History of Bengali software innovation

History of Bengali software innovation.

The first Bangla writing on computer was made possible in 1986 and the credit for this success goes to an engineer named Mainul Islam. He managed to write Bangla on Apple-Macintosh computer using his invented Bengali font 'Mainulipi'.

In this case, the work was done with English keyboard without using any separate keyboard for Bengali. Different types of English and Bengali alphabet and Bengali conjugation problems were solved by using the facility of using 4 layer keyboard of Macintosh computer. Soon after the main script, two more Bengali fonts called 'Shahidlipi' and 'Jabbarlipi' were invented and used in the same way on Macintosh computers. The following year, in 1986, Ananda Computer, a non-governmental organization, launched the first interface for the Apple-Macintosh computer, Vijay.

It was at this time that the first Bengali keyboard layout was created. Among the first level Bengali keyboards, 'Vijay' and 'Munir' are notable. In the interface method, Bangla fonts and Bangla keyboards are integrated with the operating system or OS of the computer and Bangla can be written on the computer by activating this keyboard and selecting the font. The Victory interface was Macintosh-based, and because of the high cost of the Apple-Macintosh computer, it had a limited number of users, mainly for publishing purposes.

Considering the large number of IBM computer users and considering this huge number of users, in early 1992, a self-contained Bengali word processing software called 'Varna' was invented by two students of higher secondary level, Reza-e Al Amin Abdullah (Math) and Md. Shahidul Islam ( Sohail).

The invention of this self-contained word processor by SafeWorks, the own company of two talented teenage programmers, was a landmark event in the history of Bengali software. The word processor was based on DOS (Disk Operating System - DOS), but the program had its own structure similar to Windows.

The three types of keyboards used in Varna were Munir, Vijay and Easy Keyboard. The Varna software also included the ability to customize keyboards. In other words, anyone had the freedom to create a new keyboard layout according to their own preferences or preferences. The interface 'Vijay' was invented for use with the computer's modern operating system 'Microsoft Windows'. Then in 1994 an interface called 'Lekhni' was also created. Although 'Abah' (invented in late 1992) was the first interface to be used on IBM computers, it was not widely used due to some errors.