Date:31/03/2004 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2004/03/31/stories/2004033103811800.htm

Business

Digital Global: end of an era

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, MARCH 30. Digital Globalsoft, the Bangalore-based transnational company focused on high-end software products, will cease to exist with the end of this fiscal year, March 31, its separate identity buried within the company that acquired its name and fame — Hewlett Packard.

This, marks a sad, yet important date in the history of computer technology: The original Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), started in an abandoned mill in Maynard, Massachusetts (U.S) by Ken Olsen, an engineer then working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) — created the world's first general purpose mini computer, the PDP-8, at a price of $ 16,000. Short for Programmable Data Processor, the PDP series was the most popular computer range in the 1960s and 70s, because the trolley-sized machines were the first serious computing platforms that the educational sector could afford to buy.

The PDP-11 that followed, was so popular, it made DEC the second largest computer company in the world, after IBM in the mid-80s. The advent of the Personal Computer (PC) in 1983, made minicomputers less attractive — but a nimble DEC reinvented itself by bringing out the world's first 64-bit processor, harnessing the then nascent Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) architecture.

The DEC "Alpha", was the choice for almost all high performance computing applications till 2000.

In the mid-80s, DEC came to India, in a joint venture with its long term distributor and service agency here, the Mumbai-based Hinditron Services. The new entity, Digital Equipment India Ltd (DEIL) started assembly and manufacture here of DEC's mid range servers, the VAX or Virtual Address eXtension series.

When the bottom dropped out of the minicomputer business in the 1990s, the parent DEC was acquired by Compaq Computers in January 1998, which in turn was taken over by HP in 2002. But in India alone, the Digital name lived on — under its last and final avatar, Digital Globalsoft.

Shedding its hardware baggage, the company made a name for itself in specialised software services particularly for users of enterprise packages like SAP. Parent HP chose to retain its separate identity and did not touch its software operation in Bangalore, which employed over 1,500 experts in 25,000 sq. metre facility.. till December 2003, when it decided to buy out the remaining 49 percent of Digital Globalsoft from shareholders, and settled on a price after an emotionally charged extraordinary general meeting in January this year.

For many small shareholders in India who had to sell out; for thousands of Indian professionals over two generations whose first real feel of a computer was a PDP or a VAX; for Hemant Sonavala and others from the Hinditron family who introduced the famous DEC machines to Indian engineers and for the many software experts who kept the Digital name flying uniquely in India for five years and more, after the parent company's takeover by Compaq, the final demise of Digital on Wednesday will be a sad day.