SoCultures October 2018
circumstances as well as the new arising opportunities in a growing developing
economy of a free India.
Soon, the resilient and resolute Shiv Nadar had acquired his graduation degree. He
had started envisioning the future not only for himself but also for his counterparts
as well. He arrived in Chennai, all of 21.
A visionary who dreamt of changing the world: It was 1976, when talented
eight young men left DCM to create HCL in a small room (much akin to a start up
scene in India now) in Delhi to make calculators and microprocessors. The initial
setup was in a small room but the vision was huge, it took over the world by
storm..It compelled and influenced the ways, the world functioned. HCL proved to
be a revolutionary invention - the first 8-bit microprocessor-based computer in
1978, the first Relational Database Management System in 1983 before some of its
global peers, client- server architecture in 1984, and world’s first fine-grained
multi-processor UNIX installation in 1989, among others.
Shri Manmohan Singh, previous prime minister of India was presented with a memento by the
Chairman,IIT Kharagpur and Shri Shiv Nadar at the Diamond Jublee Celebrations at the 57 th Annual
celebrations of IIT, Kharagpur, India
91 | P a g e