Fifty years of grit: The journey of one of Bengaluru’s earliest ‘start-ups’ Premium

It was the summer of ’79. For M.S. Rangaraj, a Masters’ student at BITS Pilani then, it was his first week of internship at a Vadodara-based computer systems-making company.

It was the summer of ’79. For M.S. Rangaraj, a Masters’ student at BITS Pilani then, it was his first week of internship at a Vadodara-based computer systems-making company.

“It was my second or third day. At lunch there was a lot of commotion and animated conversations,” Mr. Rangaraj recollects. On enquiring about it, he came to know that it was the excitement around a huge tender that everyone was sure the company would secure.

Two days later, Mr. Rangaraj came across the same group of people, this time with sullen faces.

“We lost the bid to a tiny little never-heard-before company called PSI from Bangalore,” one of them told him.

It was the first time Mr. Rangaraj too heard of PSI or Processor Systems India, but it piqued his curiosity.

Known today as ProcSys, it was one of the first IT companies born in what is today’s IT capital, Bengaluru.

The company, which celebrated its 50th anniversary recently on December 29, 2023, was founded by Dr. V.K. Ravindran, his brother Dr. V.K. Harindran and Mr. Ravindran’s friend from Stanford University Vinay Deshpande, in 1973.