DELHI BELLY FOR BOMBAY KA BABU

"In retrospect, I was fortunate to have been at the right magazine at the right time, when India was taking off," says Raju Chellam, who remembers the glory days of the 1980s and 1990s

I think I first met Pradeep Gupta (PG) in the summer of 1985 at an IT conference in London or Paris. We knew each other through our respective publications. He was publisher of Dataquest, India's first computer monthly; I was with The Economic Times in Bombay, where I had started contributing India's first column on computers in the mainstream media. The Economic Times ran my column on computers (CompuTalk) - and another on science (Scien Talk) every week from 1984 through 1989.

PG was in Europe on business; I was visiting on an invitation from the British government to write about its IT industry and had appointments to meet with top executives from International Computers Ltd (ICL) and Sinclair Research (it's landmark XZ80 PC was launched in January 1980).

THE 1980s
While PG launched the first issue of Dataquest (DQ) in December 1982; two years earlier in December 1980, Bennett Coleman & Company, publishers of The Times of India, The Economic Times, The Illustrated Weekly, and a slew of other titles hired me as an intern.

In December 1980, Ronald Reagan was preparing to take office as the 40th President of the United States, and Indira Gandhi was elected Prime Minister of India for the fourth time. In the IT arena,

Microsoft released its first programming language, Microsoft QuickBASIC, for the IBM PC, and the US government set up the Federal Computer Investigations Committee to investigate computer-related crimes, a precursor to the current scourge of cybercrime.