-UPS Shootout’ – were the sine qua non for buyers. And not just individuals: organizations would read them, and then we began to find government tenders and even a defense tender for UPSs that said applicants must have had their product tested by PCQ Labs!

That was remarkable, for a magazine and a test lab that did not do commissioned product tests for payment, despite many requests.

Two decades down, former and present readers still tell us they have saved every PC Quest issue and CD-ROM from those years. Unicorn startup founders tell us how they read those issues in school and college, and wrote letters to the editor. Unlike most tech publications of the 1990s, PC Quest lives on, with other CyberMedia publications like Dataquest, all adapting to a changing world. And it feels special, having been part of and steered a magazine that helped change the market, driving tech usage in the world’s largest democracy.

This is part of our PCQuest 35 Years Series on the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow of Technology.