[LI] Re: [ilug-blr] Re: Times of India articles

[Atul Chitnis <achitnis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 19 Nov 1999, Uday Kumar wrote:

> I need to know who Introduced Linux in India so I can Interview him
> for my site and have a feature. Please let me know

The earliest reference to Linux in India I have is February 1992, when a
chappie named Rajendra Kulkarni at NCST Bombay, along with a few friends,
downloaded a *very* early version of Linux to try out. I saw it, and it
wasn't pretty. They put it on a tape for later reference. I have that
tape.

Several early adopters I recall were Sundar Nagarajan and Basant at TIFR
Bombay. They already had some experience with early Linux kernels when I
met them in mid-1992.

The X Group (Raj Mathur and Ashish Gulati) was also mucking around with
Linux around 1993. I also seem to recall Gurunandan Bhat and others having
a go at Linux around that time. 

This was roughly the same time as my own feeble attempts at getting it
going. Not very successful, and I switched to SCO Xemix. A few months
later I got SLS Linux 0.99p11 - this was August 1993 (I still have that).
That worked, and SCO was history.

Most of the Linux pushing in "the early years" was at places like the IISc
Bangalore and the IITs. There were some commercial efforts (The X Group
was one of them), but no serious waves could be felt, though several
"corporate" Linux installations did spring up countrywide (Kishore and I
did our first corporate Linux install at AMP India in 1995).

In 1995 (I think) Ashish Gulati (who was *heavily* into OS/2 by then)
convinced PCQ that OS/2 was a good thing, resulting in IBM shipping a free
copy of OS/2 on a PCQ CD. I used that precedent to get PCQ to ship Linux
on their March 1996 CD. 

It will be difficult to pinpoint the real "first Linux-heads" in India,
but if you go by my records, it would be Rajendra Kulkarni, Sundar
Nagarajan, Raj Mathur and Ashish Gulati.

Atul


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