Chapter 59: Sparks of Silicon (Mid-Summer 1981 – January 1983)
Flashback: Mid-Summer 1981, Singh Research Centre, Lucknow
The air buzzed with a mix of ambition and electricity.
Inside the modest Singh Company research lab — formerly just a storage space for spare parts — old radio transistors sat beside bulky oscilloscopes, and the smell of solder and hot circuitry mingled with the sharp tang of black tea.
Bharat stood beside a long wooden table, watching the engineers work with tweezers and magnifying lenses. He was just a boy, but his mind was lit up like a control board. Around him were wires, chipsets, motherboards with crude etchings, and engineers too focused to speak.
Ajay Singh leaned in close to his son, pointing at a schematic. "We've moved from CRTs to motherboards now. After color TV, this… this is our next mountain."
A large ceiling fan clanked as it rotated above them, making a rhythmic thump-thump-thump that matched the pacing hearts in the room.
They had finally started earning profits from their domestic manufacturing of color televisions. Those earnings were now being funneled — not into comfort, but into risk. Into innovation.
The Dream: Self-Reliance
Ajay addressed the newly formed R&D team of about 20 members — engineers, coders, mechanics, and even a couple of professors from Lucknow University.
"We've relied too long on American imports," he said. "Our goal is not to copy the West, but to stand next to it. Our machines. Our language. Our chips."
A younger programmer, Ravi, raised his hand. "Sir, we'll need to reverse-engineer chipsets. We can't even order Motorola or Intel chips without huge costs and delays."
"We'll do it. Even if it's slow," Ajay said firmly. "Slowness is better than surrender."
The first attempt was rough. Their locally designed microchip overheated within 17 seconds. The casing warped. A faint trail of smoke rose from the circuit board. Everyone paused.
Someone laughed nervously. Bharat clapped.
"It worked for 17 seconds longer than we expected," Ajay said dryly, and the room burst into laughter.
That day marked the start of a very Indian form of silicon determination.
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Global Context: What the World Was Doing
While Singh & Co. was learning how to solder a stable chipset, the world outside was sprinting.
In March 1981, the British home computer ZX81 launched. Over a million units sold.
In April, the Osborne 1 — the world's first commercially successful portable computer — was introduced in San Francisco.
In July, Nintendo released Donkey Kong. A jumping plumber named Mario made his debut.
By August 12, IBM unleashed its Personal Computer. Big. Square. Fast. Expensive.
That same year, the Chaos Computer Club was born in Berlin — hacking into tech's deepest underlayers.
But in Lucknow, they didn't have access to any of it directly. Only magazines and grainy Xeroxed schematics sent from abroad by sympathetic friends gave them glimpses of this new world.
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Late 1981 – Reverse Engineering & Learning
By November 1981, a quiet breakthrough arrived.
Using reverse-engineered versions of open circuit designs, Bharat and the team managed to boot up a homemade operating system—coded fully in Hindi script.
The interface was basic, using Devanagari characters mapped onto binary arrays. The fonts were clunky, and memory usage was inefficient. But it worked.
Ajay stared at the blinking cursor on the black screen. "हमारी भाषा, हमारी मशीन," he whispered.
Our language. Our machine.
The team cheered.
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Mid-1982 – Chips, Speed, & Vision
By the summer of 1982, the Indian-made chipsets were running better — they weren't overheating, and their computational speeds reached about 60–65% of imported systems. Not fast, but affordable and reliable.
Imported computers cost ten times more due to taxes and middlemen.
"You know what IBM charges for this?" asked Pramod, the chip design lead, holding up a bulky motherboard. "Twenty thousand rupees."
"And ours?" asked Bharat.
"Three thousand. And I bet it survives an Indian summer."
Laughter filled the room again.
The engineers even began to build their own tools — logic analyzers, testing machines, and primitive compilers written in hybrid Hindi-English code. Their debugging process involved printouts, carbon sheets, and red ink pens.
Outside, monsoon rains poured against the windows.
Inside, a revolution brewed in silence.
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Flashforward: January 1983 – The First Indian PC
The R&D lab had moved into a larger building. Fans no longer clanked, and the walls were painted a fresh cream. A table in the middle displayed their creation — a square desktop computer with a wide CRT screen, keyboard in Devanagari-English, and a CPU case marked: "Singh Series 1".
"Everyone," Ajay called out. "This is not just a computer. This is a declaration."
He turned to Bharat, now seated next to Pramod and Meena at the side table. "Want to do the honors?"
Bharat grinned. "Definitely."
