About us

With a natural curiosity and adaptability, I find almost every facet of computer science and computer information systems intriguing. Seventeen years prior, my passion for bilingual word processors led me to create an innovative application named Nalinam using an object-oriented approach. This application turned out to be the world's first bilingual Tamil word processor with a native language graphical user interface. A result of two years of rigorous research and over 50,000 lines of original C++ code, it has been downloaded nearly half a million times from over 50 countries.

The initial development process was complex due to the hardware and software constraints of the time, which were geared primarily towards English and European languages. I had to come up with creative solutions to bypass these limitations through direct hardware interfacing. The process included replacing the extended ASCII character in the VGA RAM with Tamil character sets and creating printer and keyboard drivers. I also designed a comprehensive user interface and incorporated a font utility for displaying and printing Tamil text. To make the program more interactive, a tutorial and word game were added.

Later, I transitioned the code to Windows. Though the code was condensed to 10,000 lines, adapting to the new operating environment reshaped my programming perspective. Many functions developed in the DOS environment became obsolete as operating systems began taking over tasks previously managed by my application. In this phase, I mainly focused on creating fonts and an editor, a process that was simpler and easier than before.

In a subsequent update, I expanded the program's capabilities to allow Tamil language use in all Windows applications. This step eliminated the need for an editor. By manipulating the message queue using the Windows API before keyboard-generated events reached an application, I enabled users to utilize the Tamil language in any application. During this time, Microsoft introduced a similar technology for multiple languages, but their Tamil version did not offer the simplicity of my system.

Looking ahead, I anticipate my innovation might share a fate similar to WordStar, Lotus 123, Dbase, and other products. Given the growing number of Tamil users worldwide and its increasing usage in schools and government administrations across India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, and Australia, it's likely that Microsoft will identify the economic potential and demand for such a feature and potentially develop a similar technology.

My original endeavor aimed to promote the survival and growth of the Tamil language and to advance scientific knowledge among its 70 million native speakers. In the late nineties, I collaborated with Articulate Multimedia, a leading Malaysian multimedia company, to create the world's first Tamil edutainment software for children, "Story Time with Arti", which won the Best Multimedia Title of the Year 1998. Over the next three years, we produced nine more engaging titles covering various subjects in a fun and educational manner. These were subsequently incorporated into the primary curriculum in many schools in Malaysia and Singapore. With growing global interest in promoting Tamil computing in education, there has been an explosion of Tamil software, and I am proud to have contributed to this initial framework.