Events and Sightings

New App Shares IT History in India

History of computing may be presented in many ways. The traditional method is to write articles, monographs, and books that are often a scholarly analysis of history. In addition, interviews with pioneers in computing can be recorded and archived, a task that is currently being performed by some of the members of the IEEE Computer Society’s History Committee. Another method of recording history appropriate for a relatively young technology such as information technology is to record it from the perspective of people who participated in history making. In this age of smartphones and tablet computers, one way to share such a collection is through a digital museum app.

Such an attempt to chronicle the history of the development of information technology in India has been made by a team led by Kris Gopalakrishnan (see Figure 1). Kris is one of the founders of Infosys, the second largest IT company in India. The project was started in March 2015 and the app named Itihaasa (a Sanskrit word that may be interpreted as history or epic, depending on the context) was released on 17 April 2016 in Bangalore. The project cost around Rs.10 million (US$1 = Rs.66 in April 2016) and was entirely funded by Kris.

As part of the Itihaasa project, the history of IT in India was recorded by interviewing 44 individuals from academia, industry, research establishments, and government who were intimately associated with the development of IT in India. Unfortunately, some of the pioneers in the development of information technology in India are no longer with us or could not be interviewed. However, some of the artifacts featured in the app reflect their contributions.

The process of interviewing (I was one of the people interviewed) consisted of two parts. A preliminary interview gathered the contributions and the perceptions of the interviewee on the development of information technology in India. That was followed by a structured interview, during which the interviewer asked a set of questions that were sent earlier to the interviewee. The interviews were video recorded by a professional team, and each interview was then split up into smaller parts. Each part was tagged based on six dimensions: time, people, organization, policy, technical terms, and place. Splitting the interviews into segments allows the app users and researchers to navigate to appropriate sections on a specific topic as told by different interviewees. This gives different perspectives about a selected topic.

As a bonus feature, a number of artifacts such as old photographs and articles of historical interest have also been captured and added to the repository that can be accessed via the app. The team plans to extend the app with more interviews and crowd-sourced, but copyright-protected artifacts in the future.

This app is an invaluable source for researchers who would like to learn about the development of IT in India. The app is available for free download from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. For more information about the Itihaasa app and project, visit www.itihaasa.com.

Figure 1.

The Itihaasa app chronicling the history of Indian IT was released on 17 April 2016 in Bangalore, India. This photograph of the Itihaasa team was taken at the release function: Kris Gopalakrishnan and to his left N. Dayasindhu and Krishnan Narayanan, who are in charge of the program and research management of the Itihaasa project.