He flipped the switch. The monitor buzzed. The black screen blinked. White Devanagari text appeared:
> "स्वागत है – सिंह कंप्यूटर प्रणाली 1"
("Welcome – Singh Computer System 1")
People clapped, whistled, and some wiped tears.
Ajay walked over to the board and wrote:
January 1983 – First Indian PC launched – Made by Indians, For Indians
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The First Sale
January to March 1983 | Singh Company Headquarters, Lucknow
The winter in Lucknow had begun to recede, but the chill still lingered in the early mornings. The soft golden light filtered through the frosted glass windows of the Singh Company's main lab building. Inside, the hum of electricity, the occasional beep of machines, and the scent of warm solder filled the air like the soundtrack of an awakening era.
The first personal computer — Singh Series 1 — stood proudly on a clean white cloth at the center of the display room. It was compact, boxy, coated in matte grey with black accent panels. The keyboard had a clean bilingual layout: Hindi (Devanagari) and English (QWERTY). The operating system booted in both languages and supported the custom-built text editor, spreadsheet tool, and file manager.
Ajay, Bharat, and the senior team stood watching it, as if admiring a child about to take its first steps outside the home.
"Everything we've done," whispered Ravi, "leads to this moment."
Bharat, just nine and a half, wore a wool vest and kept wiping his glasses with his handkerchief. "Papa," he said, "who's buying the first one?"
Ajay smiled gently. "A school."
Bharat's eyes lit up.
📍Scene: The First Customer – Saraswati Vidya Mandir, Lucknow
A school principal, Mr. Dinesh Shukla, had heard about the PC from one of his former students — now a junior software assistant at Singh Company.
On February 15, 1983, he arrived with two teachers at the headquarters. He wore a simple brown woolen shawl, a black Nehru cap, and an expression of cautious curiosity.
The office boy brought in three cups of chai on a steel tray. Ajay and Bharat welcomed them into the demonstration room.
"Principal Shuklaji, welcome," Ajay said warmly. "We're honored."
Shukla smiled. "I've never touched a computer before, let alone in Hindi. But our students... they are hungry for knowledge."
Ajay nodded. "Then let me introduce you to the first Indian-made bilingual computer — born right here in Lucknow."
📍Demonstration Scene
Bharat stepped forward, stood beside the monitor, and clicked the power button. The screen buzzed slightly — the room went quiet.
A soft beep. Then glowing white text appeared on the black screen:
> स्वागत है – सिंह कंप्यूटर प्रणाली 1
(Welcome to Singh Computer System 1)
Mr. Shukla leaned forward. "In Hindi?"
"Yes," Ajay said. "And it also runs in English. Would you like to type something?"
Ravi handed the principal the keyboard. His fingers trembled a bit. Slowly, he typed:
> विद्यालय शिक्षा का मंदिर है
(The school is a temple of education.)
The teachers behind him clapped softly. One of them — a younger man named Suresh — leaned toward the screen and muttered, "It's faster than I expected."
Ajay laughed. "It's not a race car. But it gets you to your destination."
📍The First Purchase
After half an hour of demonstration — from basic text entry to showing a simple arithmetic program and drawing a graph in Hindi — the principal placed a small black briefcase on the table.
"₹12,000 as discussed," he said. "We're ordering one unit now. If it proves successful with our Class 10 batch, we'll order five more by July."
Ajay opened the briefcase. Neatly stacked notes. Old-school, pure cash.
Bharat looked up at his father and whispered, "We sold it?"
Ajay nodded. "We sold it."
He looked around at the engineers, the assistants, the cleaners, even the chaiwala at the corner who had watched this journey unfold. "This is the beginning."
Everyone clapped. A few had tears in their eyes. One of the senior typists — a man in his fifties — mumbled, "First time in my life... I worked on something this big."
📍Celebration Scene
That evening, in the main courtyard of the Singh household, they lit diyas and served jalebi and samosas. Dadi made fresh halwa, and Dadaji handed out sweet betel leaves with pride.
Ajay raised a toast with steel tumblers of warm milk: "To our first customer."
Bharat stood on a chair and added, "And to our last — whenever that day comes, many years from now."
Everyone laughed.
Even Dadi wiped her eyes. "Ajay beta, your Dada would be proud. When he fought the British, he never imagined his grandson would build India's brain machines."
Ajay looked at his son and whispered, "And I never imagined mine would help run them."
📍Endnote: Orders Begin
In the following weeks, they received orders from two colleges, a local textile firm, and even a government office in Kanpur looking to automate files.
Word spread.
Their PC wasn't the fastest. But it was reliable, bilingual, affordable, and proudly Indian.
Bharat wrote a single line in his journal that night:
> "We didn't just sell a machine. We sold hope."
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