India’s old computing wars offer a roadmap for future chips

In his new book Computing in the Age of Decolonization, MIT-based historian Dwaipayan Banerjee uncovers the overlooked history of India’s computing industry from the 1950s to the 1980s, and analyses why the efforts to build self-reliance failed. The story unfolds at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), where scientists found computing to be integral to national sovereignty and built TIFRAC, an indigenous computer completed around 1960. While the postcolonial Indian state fully supported this flagship project, it did not cultivate an industry around it, leaving a weak domestic electronics base and technical talent concentrated in a handful of institutions….