Deepak Panmand

Design | Build | Destroy | Repeat

[BRICS News @BRICSinfo]

JUST IN: Senior citizens officially outnumber young children worldwide for the first time in human history.

[Deepak Panmand @deepak111101]

@regalstreak Hello

[Vivek @Vivek_Investor]

Everyone busy running but most don't know where they are heading. They running because others are running so fast, we should not be behind in this race. No time to pause and reflect.

Modern life |

[Parimal @Fintech03]

Bangalore, late 1990s. Four professors who decided PCs were the wrong answer.

Inside the Indian Institute of Science, in the Department of Computer Science and Automation, 4 faculty members - Vijay Chandru, Swami Manohar, Ramesh Hariharan, and V Vinay were running a small industry-facing lab called Percolat, doing contract research projects.

Nothing unusual about that. Profs do consulting work all the time....

But somewhere in the middle of it, 1 particular side-project quietly took over their imaginations: an idea for a device built specifically for the common man of the developing world.

In a country of a billion+ people, computers were expensive, English-centric, keyboard-dependent, and utterly useless to anyone who could not read.

At the time, only 9/1000 Indians owned a computer....

So they asked a different question entirely: what if a computer did not need you to read / type / even own it yourself?

They called it the Simputer and get this, they liked the name so much they built the meaning backward to fit it:

the Simputer Trust framed it as short for "Simple, Inexpensive, and Multilingual" computer.

The vision, boldly printed on their launch T-shirts, was just 2 words: "Radical simplicity." 🙏🙏

The scientists literally wore that phrase "for universal access" on jeans and tees at the launch event.

No keyboard. No literacy required. No ownership required.

This is where the Simputer stops being just "a cheap Indian gadget" and becomes genuinely visionary.

Look at what they actually engineered:

- No keyboard: just a touchscreen and a stylus, because a farmer should not need to learn QWERTY to use a computer.

- Text to speech in local languages: the device could speak the screen's contents aloud, so an illiterate user in the literal, not metaphorical sense could still operate it.

- A device you did not need to own: this is the masterstroke. The Simputer used cheap removable memory cards nicknamed "Chikki" cards, so a whole village could share one physical Simputer, while each person carried their own low cost card holding their personal data. One machine, many owners, zero exclusion.

- Fully open hardware: years before "open source hardware" was even a phrase people used casually, the Simputer's entire hardware specification was released under its own license, the Simputer General Public License, explicitly inspired by the free software movement. Anyone, anywhere, could legally build one.

Think about the audacity of that last point. A team of Indian academics open-sourced the blueprint of a computer, in 2001, so the idea could outlive any one company.

April 25, 2001. Bangalore shows the world....

The 1st working Simputer prototypes were unveiled on the 25th of April, 2001, built on a shoestring, quite literally by hand. The team had bought exactly one StrongARM processor board from the US to prototype with, Vinay wrote the software, and Manohar personally burned it onto the chip's memory.

No massive R&D budget. No corporate lab. Just profs doing hardware bring-up like hobbyists, because that is what building the future from scratch actually looks like.

The world noticed almost immediately. By December 2001, the New York Times named the Simputer the biggest technological innovation of the year.

In 2002, it won the 1st ever Dewang Mehta Award for innovation in IT from India's own Ministry of Information Technology.

The profs did not stop at invention. With the institute's blessing, they did something almost nobody had done from inside an Indian academic institution before: they spun their research into companies.

Strand Life Sciences launched in Nov 2000, and Picopeta Simputers followed in May 2001 becoming, together, the 1st examples of academic entrepreneurship to come out of IISc.

That single decision, profs stepping off the tenure track to build a company around their own invention quietly rewired what was considered possible at Indian institutions.

It is credited with pioneering faculty entrepreneurship at IISc, a precedent that IITs and other institutions would go on to follow.

By 2004, the commercial version, the Amida Simputer, finally hit the market: a $220 handheld with a 206 MHz processor, 64MB of memory, a monochrome touchscreen, a 6 hour battery, and full internet connectivity, running Linux to keep licensing costs at zero.

Bharat Electronics Limited even stepped in as a manufacturing partner, branding it the BEL-PicoPeta Simputer.

It should have been everywhere. It was mot.

Software developers struggled to build applications for a device this different, distributors did not know how to sell something so unfamiliar, and the govt never placed the bulk order that could have jump started an app ecosystem.

A change in leadership at BEL eventually brought production to a quiet halt altogether.

When Bill Gates visited Bangalore in 2005, he was directly asked about the Simputer's potential and by Vinay's account, senior design engineers working on the iPhone had studied the Simputer for ideas years before Apple's device ever shipped.

A handheld, touchscreen first, stylus-operated, always-connected personal computing device, engineered in Bangalore for illiterate rural users years before Silicon Valley made "mobile-first" a religion.

The Simputer did not win the market. But it got the idea right long before the world was ready to listen.

That is the story people mean when they whisper, half-joking, half-serious: before the iPhone, there was the Simputer.

2nd Image - Standing L to R: Swami Manohar, V Vijay, Vijay Chandru, Vinay Deshpande. Sitting (L to R): Mark Mathias, Shashank Gang, Ramesh Hariharan. Courtesy: Frontline Magazine

[Deepak Panmand @deepak111101]

Hey @grok show my first tweet

[Deepak Panmand @deepak111101]

@RoadsOfMumbai Ohh missed it

[27. @dimvji]

all roads eventually lead back to the interests you had as a child

[Deepak Panmand @deepak111101]

@MMMOCL_Official Plz increase the frequency during peak hours

[Tukaram Mundhe @Tukaram_IndIAS]

Just Speak

FDA Maharashtra has launched grievance redressal portal for citizens. It is AI enabled platform, having auto assignment, auto escalation and built in accountability with traceability features .
https://t.co/597si71Z6E
#TukaramMundhe #FDA

[Deepak Panmand @deepak111101]

@runkarthikrun @amazonIN Same thing happened with me, looks like some kind of scam going on

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

2020 was 2020 days ago.

[Deepak Panmand @deepak111101]

@WaterBaker Major Upanishads, but to truly understand them one needs a guru

[Deepak Panmand @deepak111101]

@owenthcarey On reddit, there was one 48y old manager who FIREd, was leetcoding to get back into job

[ℏεsam @Hesamation]

Vibe coding essentials.

[Orange Book 🍊📖 @orangebook]

Growing up with parents who are high-energy, emotionally mature, mentally stable, intellectually curious, financially responsible, generous and secure, is a blessing, and it’s also the kind of parent you should aim to become if you want your kids to have a wealthy childhood.

[Robert Greene @RobertGreene]

Think back on the moments when you felt deeply and personally connected to an activity. Think about the pleasure it brought you. In such activities are signs of your true purpose.

[Abhishek @MSDianAbhiii]

Indians have reason to support Argentina 🇦🇷 in FIFA World Cup

[Deepak Panmand @deepak111101]

Flyover is fresher, road on it has 30 years of experience

[Richa Pinto @richapintoi]

Mrunal Tai Gore flyover extension opened up for motorists hour an hour back.