History of computer in Nepal

Computer was introduced in Nepal in the year 1972 only. It was introduced by His Majesty's government for the population census of 1972(2028 B.S.) This was the second generation computer of IBM company called IBM 1401. The goverhment had paid Rs 125000 per month as rent for this computer

At that time British Government helped to develop manpower of NCC. In the meantime Nepalese students went to India, Thailand and USA for the computer education themselves. In 2039 B.S., microcomputers such as Apple, Vector, Sins, etc were imported by private companies and individuals. Many private companies like Computer Consultancy (CC), Management Information Processing System (MIPS), Data System International (DSI), etc were established. Such private companies started selling computers and training people in other to produce manpower in Nepal itself.

Nowadays, computers with faster processing and larger storage are found cheaply in Nepalese market. Students are given computer education from school level. At present Computer Association of Nepal (CAN) is the governing body of Nepal.


In 1994, Mercantile Office Systems and Royal Nepal Academy of Scient and Technology contracted an Internet feed from a site in India. Since the transmission was over cable, the quality of the line was VERY poor and the UUCP connection was not reliable. It was not uncommon to try several hundred time to retrieve a few messages from the spooled computer in India. This effort was commercialized although there were significant losses. However, the CEO, Mr Sanjib Raj Bhandari considered it a necessary investment for the future of internetworking in Nepal
Also in 1994 Sanjay Manandhar volunteered to set up a private net called HealthNet for Satellife in Cambridge, US. It was started using the same UUCP technology. However, the mail exchange was with a computer in Cambridge, US over good international lines. Hence, the throughput and reliability was good and several hospitals and doctors were, therefore, connected to the network of healthcare providers in the world.
As of January 1996 only these two nets allowed limited access (email and some newsgroups) to the Internet. Mercantile was experimented and later provided more Internet functionality such as file-transfer (ftp), remote logging in (telnet), etc. but did not have enough bandwidth to provide WWW commercially