Only idiots call Olsen an idiot. He ushered in the era of MiniComputers and was the first to knock IBM's mainframe business down a few notches. Many aspects of technology we take for granted today are thanks to Olsen and Digital.
It still gives me a buzz to have been part of the company and culture. From RSTS/E on the PDP-11 to OpenVMS on the uVAX and Alpha machines and clusters. It was a special time, never to be repeated.
I hear you, here in the other side of the world I was just a user in a client Telco, when I left that company I brought with me two DEC3000 (retired and obsolete) and a vt420 just to own something from that incredible company.
Ken Olsen was a good and decent man. His only failing was to ignore UNIX. Before Sun Microsystems came along, DEC owned the UNIX market. Had they been more aggressive about UNIX, Sun Microsystems would have never happened. I know, I worked for both companies in Silicon Valley. There were quarters where the number of VAX machines shipped without VMS licenses equaled the one’s with! That means half of all VAX in high tech and academic computing ran UNIX. These were the markets I worked in. Around 1982, I had a summer job at Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ. They had two VAX machines named Alice and The Rabbit. Both attached to a DEC Star Coupler. A UNIX cluster in 1982! Alice and The Rabbit have the distinction of being among the first computers on the ARPA net!
DEC had a tradition of hating Unix, which went all the way to the top, to Ken Olsen. So that really only changed about the time he left. Also, just the year before this -- 1988 -- management cancelled Dave Cutler’s PRISM/MICA project for a successor to the VAX and VMS. So he left and joined Microsoft, where he led the creation of Windows NT. Which went on to destroy the Unix workstation market.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I disagree. There were multiple product lines. The first-ever licensed UNIX system was "mine" at the Boston Children's Museum (with a one-off license signed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs).
DEC was a company founded by engineers, selling to engineers. You could get schematics, down to the transistor level, for all their PDP products. You didn’t have to pay licence fees to design cards to plug into their Unibus and Q-Bus expansion backplanes. (I think this changed later with the MASSBUS for VAXes.) There were even some PDP-11-compatible machines built by third parties, and DEC didn’t sue them. Xerox PARC (where the GUI was invented, also where Ethernet began) wanted a PDP-10. But rather than buy one from DEC, they built their own (the MAXC). And again, DEC didn’t sue them.
I loved working for Digital in the late 1980s. Not a bad gig for a 19 year old kid without a degree. I even got to meet Ken Olsen and shake his hand in 1989 when they were opening up the new buildings on Taylor Street. I wrote a lot of code with my high badge number in the 210,000s.
as a former DEC admin, i recall having clusters with up times measured in years. machines were only ever powered down for upgrades or decommissioning. something that windows still can not match today. great memories. great bunch of people.
Exactly! I managed vax prototypes 8 and 16 and many clusters later with no downtime for years and I alone could support multiple clusters in different locations! All these years later with Windows and not there yet lol! Best people and memories of my 40+ year career in the industry, we’re working at DEC. 👍
I loved my 13 years at DEC in Melbourne Australia! I still remember my badge number like many others from the company! Although it was a large global American company it didn’t feel like a large Company. I’m still in contact with many people who worked at Dec in south Melbourne and Box Hill in the 80’s and 90’s. Ken built an amazing company with amazing people!
Great company, with lots of career growth opportunity, as long as you produced and learned. The employees loved and were loyal to Ken. There were no layoffs until after Ken was forced out in the early 90's, replaced by a CEO who laid off thousands and sliced up the company for sale to Compaq. DEC was an engineering company with innovative products and excellent services. I wish it had some of the marketing savvy of IBM. Even so, DEC made it to #2 to big blue and it's stock took off. The rise of ever more powerful networked PC's and open systems did in many such as DEC, DG, Prime, Wang, etc. I was fortunate to spend 15 years there.
14:12 Observe the VT-100 terminals. In those days, there were a great variety of CRT terminals from different vendors, all incompatible. For example, the control sequence to move the cursor to a particular spot on the screen would be completely different from one vendor’s terminal to another. Somehow, into this _milieu_ , the DEC terminals became _de facto_ standards. There was an ANSI standard for these control sequences, and the VT-100 implemented a superset of this standard. Unix systems incorporated a library called “curses” which let application programs do on-screen interactive displays without worrying about the differences between different terminal types. This library still survives on Linux systems today. These days, all the old terminals have become extinct, not to be found outside museums (or the homes/shops/sheds of vintage computing enthusiasts). But the curses library still exists on Linux systems. As do terminal-emulator programs on text consoles and running in windows under a GUI. But the great variety of incompatible terminal types is no more; they all emulate a VT-100.
_"This library still survives on Linux systems today."_ Which says a lot about how old fashioned UNIX/Linux is, and was, already in the 1980s. No hate, but I always found it absurd that those old style systems are seen by many as more "modern" or "high tech" than (say) a scientific calculator, or even the home computers of the early 1980s, both of which starts in a second... (Yes, I know that's because they are ROM based, but so what? Why are not all personal computers ROM based?)
I programmed a DEC PDP 11/10 driving a Laboratory Peripheral System to perform interrupt-driven waveform signal averaging in 1976 at Sydney University, Australia. My supervisor was an MIT Engineering grad who had known the DEC people while there. I used the logic in later (1981) routines using the Apple ][e with Motorola 6502 microprocessor and 6502 peripheral IC. Thank you DEC.
I was badged in the 173,000 range. I diid a shutdown, went to MLO... and quit. Did nothing even go for the buy out. Palmer sat above my office while he was killing DEC. He had nice hair and a designated parking space. Ken used to park wherever he got a spot in the lot.
