History of Cerebral Voyage

The idea for Cerebral Voyage started, back in the dial-up internet era, as a personal endeavour to maintain a curated collection of useful software tools.

Genesis & Evolution

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Cerebral Voyage is the brainchild of Vihar Malviya, which started as an outlet for his life-long desire to share the knowledge he gained through researching the activities he was involved in. Being very organized, he documented everything he did, quickly creating a collection of guides he had created for his own use. Although this knowledgebase was initially meant to allow him to recreate the steps to accomplish the same tasks repetitively, soon realized that this wealth of knowledge, which had helped him successfully laccomplish tasks - both complex & straightforward, was just sitting there, having been used just once.

Inspired by the vlogging generation of influencers who share their experiences, he set out to establish the best way he could share his experiences and competencies in a way that would help others. One of the key aspects of choosing an outlet was to minimize the initial effort in publishing this knowledge. Video was quickly ruled out due to the time & effort required in producing high quality informative content. Text & blogging was chosen as the preferred medium to start off, since a lot of the documentation already existed, and notes were piling up.

And so was conceived Cerebral Voyage...

Resource Kit

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When it began, it was called Resource Kit. It was simply a CD-ROM full of software installation packages - and this was only Windows-based. The idea behind this approach was quite simple - to ensure that the latest copy of an useful software installer package was always available offline and did not need the internet. Hence it removed the need to have to dial-up to the internet to download the software every time it was needed. And this was when 56kbps was considered the state-of-the-art for normal consumer internet connections.

Whenever the opportunity presented itself, a new & updated copy of the software was either downloaded from the internet or copied over from the free CD that came with a copy of CHIP or Digit magazine.

This collection was lovingly called RezKit (short for Resource Kit) - in those days swapping out S's for Z's was the quickest way to make anything 'k'ool 😉. There was even an autorun.inf file at the root of the CD which pointed to a customized icon. Talk about "fully utilizing the available stack of software and tools"!

With the IT industry boom, everything had a software. Software packages became more and more advanced, and eventually bigger. The poor old Rezkit CD starting feeling cramped; and eventually grew into a DVD.

RezKit

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When broadband and always-connected internet became commonplace, the need for having pre-downloaded copies of software packages became less and less important. However RezKit was still a "resource". It was still a curated collection of software packages. It was always handy to have a recent version of a known good tool. And so the focus shifted from availability to curation.

With the advances in portable storage, the optical disc drives started becoming rarer, especially since the primary computing device in most households moved from the desktop based behemoths to laptops, and eventually handheld devices like smartphones and tablets. This eventually led the way for RezKit to morph into a USB flash drive that would be a handy toolkit to carry on person. This was clearly the future as the prices for solid state storage started nose diving, along with their portable variants.

Cross-Platform

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In 2008, Vihar started dabbling with Linux during his University
research program, where he started exploring alternatives to Windows
for running his CFD simulations. Some may remember the days when Windows XP was limited to 4GB of RAM due to the limitations of the 32-bit operating system. A research colleague recommended Linux Mint, which led to a survey of
Linux Mint & it's origins, soon revealing Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron, on
which Mint was based.

This discovery of Linux, as a platform, opened up a universe of new software tools and the idea of open source. It was difficult to imagine how such polished software products were available for free - with no catches. None! Nada!

Due to this "cerebrum"-blowing enlightenment of an entire world of ways to achieve what would otherwise be accomplished in Windows' or Mac's single-track opinionated way of doing things, was a boost to what Rezkit could achieve.

The Rezkit collection eventually transcended platforms and started including platforms other than Windows.

Cerebral Voyage

So far the history of Cerebral Voyage sounds biased towards software. And admittedly Cerebral Voyage, may be a bit software-biased... at least initially. However, thinking about other aspects of life like cars, music, documentation, philosophy and life, Vihar soon realized that there was a curated knowledgebase similar to the hand-picked catalogue of software tools ripe for sharing with the world.

He also recognized that his unique way of looking at things, and his quirky approach had immense value which proved to be successfully in various walks of life. He embarked upon setting out his vision to create an outlet for his knowledge, but with an opinionated approach which would add value as it is shared.

There was also a realization that name - Rezkit - didn't fully cover the vision of the new extended scope of knowledge to be shared. It wasn't limited to just software, or cars, or music; but free from the shackles of a specific aspect of life.