Enthusiasm bordering on  recklessness coupled with  scientific rigor and a quest for practical innovation” is what Dr Ramani attributes his achievements to. Dr Ramani’s areas of research and development are spread across the many applications that have data networking at the core. Dr Ramani and fellow scientists created and successfully tested the first e-mail in the country—way back in 1980, an electronic equivalent of “Dr Watson, are you there?” The service was developed to demonstrate the country’s technological capabilities in data networking at the Networks ‘80 conference, an international meet on data communication and computer networks. Dr Ramani comments, “We successfully demonstrated a live data connection between London and Mumbai for an application called Videotex.” 

Dr Ramani and his colleagues have germinated the seeds of many new technologies. They pioneered the Internet age in India through Ernet—a network leaning toward the education and research community. They conducted the earliest experiments in satellite-based communications, which was the forerunner of the VSAT technology. They created industry and community-specific data networks in spearheading the computer networking in India.

TIFR internship

Born on March 21, 1939 at Nungambakkam, in the then Madras Province, Dr Ramani was exposed to an environment of learning from his boyhood days. He took his graduate electrical engineering degree at the Government College of Engineering, Coimbatore, followed by a Masters degree, specializing in digital electronics from IIT Bombay in 1964. 

Dr Ramani doesn’t fail to mention the help that the IIT and TIFR, gave him—JR Isaac, then director, IIT Bombay, broke the IIT tradition by allowing him to work at TIFR while studying at IIT. The TIFR scientists provided an environment conducive to developing his research instincts and extending the best infrastructure to conduct his work. After his MTech, Dr Ramani joined TIFR while he continued his PhD at IIT. 

His doctoral dissertation was in studying the connection between problem-solving and language in AI. Dr Ramani’s guides for the project were Professor Narasimhan of TIFR and Professor JR Isaac of IIT Bombay: he was awarded the doctorate in 1969. 

He left India to advance his work in AI to work as a post-doctoral research associate at the Carnegie Mellon University, armed with the Homi Bhabha fellowship. He worked with authorities in the area—Herbert Simon and the late Allen Newell with whom he shared his convergent interests in AI and human psychology.

Upon returning to India, he continued his work in his chosen areas at TIFR. The direction was clear: the future was in data networks, which sought to share computing power and rendered connectivity between machines. The team wrote the software for the first datacom protocol link between TIFR and VJTI, an engineering institute. 

Down from space

Meanwhile, a few exciting developments were happening in the area of space research, of relevance to data networking. Dr Ramani came up with the novel idea of low-altitude data satellite and presented a seminal paper co-authored by Dr Miller at an international conference in London 1980. Dr Ramani exploited its data-carrying capabilities, presenting a paper at an international conference in London in 1980. This satellite technology was later on called low earth orbit satellites (LEOs).

An entire system was built ground up by TIFR scientists—including designing and making the earth stations, and the whole gamut of software pieces that were required to run it. “We even went to buy aluminum for the project,” muses Dr Ramani. But the technology was cent per cent Indian: from hardware, software, and satellites to the network—a data network connecting Ghaziabad, Ahmedabad and Mumbai. The project was called Comnet and was successfully completed in 1982. The project was essentially the current VSAT technology, which came into much prominence years later. It was truly a moment of triumph for Indian science. 

Dr Ramani’s engagement with networking continued with many consulting assignments in the area—the earliest amongst them being the network for Press Trust of India (PTI). He also designed nation-wide WANs for a number of major banks and stock exchanges in India, and was a consultant during 1997–99 in planning and creating the technical infrastructure for MTNL’s ISP venture.

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