Do you carry a cow to office to drink milk
But that is pretty much the architecture
Of our smartphones and desktops
Way back around y2k, an enthusiastic academician and my college batchmate Prof Vikram Adve at UIUC near Chicago came up with something called a low level virtual machine (llvm). What it broadly did was to load a set of use cases in a computer and when launched the entire resources of the machine would become exclusively available to that use case. So if you had a camera use case, the entire machine would act like a dedicated camera. If you put the camera off, the hardware resources were released. These were the early days of 3G and network bandwidths could at most support messaging. Blackberry devices did not have a touch screen.
Steve jobs came across this when enrolled at a monastery near Chegdu somewhere around 2002. I recall Prof Joseph Fowler and Steve having an animated discussion on this. Both were failed techies. Steve was trying for enlightenment. Joseph had been sacked from the silicon glen initiative in Scotland. Instead of creating another Silicon Valley GBP 10 billion had gone into pretty much doing nothing other than increasing scotch sales to frustrated startups who couldn’t manage in the cold.
Sometimes Indian strategy in semiconductors reminds me of Silicon Glen and Noel Tata has a striking resemblance to Joseph. I remember Joseph, an articulate Britisher saying “what is this low level virtual machine” term. Let’s call it app as a short for application. And that is how the word app was born. Apple licensed the LLVM from Prof Adve and that is how the Apple iPhone was born. Steve didn’t make it past the first exam in the 19 year monkhood course but decided to reinvent himself as a maker of consumer goods.
Apples first product was the iPod and it was manufactured in Chengdu using a second hand SMT line imported from India and set up by an enterprising Indian VC fund to capture some subsidies offered by the state govt. Joseph went on to set up the first electronics mfg fund in chengdu (which is the equivalent of Bihar in India – land locked and lazy. Best known as foodie capital of China. Punjab Chinese food comes from sichuan, chengdu is its capital). Google had some spies figure out what was going on in apple and quickly licensed the llvm from Prof Adve. Here is Google proof.
But now with 5g and beyond it no longer makes sense to carry your own cow to drink milk. With neoclouds supposedly investing trillions of dollars, you need a tv screen and not a computer in your hands. Indian startup IBTV has the entire ecosystem figured out complete with its citrus equivalent client server architecture and a cybersecure network link called hdvsl. It won the Govt of India Technology Day award in 2008 from DST. Here is Google proof
More on this another day.
But it is India’s most incredible story.
Going forward. Forget the past