If thos pdp11 units go down, half the banking, .edu and insurance digital apparatus go down. Mother structures are likely compromised . nda. DEC is a leg of the entire net. My first post on a comment board was 1983. We had comment boards years before the word internet was invented. We called it DECNET. There were 169,000 of us then. We built things. We got screwed by poor management decision. So it goes
J'ai travailler 34 ans chez DEC-COMPAQ-HP. Je suis rentré en novembre 1976 en tant que technicien après-vente. j'ai connu la lignée des PDPs en commençant avec le PDP 11/05. Celui sur lequel j'ai le plus travaillé, le PDP 11/70. Que de bons souvenirs dans cette société! j'ai fait un boulot formidable dans une ambiance formidable. Je n'oublierai jamais ces années... Merci Ken!!!
And I built at least 30 or more of the PDP 11/45 systems. DEC was a great fun place to work. Worked on PDP-8 too. Still have my PDP-8 and 11/45 programming cards too. PDP-8 was a desktop machine, it had to be a strong desk, but it was all in one cabinet sitting on top of a desk. One day I was working on a group of modules, K578s I think and a man came up to me and asked what I was doing so I explained to him what the module did, he thanked me and walked away. Well my department head came over and asked me if I knew who that man was, and I told him no. Well, he said, that was the president of the company, Ken Olsen. My badge, which I still have was 7636.
Most of the PDP-8 models I knew were not desktops... they were 12-bit machines in free-standing, nearly-6-foot cabinets.(I also recall an 8-E and 8/L) Of course the cabinetry and technology evolved over the years.
Digital was the best work experience I had. My first relationship was while working at the Control Data Analog Systems Division in La Jolla, about 1965. Specified and bought the Digital logic modules to integrate into the process control systems and Hybrid Computers, used as flight simulators. Later Digital, 1981, was my customer at Megatek, we were supplying innovative high speed color raster graphics processors integrated into Digital computers. In 1987 I joined Digital as a CS4, for Computer Special Systems in Merrimack, N.H, working out of San Diego. I retired 1997 and living the good life here. { oddly almost across the hill from the old Hewlett Packard local headquarters.] .raster
I think DEC used CDC disks. CDC was the original employer of Seymour Cray. They wanted to get into this new business-computing market, but he created a machine that was 50 times faster than anything IBM had. So they had to invent this new “supercomputing” market to sell it.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Yes, I worked up at Chipawah and Arden Hills with Mr. Cray, 6000 series operating system design. At DEC, with the Componets Sales Divison, Manchester, sold DEC , Colorado Springs Division, discs to several computer companies. Data General bought that division. It was a great ride! Hub
Idiot??? where did that come from DEC/Digital was the best computer company ever I miss the VAX era of computing before MBAs started calling the shots :(
@@rstelzer2928 The Rainbow was a rush job to compete with IBM. Since DEC's bread and butter was the PDP-11 and VAX family at the time, the Rainbow was little more than a side project bodged together to provide a PC-esque product to compete with IBM. Hindsight teaches us that the PC was indeed the way the world was going, and maybe if DEC hadn't rushed the product out the door, they may have been a viable competitor to IBM in the early days of the PC.
@@rstelzer2928 - CP/M license was $100 per group. It was easy to port. Technically superior to MS DOS. (I used CP/M in 1976, and MS DOS for years.) The problem was Gary Kildall did not want to work with IBM, and Gates did. CP/M used many of the same concepts as UNIX.
This video (originally titled "Digital from the Beginning") is an excellent review of what Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) brought to the tech industries up until 1991 (when I think this was made). Through a series of excellent choices and innovations DEC and Olsen went from strength to strength and were involved in so many of the things that form the foundations of today's tech world. Of course the history of DEC beyond 1991 was far less wondeful - but that was also - in part - brought about by tech change, new waves that DEC somehow missed. I was badge number 185688 in the UK.
I worked there (field service in the DC office # 48818) and got to meet Kenny once. Truly a great guy. Talk about a neat way to start a career - everyone in DC who had a computer loved the FS techs like me, and after that, getting good jobs was just making it known you were available.
If I knew then what I know now, I doubt I'd have bailed for a mere doubling of (already good) pay...What a great place to work what was. Few places ever treated their people as well as DEC did. It was a blast. I wrote that badge number on so many of those "print in the box" forms (basically all success stories about customer interactions) I didn't have to look it up all these years later. I got to spend a lot of time in Maynard as my branch would send me to the courses on new product so I could come back and teach the other techs, which worked out well for all. I learned on a PDP-8 my dad got surplus when I was a teen before I worked there...talk about jump-staring a career in computing! I'm still at it...doing different things these days of course. We all thought that those newfangled and SLOW 8 bit IC machines were junk...goes to show how it really was then. Octal forever!
