bill gates high regard for indians and through them for india runs deep it also goes a long way back in fact it goes all the way to 1981 when microsoft was just another tiny startup with less than 50 people and not the 50000strong behemoth it is now the man through whom bill gates first saw india was a slight gauche chap named rao remala then 32 who had just joined microsoft as its 39th employee and the first indian on its rolls a graduate of iit kanpur remala had worked for five years at dcm data products and its offshoot hcl he was a contemporary of indian tech pioneers arjun malhotra and shiv nadar and as a young programmer and developer he had done some projects for the upstart american company remala had come to the us in 1981 to do some contracting work when microsoft hired him full time ibm had just introduced its personal computer with microsofts 16bit operating system msdos 10 and it was thought remalas experience in writing code could be handy as he signed up remala was offered stock options in the yet unlisted company yeah right he told himself not having a clue of history the company would make he had heard about stock options in hcl for five years and never seen a scrap of paperremala was not the kind of guy who would voice such a though publicly gates liked remala a telugu bidda born to a peasant family in kotaplam village in andhra pradesh he was a quiet unassuming indian who simply went about his work with metronomic precision without ever tiring bill himself worked on some projects with remala the boss of the firm showing technological felicity the two of them designed an extended memory architecture in 1982 bill gates visited las vegas comdex looking for and looking at advances in geekdom the story goes that he stopped by at a booth run by a company called visicorps and watched a demo of its graphical interface named vision remember in those days computers were all about alphabet and numerals with none of the point and click features gui or graphical user interface that make it so easy now over at apple steve jobs was already using such stuff to peddle a much smarter computer and the microsofties were afraid they would get run over gates feared that his competitor in the applications space would use the product to jump into the operating systems businesson his return gates conveyed his nightmare from vision to his colleagues paul allen and steve ballmer around that time rao remala and fellow developer dan mccabe were also studying xerox parcs star system which too featured icons such as folders and inbaskets they were called in and told to get started on the new project it was heady remala recalled in an interview on tuesday i was hauled out of nowhere and given something only the best in the company got