Rachna Malayalam is considered as the first computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

 in Malayalam language and the first such system in a regional language in India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. It was launched on February 16, 2006.

The operating system, developed by four people in Kerala

Kerala

or Keralam is an Indian state located on the Malabar coast of south-west India. It was created on 1 November 1956 by the States Reorganisation Act by combining various Malayalam speaking regions....

, is in the Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 platform and is an open software. The software will make multimedia

Multimedia

Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...

 operations and chat

Online chat

Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...

 possible in Malayalam.
The biggest advantage of this operating system is that henceforth advanced computing in Malayalam will be possible. Among the features of this new operating system include the opening of any MS Office file, to make any file into PDF format, and for the first time sorting is possible in Malayalam.

Technical contributions of this long-term project were:

• Development of a standardised and comprehensive character/glyph set (codified by R. Chitrajakumar and N. Gangadharan, and developed into a font by K.H Hussein)
• Development of the first computable and linguistically correct sort order for Malayalam with broad application to Sanskrit and other Indic languages
• Development of various system tools and user interfaces to ease Malayalam Computing

R. Chitrajakumar, senior linguist and lexicologist:

"This has come after close to nearly three years of working on the Rachna font

Font

In typography, a font is traditionally defined as a quantity of sorts composing a complete character set of a single size and style of a particular typeface...

 under GPL (General Public License) for the Original Malayalam script, that was developed in the late nineties"

The team members are: R. Chitrajakumar and N. Gangadharan (linguistics) who developed and codified all language aspects of the project, K.H Hussein (information specialist) who developed the Rachana font, and Rajeev J Sebastian (software engineer

Software engineer

A software engineer is an engineer who applies the principles of software engineering to the design, development, testing, and evaluation of the software and systems that make computers or anything containing software, such as computer chips, work.- Overview :...

) who developed and maintained the software for the OS.

External links

• "Malayalam gets its own operating system", The Hindu
  The Hindu
  The Hindu is an Indian English-language daily newspaper founded and continuously published in Chennai since 1878. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, it has a circulation of 1.46 million copies as of December 2009. The enterprise employed over 1,600 workers and gross income reached $40...
  
  (15 February 2006)