Naa Govindasamy
Encyclopedia
Naa Govindasamy was one of the pioneers of the Tamil
Tamil people
Tamil people , also called Tamils or Tamilians, are an ethnic group native to Tamil Nadu, India and the north-eastern region of Sri Lanka. Historic and post 15th century emigrant communities are also found across the world, notably Malaysia, Singapore, Mauritius, South Africa, Australia, Canada,...

 on the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

.

Naa Govindasamy, a lecturer at the National Institute of Education
National Institute of Education
The is an institute of the , Singapore.NIE, Singapore, provides all levels of teacher education, from programmes to for in-service teachers and executive for Principals, Departmental Heads and other school leaders. NIE also administers postgraduate programmes that lead to the award of in...

, worked to develop the Singapore
Singapore
Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...

 16 bit Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 system which uses Tamilnet and Tamilfix fonts and enables a user to input Tamil in all three computer platforms - Windows, Mac
Macintosh
The Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...

 and Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

. These fonts enable a user to read emails and web pages in Tamil
Tamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...

 on a terminal with only a shell account.

Amongst his other achievements, since 1965 Govindasamy wrote short stories
Short story
A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

. In 1977 in Singapore, he initiated the Ilakkiya Kalam (Literary Critics' Circle) which gathered and analysed the best stories of the period and subsequently a collection of the best short stories of 1977 was published in 1981. He published a collection of short stories, Ulloliyai Thedi and a novelette
Novelette
A novelette is a piece of short prose fiction. The distinction between a novelette and other literary forms is usually based upon word count, with a novelette being longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella...

, Velvi.

His untimely demise in 1999 is considered a huge loss to the Tamil society in Singapore and around the world.

External links

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