DEC KNEW this computer (Rainbow 100) was junk in 1982; because I TOLD THEM and also proved it to them shortly after it was released. In 1982/83 My company bought new DEC Rainbow computers, running CP/M for the entire engineering department. instead of the IBM PC's everyone else was getting. While creating programs for Line Balancing, Screw Machine labor standards and many other things in the Engineering department I noticed anomalies. I shook the Rainbow down and found that it was not doing math properly. It took three days to find the Engineer in charge at DEC of the Rainbow 100. When speaking with him I asked him to cold boot his Rainbow, then type these keystrokes: . He did, and immediately said "Oh my god!" He repeated this keystroke pattern several times, getting a different result each time, never getting " .50 " which is the correct answer. That duplicated what I found. I asked if the problem was hardware or software, and he said it was hardware and a fault in the motherboard DESIGN. I worked at that time as Industrial Engineering Manager for the Electricity Management Division of Schlumberger in West Union SC, USA. Schlumberger bought more DEC computers than any other company in the world. The Rainbow 100 was TRASH. The problem required a newly engineered MOTHERBOARD. I do not know how DEC resolved this issue. But we trashed them all and went with IBM PC's even for Engineers. I highly recommend anyone using A DEC Rainbow 100 or other DEC computer from that era do the same simple test I "boiled the test down to" to see if the computer has the bad motherboard. : One divided by two = ? If you get anything but .50 your computer is JUNK, and everything you have calculated on it is suspect (but probably 100% worthless). My name is Michael Stelzer. Have a nicer day!
Currently doing a research project on DEC’s impact on suburban New England Mill towns and the socioeconomic changes that followed. Thanks for the upload!!!!
The very best company I ever worked for. It was my first job in 1977, and it was my basis for a successful engineering career. I will be a deckie until my death.
Quotes I like from Ken Olsen in this video: "Entering the laboratory was a little bit like going into a religious order as a neophyte, they had an attitude about reliability, and how you build electronics, which they believed religiously. You had to follow the rules, and it was almost a fixed procedure that you had faith in, rather than something you knew worked". "You never talk about business in terms of calculus, but it sure is a handy way to look at it yourself, because the balance sheet is an integral of the P&L statement, and you really need to look at the derivative of the P&L statement in order to gain knowledge, and sometimes the second derivative. And all of this helps in looking at the phenomena we work with everyday".
every genius and interesting man, but at the dark side, he became so unique in his thoughts nobody would come clean to some-sense thoughts, from clusters, to superclusters, you need a mainframe to control de facto machines, it became a big company by doing the right thing to do at a time, even if you don't like the thing HE DOES, HE WHO LIKES TO DO THIS WORLD DOES WHAT HE THINKS IS CORRECT, even if creatures just don't like it
In a way, what he said was correct - you were able to design by following rules about tolerances and "worst case" specs, without questioning them - rather than having to compute the exact behaviour of every interface. This was before 7400 series TTL. The use of a standardised interface made design work 100 times faster - both designing the modules and designing an application constructed with the modules. While that might seem obvious to today's digital designers - this was still the first generation of digital designers, and it was a whole new world they had discovered. (Actually, Charles Babbage's team made the same discovery almost 100 years earlier, but very few people knew that in the 1960's). If you look at EDSAC (10 years earlier than DEC) this was still not well understood. Ask the rebuild team. As for calculus and business - that is what "quants" are about today.
Over the years I used several different DEC machines. In 1975 I used a time shared PDP-11 that had UNIX for its operating system. That was in a sophomore CS lab. Later, I was in a realtime programming lab that had a dozen PDP-11s, running RT-11. After I graduated I completed a project that used a KA10, as a standalone processor. It was quite an experience to see 20 feet of multi-platter disk drives vibrate when a program compiled. Some of the software was written in assembler. Amazing what one instruction could do on the 10. I am retired now and have done a wide variety of electronics and software work. My only regret is that I didn't spend more time dosing DEC hardware.
Today, I work. With new engineers from India , china or Vietnamese. They have no on hands experience as ken Olson. He would go crazy if he saw what a engineer is today. I think its funny engineers who graduate today, can’t even work on their cars or know anything and on hands experience. It’s all on the computer and theory. That is all they know. Downey California
17:35 On the plus side, DEC promoted peer-to-peer networking which went beyond the hierarchical restrictions of IBM’s SNA up to this point. On the minus side, DECnet had no ARP layer, unlike TCP/IP or even AppleTalk. That meant that there had to be a fixed relationship between the Ethernet MAC address and the DECnet node address, so that one could be computed from the other. With the other common protocols, node A trying to talk to node B could simply broadcast a request on the wire asking “What is the MAC address for node B?”, and node B would reply “Here I am!”, and the source MAC address on its reply frame would be the answer.
I spent a lot of my college time on DEC machines, VT terminals and also the big boy CDC 6800 and access to a Cray 1. Oh and as a high school student and under grad in the late 1970s the IBM 360 and 370.
I think even if they did, there was not enough profit in them to keep DEC alive long term (without many layoffs). Even IBM eventually got out of the PC game.
11:15 Apparently DEC lost money on the PDP-6. So they announced they were not going to make any more 36-bit machines. 2 years later, they came out with the PDP-10.
14:36 While there were similarities between PDP-11 and VAX architectures (byte addressability, patterns in the addressing modes), they were not quite compatible. Early VAXes actually had a PDP-11 compatibility mode built-in, so you could switch between running old PDP-11 code and new, native VAX code. This was done away with in later models, as customers’ need for it went away.
To this day, nothing I've done in my career matches my 14 years at DEC. I've created a website offering merch/swag with the digital logo. It's a labor of love, pays for a few lattes and a portion of the proceeds goes to the Alzheimer's Association. You can find it at www.decswag.com
I worked 2 years for DEC. After he left, we were making IBM compatible 486 and pentiums! Once I graduated, I went to MA for an interview. I met the worst people ever. I made the right decision and stayed in CA. A couple years later Compaq bought it and DEC was gone. The DEC's downhill started when SUN and then SGI created more advanced computers and DEC was spending it's money to create Alpha to beat Intel.
