Prashant Chandra’s idea for a new type of personal computer began taking shape when he was still in school in Lucknow, India and would misplace one of his paper notebooks or accidentally spill ink on an assignment.

The idea kept taking shape over the years, often at unlikely times. When Chandra would go jogging, he would think about alternatives when he would see young children carrying heavy book bags home from school. What was needed, Chandra realized, was a PC designed for teen-agers and college students to do academic work – and nothing else. Instead of traditional hard drives, it should include slots for students to plug in digital textbooks and notebooks, which could be stored on light-weight digital cards.

The idea would have remained nothing more than that – an idea – if Chandra, an industrial designer for a company in New Delhi, India with no ties to mainstream PC manufacturers, hadn’t seen an advertisement in a magazine last summer for the Next Generation Windows OS PC Design Competition.

Chandra’s “sChOOL Pak” PC is much more than an idea now. Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates selected it over the nearly 200 other entries to receive the Chairman’s Award, one of the inaugural PC-design contest’s four awards.