The Magazine journey: It all began in 1987

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”.

It was in this backdrop that PC World India was launched in July 1987. We became PCQuest and the magazine proved to be 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, and the first with the concept of Labs for testing and reviewing products.

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 and 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. Today we have seen a smartphone-data revolution even in rural India!

The 1987 covers picked up many stories. Like there was one about the world's best software packages. Do any of you remember WordStar, WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3? This spreadsheet ruled the 1980s, but was taken over by IBM and faded out of existence. Both Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel took over.

Another cover was about Desktop Publishing, a really hot topic in the late 1980s. It did indeed transform India well into the 1990s, empowering the consumer and many small businesses. Today almost every citizen in India has a mobile device while most of the city dwellers have printers-MFDs.

The IBM Personal Computer came in 1981 and revolutionized the world. The IBM Personal System/2 or PS/2 was the company's third generation of Personal Computers released in 1987. The 3.5-inch floppy disk format really took off after that. Nowadays if you say PS2, you immediately think of the Sony PlayStation 2, which came out in 2000.