Alpha ran rings around Intel. I guess that is why Intel was sued for patent infringement by DEC and lost. Alpha was out there, way out there and you can thank those pentium chips for what they stole from Alpha.
Ken Olsen was anything but an idiot. He was a visionary and nothing could touch Digital equipment. It was built up to a standard and not down to a price. If only they were still around!
@@mrbanditoxyz I think YOU are the idiot. That computer cost my company (the largest single purchaser of DEC computers in the entire word for many years in a row $millions). WOrship whatever geek-god wonders you want; but that DEC Rainbow was a total piece of shit and DEC never made the buyers whole either. So I think they (DEC) were all incompetent and ill-willed too.
@@rstelzer2928 - I get that your company made a bad technical decision. I get that the rainbow was probably was as you described. How it made it past their QA process is a good question. But calling me an idiot is silly. You calling Ken Olsen an idiot is silly. He was not - he was brilliant. Should DEC have fixed the problems and made things right. But doing a paste of your rant multiple times was silly. Calling someone an idiot because he recognizes the brilliance of a pioneer actually *does not reflect well on you* .
@@rstelzer2928 no, that'd be you and your company who misread what was happening. Fact is, astute purchasers very rarely chose Rainbow. It was a fine product for very narrow purposes, but not widely supported. What we saw was that certain offerings were widely supported and extensible. These, at that time, included PDP, VAX, and funnily enough, IBM PC. There was also a new player in Apple... And, of course, the incumbent IBM mainframe had its incumbent "role". Apart from Rainbow, the only other decision that was bad, fatal in fact, was to withdraw their operating system "listings" from the education sector. Eventually, that killed DEC's industry leadership, and the company. I'll leave it to you to work out why. Beyond that, Ken Olsen's philosophies were ground-breaking. The midrange disciplines (software, hardware, networking) that he demanded were very important. This is because customers spent less time on code maintenance and more time on architecting better ways to incorporate useful computing solutions into the business. Anyone who spent any time thinking that way, back in the day, knew that Rainbow was never going to win... anything.
bro.. these are the microsofts and the apples of the 60's before the microprocessors inventions.. these are the big minds back then how are these people not being recognized much.. without this guys there wouldnt be personal computers today!! smfh!!
In 1963 DEC entered the mainframe market with their PDP-6, largely a failure. In 1968 the PDP-6 was improved and released as the PDP-10 mainframe, very popular among Fortune 500 companies. In 1979 they produced the their last model of PDP-10. In 1983 DEC completely abandoned their mainframe products, which caused a lot of damage to the Fortune 500 companies that depended on them. DEC deliberately went out of their way to hide what they did. When the VAX 9000 came out, DEC product literature proclaimed it was DEC's first mainframe. Who would buy a mainframe from a company if they knew they had sunk all of their mainframe customers in the past? To this day, small children who can't be bothered with reading history books think that DEC only produced minicomputers, not mainframes. DEC fooled you in order to cover up their ugly past.
DEC in the 70s assumed that memory would stay expensive forever, and designed the Vax to save memory. They never understood the markets above the hardware level, and were a hardware company. But UNIX made Digital computers a commodity and DEC Vaxen were too overcomplicated and came to be seen as CISC (complex instruction set computers) - an epic mistake!! Even the PDP-11 was CISC to some extent. It's the MIT disease. MIT's Multics computer was CISC, too. All of them put too many features into the hardware to try to lock-in the customer. Think too hard, make a bloatware system to solve problems that nobody has.
There's truth to this comment, and one reason behind the death of the Boston-area computing industry in the US between the late 1970's and the mid 1990's (by which point the epicenter had long since moved to central CA).
I loved working for DEC. Great collegues, great business ethic, and I learned soooooo much 🙂
Only idiots call Olsen an idiot. He ushered in the era of MiniComputers and was the first to knock IBM's mainframe business down a few notches. Many aspects of technology we take for granted today are thanks to Olsen and Digital.
It still gives me a buzz to have been part of the company and culture.
From RSTS/E on the PDP-11 to OpenVMS on the uVAX and Alpha machines and clusters.
It was a special time, never to be repeated.
I hear you, here in the other side of the world I was just a user in a client Telco, when I left that company I brought with me two DEC3000 (retired and obsolete) and a vt420 just to own something from that incredible company.
I know this post is 9 years to late but thanks for the trip down memory lane. Dec employee #19841
Ken Olsen was a good and decent man. His only failing was to ignore UNIX. Before Sun Microsystems came along, DEC owned the UNIX market. Had they been more aggressive about UNIX, Sun Microsystems would have never happened. I know, I worked for both companies in Silicon Valley. There were quarters where the number of VAX machines shipped without VMS licenses equaled the one’s with! That means half of all VAX in high tech and academic computing ran UNIX. These were the markets I worked in. Around 1982, I had a summer job at Bell Labs in Murray Hill NJ. They had two VAX machines named Alice and The Rabbit. Both attached to a DEC Star Coupler. A UNIX cluster in 1982! Alice and The Rabbit have the distinction of being among the first computers on the ARPA net!
DEC had a tradition of hating Unix, which went all the way to the top, to Ken Olsen. So that really only changed about the time he left. Also, just the year before this -- 1988 -- management cancelled Dave Cutler’s PRISM/MICA project for a successor to the VAX and VMS. So he left and joined Microsoft, where he led the creation of Windows NT. Which went on to destroy the Unix workstation market.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I disagree. There were multiple product lines. The first-ever licensed UNIX system was "mine" at the Boston Children's Museum (with a one-off license signed by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs).
