Nov. 8, 2009 (The Hindu Business Line) --
D. Murali
), goes a step further. We should be talking not just about the adoption of new technologies but about the experience of choosing the ones that are key to the customer’s needs, he explains, during an interaction.
“Our industry is overflowing with great ideas, but the key is to have an innovative product,” observes Shankar. He then cites the saying, ‘Code is easy, products are hard,’ to emphasise that companies consistently delivering quality products are the ones that continue to bring the best innovations to market. His eyes light up, while reminiscing on the early days of computing in India, when he was part of the team in MMC (Machinery Manufacturers Corporation, a division of Mahindra and Mahindra) that put together ‘Charlie,’ the first PC clone in the country.
A B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras (1971), Shankar worked for three years in the R&D labs of Tata Electric Company, before proceeding to Canada for his Masters in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Brunswick in 1976. American Megatrends Inc, which Shankar founded in 1985, is ‘the world’s largest BIOS (basic input/output system) firmware vendor, with AMIBIOS deployed in more than 65 per cent of all computers worldwide.’
For starters, the BIOS is boot firmware, designed to be the first code run by a PC when powered on, as Wikipedia explains. “The initial function of the BIOS is to identify, test, and initialise system devices such as the video display card, hard disk, floppy disk and other hardware. The BIOS prepares the machine for a known state, so that software stored on compatible media can be loaded, executed, and given control of the PC. This process is known as booting, or booting up, which is short for bootstrapping.”
Among the many firsts mentioned in the company’s Web site are the following: “First to build motherboards based on the Intel 386 and 486 processor platforms, and first to use onboard external cache designs to significantly improve their performance…First to support USB (universal serial bus) in BIOS, first to create a GUI (graphical user interface) BIOS interface with mouse support, first to integrate diagnostics into BIOS…”
And my conversation with Shankar, the BIOS boss, continues over e-mail.
Excerpts from the interview:
Over the decades that BIOS has been around, what has changed and what has not?
As an industry leader, AMI has seen several changes in BIOS over the decades. Initially, BIOS was built to support X86 architectures. Operating systems such as Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) DOS (disk operating system) heavily relied on BIOS to carry out most of input/output tasks within the PC (personal computer).
