Ask anyone in Dhaka where to buy a computer and the answer for a quarter of a century has been two words: IDB Bhaban. The market inside it, BCS Computer City, opened on 11 September 1999, and it began as a fair that decided not to leave.
The fair that stayed
Through the 1990s the Bangladesh Computer Samity, the trade association of computer businesses, ran an annual BCS Computer Show, and every year more people came and the show needed more room. In 1998 the executive committee went looking for a large venue and found one newly built in Agargaon: the Islamic Development Bank Bhaban, a tower with a broad four-storey block beside it. They held the 1998 show there. “The 1998 fair really created the ground for Computer City,” Ahmed Hasan, then BCS general secretary and the first convener of the market’s management committee, told Prothom Alo. “After the fair we thought about a permanent, specialised computer market here. Our members responded well.” The 1999 show opened on 11 September, and this time the stalls became shops. Rented from IDB, the market started with 125,000 square feet and 110 shops; it has since expanded to 156, every one of them selling computer technology.
What it became
For a generation of Bangladeshis, IDB was where a PC was assembled to order from a printed price list, where a student bought a second-hand hard disk, where the country’s software was pirated on the fourth floor and its first computer magazines were sold on the ground floor. It set the prices the rest of the country followed and trained, informally, thousands of the technicians who now run corporate IT. Multiplan Center and the online shops have taken much of the trade since, and the building’s escalators are older than most of its customers, but the market is still the reference: when a Dhaka price is quoted, it is an IDB price.
11 September 1940: computing by telephone
On the same date, fifty-nine years earlier, the first computation was performed remotely. At a meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College, George Stibitz of Bell Laboratories set up a teletype terminal connected by telephone line to the Complex Number Calculator, a relay machine in Bell’s building in New York. Delegates typed problems in New Hampshire and the answers came back from Manhattan. Stibitz had tested the link on 9 September; on the 11th, in McNutt Hall, he showed it to the mathematicians. It was the first time a computer had been used from somewhere else, and every terminal, network and cloud service since is a descendant of that afternoon.
Source for the 1940 item: computerhistory.org, via Prothom Alo.