DEC was a company founded by engineers, selling to engineers. You could get schematics, down to the transistor level, for all their PDP products. You didn’t have to pay licence fees to design cards to plug into their Unibus and Q-Bus expansion backplanes. (I think this changed later with the MASSBUS for VAXes.) There were even some PDP-11-compatible machines built by third parties, and DEC didn’t sue them.
Xerox PARC (where the GUI was invented, also where Ethernet began) wanted a PDP-10. But rather than buy one from DEC, they built their own (the MAXC). And again, DEC didn’t sue them.
"DEC was a company founded by engineers" ... and then came Marketing.
its easy to say they are pro invention kinds of people not pro money or fame..
Ethernet did not begin at PARC. It developed from ALOHAnet
I loved working for Digital in the late 1980s. Not a bad gig for a 19 year old kid without a degree. I even got to meet Ken Olsen and shake his hand in 1989 when they were opening up the new buildings on Taylor Street. I wrote a lot of code with my high badge number in the 210,000s.
as a former DEC admin, i recall having clusters with up times measured in years. machines were only ever powered down for upgrades or decommissioning. something that windows still can not match today. great memories. great bunch of people.
Exactly! I managed vax prototypes 8 and 16 and many clusters later with no downtime for years and I alone could support multiple clusters in different locations! All these years later with Windows and not there yet lol! Best people and memories of my 40+ year career in the industry, we’re working at DEC. 👍
I loved my 13 years at DEC in Melbourne Australia! I still remember my badge number like many others from the company! Although it was a large global American company it didn’t feel like a large
Company. I’m still in contact with many people who worked at Dec in south Melbourne and Box Hill in the 80’s and 90’s. Ken built an amazing company with amazing people!
Great company, with lots of career growth opportunity, as long as you produced and learned. The employees loved and were loyal to Ken. There were no layoffs until after Ken was forced out in the early 90's, replaced by a CEO who laid off thousands and sliced up the company for sale to Compaq. DEC was an engineering company with innovative products and excellent services. I wish it had some of the marketing savvy of IBM. Even so, DEC made it to #2 to big blue and it's stock took off. The rise of ever more powerful networked PC's and open systems did in many such as DEC, DG, Prime, Wang, etc. I was fortunate to spend 15 years there.
Thank you for sharing this, I miss him so much, made it 10 seconds in and started bawling.
💙🦋🙏🏻
14:12 Observe the VT-100 terminals. In those days, there were a great variety of CRT terminals from different vendors, all incompatible. For example, the control sequence to move the cursor to a particular spot on the screen would be completely different from one vendor’s terminal to another. Somehow, into this _milieu_ , the DEC terminals became _de facto_ standards. There was an ANSI standard for these control sequences, and the VT-100 implemented a superset of this standard.
Unix systems incorporated a library called “curses” which let application programs do on-screen interactive displays without worrying about the differences between different terminal types. This library still survives on Linux systems today.
These days, all the old terminals have become extinct, not to be found outside museums (or the homes/shops/sheds of vintage computing enthusiasts). But the curses library still exists on Linux systems. As do terminal-emulator programs on text consoles and running in windows under a GUI. But the great variety of incompatible terminal types is no more; they all emulate a VT-100.
_"This library still survives on Linux systems today."_ Which says a lot about how old fashioned UNIX/Linux is, and was, already in the 1980s.
No hate, but I always found it absurd that those old style systems are seen by many as more "modern" or "high tech" than (say) a scientific calculator, or even the home computers of the early 1980s, both of which starts in a second... (Yes, I know that's because they are ROM based, but so what? Why are not all personal computers ROM based?)
*These days, all the old terminals have become extinct*
Embedded processors: hold my beer
Proper HW and excellent SW. After nearly 40 years in the computer business I would rate DEC's products as nr. 1
Ken was the man back then. I enjoyed working on the PDP-11 and Vax platforms. DEC was one of the founders of Ethernet. RIP Ken.
I programmed a DEC PDP 11/10 driving a Laboratory Peripheral System to perform interrupt-driven waveform signal averaging in 1976 at Sydney University, Australia. My supervisor was an MIT Engineering grad who had known the DEC people while there. I used the logic in later (1981) routines using the Apple ][e with Motorola 6502 microprocessor and 6502 peripheral IC. Thank you DEC.
I was badged in the 173,000 range. I diid a shutdown, went to MLO... and quit. Did nothing even go for the buy out. Palmer sat above my office while he was killing DEC. He had nice hair and a designated parking space. Ken used to park wherever he got a spot in the lot.
Wonderful man best job I ever had , he cared about people and we wanted to give him 110 percent back
Worked there for 21 years - miss it every day !
VMS Forever!!
If thos pdp11 units go down, half the banking, .edu and insurance digital apparatus go down. Mother structures are likely compromised . nda. DEC is a leg of the entire net. My first post on a comment board was 1983. We had comment boards years before the word internet was invented. We called it DECNET. There were 169,000 of us then. We built things. We got screwed by poor management decision.
So it goes
J'ai travailler 34 ans chez DEC-COMPAQ-HP. Je suis rentré en novembre 1976 en tant que technicien après-vente. j'ai connu la lignée des PDPs en commençant avec le PDP 11/05. Celui sur lequel j'ai le plus travaillé, le PDP 11/70. Que de bons souvenirs dans cette société! j'ai fait un boulot formidable dans une ambiance formidable. Je n'oublierai jamais ces années... Merci Ken!!!
