An account of the first Indian traveling-wave tube (FITWT), designed and developed in 1977, is presented in this paper. The tube was developed at CSIR-Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute (CEERI), Pilani under a competence development project executed by the FITWT team at CEERI under the supervision of S.S.S. Agarwala. S.N. Joshi, one of the authors of this paper, was the leader of the FITWT team, and B.N. Basu, yet another author of this paper, was one of the members of the team. The FITW, as per design, delivered 2W (CW) RF output power in the octave band of 2–4 GHz with 30 dB small-signal gain, <30 dB noise figure and 3°/dB AM-to-PM conversion coefficient.