PCQ as a tech influencer and the BBS culture

Edited excerpts from an exhaustive video interview with Kishore Bhargava, CEO, Linkaxis Technologies...

”My earliest memory of PCQuest was around 1987 itself. We were trying to cover technology which was very new to everybody. We provided the readers with a lot of meaningful content. My first article was on something as trivial as a network card. It had a full-page review. The one big advantage we had was supportive editors. If we wrote a bad review, because it was a bad product, the editors supported it a hundred percent. Even at the cost of losing advertising.

We did some fabulous ground-breaking stories in the beginning. In terms of virality, reviews and graphics became popular. The graphics were not of the level they are today. When people would even see a good GIF, people would be very impressed. It was exciting for the users. If someone did something in photoshop, that was really appreciated. So much feedback came in the way of written letters.

To put things in perspective, imagine a time when there was no Internet and no additional resources. It was a daily ritual for me to go to the American Library and British Council Library and sit down and pore over whatever technical material I could get. We would go to various engineering college libraries and labs. It was the true hacker mentality of You find something, you read as much about it, you play with it, you break it, you fix it, and you do things beyond what the box says as some of the manuals were pathetic.

Bulletin Board System, a precursor to today’s chats

The Internet officially was launched to the public in India in 1995. A lot of people are not aware that the Internet came to India much before that, in 1988 but was restricted to educational and research institutes. It was called ERNET (The Education and Research Network). I do have the fortune of being one of the hackers who got into that system.

In India there are two people who set up BBS first, almost at the same time in 1989 within hours of each other: Atul Chitnis in Bangalore and me in New Delhi. It was a very simple two window chat. If you found another user on that system, you could check by saying: Who is online? If you knew the person you could give your user ID. The screen would split into two parts. Your message would be on other side and the other person below that. It was a real-time chat. That became really popular as you were able to connect with people across time zones and across geographies.

Two types of BBSes got set up. One was where a lot of people would put files and other resources for downloads, the “file leechers”. The other was where discussions started happening. My BBS was always a place for discussion. You will be surprised at the number of people who even today tell me that they used to be on these BBSes. One such name is Paytm’s, Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Mine was the only BBS that had an exclusive “women only forum”. That included my wife along with Mala Bhargava.

Seeding the Indian Linux community

PCQuest set up a BBS I think in the early 1990s. Once we had access to online communities, one was able to start getting freeware or shareware. Things like useful utilities, anti-virus, compression software, etc. What PCQuest started doing early on was making a collection of the most useful of these utilities and publishing it on a CD. The magazine was being grabbed in the market due to this. Every time PCQuest came out, people would look forward to What’s going to be on the CD and what am I going to gain from it? When it comes to Linux CDs in the early times, some of those magazines were the maximum reprinted ever. Every March we would come out with a Linux CD. The Indian Linux community got really strongly built because of that. The community was seeded by PCQuest.

Every little step in the beginning with PCQuest has been in some ways a blockbuster. Setting up a lab (PCQ Labs) with enough capabilities and equipping the people to allow them to take a product and dissect it was very forward-looking. Doing this in the early 1990s was ground-breaking.”

These are excerpts from a video chat with Editor Sunil Rajguru and part of our PCQuest 35 Years Series on the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow of Technology.

Check out the complete interview...