And I built at least 30 or more of the PDP 11/45 systems. DEC was a great fun place to work. Worked on PDP-8 too. Still have my PDP-8 and 11/45 programming cards too. PDP-8 was a desktop machine, it had to be a strong desk, but it was all in one cabinet sitting on top of a desk. One day I was working on a group of modules, K578s I think and a man came up to me and asked what I was doing so I explained to him what the module did, he thanked me and walked away. Well my department head came over and asked me if I knew who that man was, and I told him no. Well, he said, that was the president of the company, Ken Olsen. My badge, which I still have was 7636.
Most of the PDP-8 models I knew were not desktops... they were 12-bit machines in free-standing, nearly-6-foot cabinets.(I also recall an 8-E and 8/L) Of course the cabinetry and technology evolved over the years.
Unfortunately Facebook doesn't allow us to CONSISTENTLY edit/correct typos :(
My first PDP-8 (an 8/I) was a 6-foot freestanding cabinet.
I loved this man. He was the best boss I ever knew.
I worked for Digital in Kanata Canada for twenty years. Best company great people.
My first real computer experience a PDP-8e in 1973. Learned how to program it in assembly and used DEC basic for fun. A great system.
Digital was the best work experience I had.
My first relationship was while working at the Control Data Analog Systems Division in La Jolla, about 1965. Specified and bought the Digital logic modules to integrate into the process control systems and Hybrid Computers, used as flight simulators. Later Digital, 1981, was my customer at Megatek, we were supplying innovative high speed color raster graphics processors integrated into Digital computers. In 1987 I joined Digital as a CS4, for Computer Special Systems in Merrimack, N.H, working out of San Diego.
I retired 1997 and living the good life here. { oddly almost across the hill from the old Hewlett Packard local headquarters.]
.raster
I think DEC used CDC disks.
CDC was the original employer of Seymour Cray. They wanted to get into this new business-computing market, but he created a machine that was 50 times faster than anything IBM had. So they had to invent this new “supercomputing” market to sell it.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 Yes, I worked up at Chipawah and Arden Hills with Mr. Cray, 6000 series operating system design.
At DEC, with the Componets Sales Divison, Manchester, sold DEC , Colorado Springs Division, discs to several computer companies. Data General bought that division.
It was a great ride! Hub
I’m doing a research project that includes some background on DEC. Could I message you some questions?
Please don't call him an idiot. He was a brilliant, generous man.
Nancy Loves Dogs. It certainly seems that way. Did you work at DEC?
Idiot??? where did that come from DEC/Digital was the best computer company ever I miss the VAX era of computing before MBAs started calling the shots :(
Olsen was the complete opposite of being an idiot. A fantastic person in many ways
@@rstelzer2928 The Rainbow was a rush job to compete with IBM. Since DEC's bread and butter was the PDP-11 and VAX family at the time, the Rainbow was little more than a side project bodged together to provide a PC-esque product to compete with IBM.
Hindsight teaches us that the PC was indeed the way the world was going, and maybe if DEC hadn't rushed the product out the door, they may have been a viable competitor to IBM in the early days of the PC.
@@rstelzer2928 - CP/M license was $100 per group. It was easy to port. Technically superior to MS DOS. (I used CP/M in 1976, and MS DOS for years.) The problem was Gary Kildall did not want to work with IBM, and Gates did.
CP/M used many of the same concepts as UNIX.
RIP Ken, I met you once and it was terrifying. I absolutely fan-girled and had no idea why .... I loved Digital product.
Badge#128007 here, Washington D.C. 1980-90. Best company ever.
Pioneering the way to interconnectivity on all levels
This video (originally titled "Digital from the Beginning") is an excellent review of what Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) brought to the tech industries up until 1991 (when I think this was made). Through a series of excellent choices and innovations DEC and Olsen went from strength to strength and were involved in so many of the things that form the foundations of today's tech world. Of course the history of DEC beyond 1991 was far less wondeful - but that was also - in part - brought about by tech change, new waves that DEC somehow missed. I was badge number 185688 in the UK.
A great great man I miss it so much even today.
I worked there (field service in the DC office # 48818) and got to meet Kenny once. Truly a great guy. Talk about a neat way to start a career - everyone in DC who had a computer loved the FS techs like me, and after that, getting good jobs was just making it known you were available.
146486
If I knew then what I know now, I doubt I'd have bailed for a mere doubling of (already good) pay...What a great place to work what was. Few places ever treated their people as well as DEC did. It was a blast. I wrote that badge number on so many of those "print in the box" forms (basically all success stories about customer interactions) I didn't have to look it up all these years later. I got to spend a lot of time in Maynard as my branch would send me to the courses on new product so I could come back and teach the other techs, which worked out well for all. I learned on a PDP-8 my dad got surplus when I was a teen before I worked there...talk about jump-staring a career in computing! I'm still at it...doing different things these days of course. We all thought that those newfangled and SLOW 8 bit IC machines were junk...goes to show how it really was then. Octal forever!
90294
What an amazing man.
Thank you for sharing this. What a great tribute to a great visionary
DEC KNEW this computer (Rainbow 100) was junk in 1982; because I TOLD THEM and also proved it to them shortly after it was released. In 1982/83 My company bought new DEC Rainbow computers, running CP/M for the entire engineering department. instead of the IBM PC's everyone else was getting. While creating programs for Line Balancing, Screw Machine labor standards and many other things in the Engineering department I noticed anomalies. I shook the Rainbow down and found that it was not doing math properly. It took three days to find the Engineer in charge at DEC of the Rainbow 100. When speaking with him I asked him to cold boot his Rainbow, then type these keystrokes: . He did, and immediately said "Oh my god!" He repeated this keystroke pattern several times, getting a different result each time, never getting " .50 " which is the correct answer. That duplicated what I found. I asked if the problem was hardware or software, and he said it was hardware and a fault in the motherboard DESIGN. I worked at that time as Industrial Engineering Manager for the Electricity Management Division of Schlumberger in West Union SC, USA. Schlumberger bought more DEC computers than any other company in the world. The Rainbow 100 was TRASH. The problem required a newly engineered MOTHERBOARD. I do not know how DEC resolved this issue. But we trashed them all and went with IBM PC's even for Engineers. I highly recommend anyone using A DEC Rainbow 100 or other DEC computer from that era do the same simple test I "boiled the test down to" to see if the computer has the bad motherboard. : One divided by two = ? If you get anything but .50 your computer is JUNK, and everything you have calculated on it is suspect (but probably 100% worthless). My name is Michael Stelzer. Have a nicer day!
@@rstelzer2928 - dude - this is the Nth rant on the same topic. You have made your point. WE got it.
21 years I worked for DEC - from PDP8 to DECsystem10
Ken was the man.
Currently doing a research project on DEC’s impact on suburban New England Mill towns and the socioeconomic changes that followed. Thanks for the upload!!!!
The very best company I ever worked for. It was my first job in 1977, and it was my basis for a successful engineering career. I will be a deckie until my death.
Quotes I like from Ken Olsen in this video:
"Entering the laboratory was a little bit like going into a religious order as a neophyte, they had an attitude about reliability, and how you build electronics, which they believed religiously. You had to follow the rules, and it was almost a fixed procedure that you had faith in, rather than something you knew worked".
"You never talk about business in terms of calculus, but it sure is a handy way to look at it yourself, because the balance sheet is an integral of the P&L statement, and you really need to look at the derivative of the P&L statement in order to gain knowledge, and sometimes the second derivative. And all of this helps in looking at the phenomena we work with everyday".
every genius and interesting man, but at the dark side, he became so unique in his thoughts nobody would come clean to some-sense thoughts, from clusters, to superclusters, you need a mainframe to control de facto machines, it became a big company by doing the right thing to do at a time, even if you don't like the thing HE DOES, HE WHO LIKES TO DO THIS WORLD DOES WHAT HE THINKS IS CORRECT, even if creatures just don't like it
In a way, what he said was correct - you were able to design by following rules about tolerances and "worst case" specs, without questioning them - rather than having to compute the exact behaviour of every interface. This was before 7400 series TTL. The use of a standardised interface made design work 100 times faster - both designing the modules and designing an application constructed with the modules.
While that might seem obvious to today's digital designers - this was still the first generation of digital designers, and it was a whole new world they had discovered. (Actually, Charles Babbage's team made the same discovery almost 100 years earlier, but very few people knew that in the 1960's). If you look at EDSAC (10 years earlier than DEC) this was still not well understood. Ask the rebuild team.
As for calculus and business - that is what "quants" are about today.
Over the years I used several different DEC machines. In 1975 I used a time shared PDP-11 that had UNIX for its operating system. That was in a sophomore CS lab. Later, I was in a realtime programming lab that had a dozen PDP-11s, running RT-11. After I graduated I completed a project that used a KA10, as a standalone processor. It was quite an experience to see 20 feet of multi-platter disk drives vibrate when a program compiled. Some of the software was written in assembler. Amazing what one instruction could do on the 10. I am retired now and have done a wide variety of electronics and software work. My only regret is that I didn't spend more time dosing DEC hardware.
Great man, great company. PDP-11 one love.
Today, I work. With new engineers from India , china or Vietnamese. They have no on hands experience as ken Olson. He would go crazy if he saw what a engineer is today. I think its funny engineers who graduate today, can’t even work on their cars or know anything and on hands experience. It’s all on the computer and theory. That is all they know. Downey California
This brings back so many great memories :-)
i worked for DEC for 4.5 yrs excellent company
Great history!
17:35 On the plus side, DEC promoted peer-to-peer networking which went beyond the hierarchical restrictions of IBM’s SNA up to this point. On the minus side, DECnet had no ARP layer, unlike TCP/IP or even AppleTalk. That meant that there had to be a fixed relationship between the Ethernet MAC address and the DECnet node address, so that one could be computed from the other. With the other common protocols, node A trying to talk to node B could simply broadcast a request on the wire asking “What is the MAC address for node B?”, and node B would reply “Here I am!”, and the source MAC address on its reply frame would be the answer.
The best company I ever worked for R.I.P. D.E.C. ;( but hey! If it wasn't for Digital we all wouldn't have Windows 10 in the form it is :)
I spent a lot of my college time on DEC machines, VT terminals and also the big boy CDC 6800 and access to a Cray 1. Oh and as a high school student and under grad in the late 1970s the IBM 360 and 370.
too bad DEC never understood how game changing the personal pc(micro for brits) was........they had no chance
I think even if they did, there was not enough profit in them to keep DEC alive long term (without many layoffs). Even IBM eventually got out of the PC game.
VMS is still the best general purpose OS ever written.
It is Reliable.
Unlike all the eunuchs clones which are trendy now.
11:15 Apparently DEC lost money on the PDP-6. So they announced they were not going to make any more 36-bit machines.
2 years later, they came out with the PDP-10.
14:36 While there were similarities between PDP-11 and VAX architectures (byte addressability, patterns in the addressing modes), they were not quite compatible. Early VAXes actually had a PDP-11 compatibility mode built-in, so you could switch between running old PDP-11 code and new, native VAX code. This was done away with in later models, as customers’ need for it went away.
But it was still way faster to compile on a VAX with a PDP-11 as the target, and transfer the binary to the PDP-11.
A thoroughly decent man.
To this day, nothing I've done in my career matches my 14 years at DEC. I've created a website offering merch/swag with the digital logo. It's a labor of love, pays for a few lattes and a portion of the proceeds goes to the Alzheimer's Association. You can find it at www.decswag.com
It is too bad that man died. Oh, how it hits my heart like a jet crash in a building.
The nice thing about PDP-11s and VAX-11s was that they did not have to run DEC software. They would run Unix.
Andy Grove wrote Only the Paranoid Survive too late for Ken Olsen.
I worked 2 years for DEC. After he left, we were making IBM compatible 486 and pentiums! Once I graduated, I went to MA for an interview. I met the worst people ever. I made the right decision and stayed in CA. A couple years later Compaq bought it and DEC was gone. The DEC's downhill started when SUN and then SGI created more advanced computers and DEC was spending it's money to create Alpha to beat Intel.
Alpha ran rings around Intel. I guess that is why Intel was sued for patent infringement by DEC and lost. Alpha was out there, way out there and you can thank those pentium chips for what they stole from Alpha.
Ken Olsen was anything but an idiot. He was a visionary and nothing could touch Digital equipment. It was built up to a standard and not down to a price. If only they were still around!
The DEC Rainbow was total JUNK.
@@rstelzer2928 - that may be correct. But Ken Olsen was not an idiot.
@@mrbanditoxyz I think YOU are the idiot. That computer cost my company (the largest single purchaser of DEC computers in the entire word for many years in a row $millions). WOrship whatever geek-god wonders you want; but that DEC Rainbow was a total piece of shit and DEC never made the buyers whole either. So I think they (DEC) were all incompetent and ill-willed too.
@@rstelzer2928 - I get that your company made a bad technical decision. I get that the rainbow was probably was as you described. How it made it past their QA process is a good question.
But calling me an idiot is silly. You calling Ken Olsen an idiot is silly. He was not - he was brilliant. Should DEC have fixed the problems and made things right.
But doing a paste of your rant multiple times was silly.
Calling someone an idiot because he recognizes the brilliance of a pioneer actually *does not reflect well on you* .
@@rstelzer2928 no, that'd be you and your company who misread what was happening. Fact is, astute purchasers very rarely chose Rainbow. It was a fine product for very narrow purposes, but not widely supported.
What we saw was that certain offerings were widely supported and extensible. These, at that time, included PDP, VAX, and funnily enough, IBM PC. There was also a new player in Apple... And, of course, the incumbent IBM mainframe had its incumbent "role".
Apart from Rainbow, the only other decision that was bad, fatal in fact, was to withdraw their operating system "listings" from the education sector. Eventually, that killed DEC's industry leadership, and the company. I'll leave it to you to work out why.
Beyond that, Ken Olsen's philosophies were ground-breaking. The midrange disciplines (software, hardware, networking) that he demanded were very important. This is because customers spent less time on code maintenance and more time on architecting better ways to incorporate useful computing solutions into the business. Anyone who spent any time thinking that way, back in the day, knew that Rainbow was never going to win... anything.
Only $150,000? Still cheaper than apple
bro.. these are the microsofts and the apples of the 60's before the microprocessors inventions.. these are the big minds back then how are these people not being recognized much.. without this guys there wouldnt be personal computers today!! smfh!!
"There's no money to be made in computers"
-Forbes '57
In 1963 DEC entered the mainframe market with their PDP-6, largely a failure. In 1968 the PDP-6 was improved and released as the PDP-10 mainframe, very popular among Fortune 500 companies. In 1979 they produced the their last model of PDP-10. In 1983 DEC completely abandoned their mainframe products, which caused a lot of damage to the Fortune 500 companies that depended on them. DEC deliberately went out of their way to hide what they did. When the VAX 9000 came out, DEC product literature proclaimed it was DEC's first mainframe. Who would buy a mainframe from a company if they knew they had sunk all of their mainframe customers in the past? To this day, small children who can't be bothered with reading history books think that DEC only produced minicomputers, not mainframes. DEC fooled you in order to cover up their ugly past.
ill take a stab here about video games, as the TX-0 has a graphical cat and mouse chase / maze game
Lunar lander on GT40…
DEC in the 70s assumed that memory would stay expensive forever, and designed the Vax to save memory. They never understood the markets above the hardware level, and were a hardware company. But UNIX made Digital computers a commodity and DEC Vaxen were too overcomplicated and came to be seen as CISC (complex instruction set computers) - an epic mistake!! Even the PDP-11 was CISC to some extent. It's the MIT disease. MIT's Multics computer was CISC, too. All of them put too many features into the hardware to try to lock-in the customer. Think too hard, make a bloatware system to solve problems that nobody has.
There's truth to this comment, and one reason behind the death of the Boston-area computing industry in the US between the late 1970's and the mid 1990's (by which point the epicenter had long since moved to central CA).
3:21 A.k.a. the “cashflow”.
I hope riscv takes off
This is the dude who said "Unix is snake oil". Haha.
Am I the only one who hates that meandering, loud, cheap-computer-game-sounding music interspersed throughout the 19 minutes of this video?
Very 1989, though.
Microsoft and IBM destroyed DEC
I believe Shakespeare used one of the earliest word processors on a PDP.