I should probably mention calling it America Standard Code 2 was intended to be a joke. It would seem its a joke only me and one other person found funny. One error that was real and not a joke, that Lawrence pointed out was when talking about core memory, I explained it wrong. It's not that the ring is magnetised or not to represent 0 or 1, its the direction of flux is used to determine 0 or 1 the ring is always magnetised.
I was going to call you out on that! Glad I read the comments first. Now on to the rest of the video to see if you picked up on VAX being their tenth try at getting virtual addressing to work.
As someone who is blind from birth, I will always remember this company for creating the DEC Talk. One of the first, and definitely one of the best, speech synthesizers. Back in the 70s. They were extremely expensive in the beginning, but they got better and cheaper. Evolving into an internal card, for PC, serial external device, and finally simply software. One of my favorite synthesize voices ever. An early version of it may be heard if you ever listen to Stephen Hawking speak. I don't know the story behind it, but I find it hard to believe it was a business case based on profit potential
Did you ever hear it sing? They had all these demo files to tweak it so it could sing (actually very well). A DECtalk singing "New York" by Frank Sinatra is something everybody needs to experience :) :) :)
@@mayorsnorkum4005 I heard about those but I never bothered. For me this thing was an incredibly useful tool. Allowed me to do things i otherwise would not. So silly gimmicks like that didn't do much for me
I was tangentially associated with the development of DECTalk as it was produced by the Terminals Business Unit of which my group was a part. It was quite a revolutionary product. I remember observing QA engineers testing the very early versions. I was fascinated by it. I worked with Martin Minow, he was a great guy. Very smart, professional, and NICE!
Sad he was deposed. Palmer has a lot to answer for selling off database divisions and others (networking?) and the bean counters being short sighted dropping the $1 licenses to universities. I went to Uni in 1988-90 and DEC were strong there probably for that so impressed with DEC VAX/VMS my initial career was a VMS Sys Admin, even had a 11/730 as home computer, doubled up as a large space heater too. But did impress those seeing it when the RA80 spun up like a jet fighter. Nothing like an 160lb (one draw filing cabinet) holding around ~120MB... Later upgraded to VAX 11/750 and got a TU80 tape drive - luxury!
@@rw-xf4cb I worked for Digital from the end of 1987 to the middle of 1993. Robert Palmer(not the singer) was a corporate raider that sold a lot of Digital intellectual property to various entities. I was based out of the South Central Area whose boss was Michael Jackson(not the singer). I was a principal software specialist. Good times until the end. Got an offer from Oracle to work in California but even with doubling my salary it did not make sense with the high cost of a house in California compared to the cost of mine in Houston, Texas.
@@rw-xf4cb Loved the 750s and the 785s. Worked with them at Brooks AFBs and the UTHSC in the early to mid 80s. Kudos to you for finding an alternative heating source that had computing power.
DEC changed the world. By inventing the mini computer, they started the "embedded" computing revolution: computers that are used to control machines or chemical plants instead of merely being used to crunch numbers for researchers or accountants. Now, there are innumerably more "embedded" computers than regular ones, even if you count a smartphone as a regular computer. And they were instrumental in developing UNIX. Another great contribution that changed the world, as it has become the most widely used OS.
Another nice thing about core memory which I took advantage of (as a service engineer) was, if your computer had an I/O problem so it couldn’t load any code, you could take its memory boards over to another computer of the same model, load the I/O diagnostics, bring them back and plug them in and presto! You could run diags on the broken computer to find out why it was broke! Try doing that with DRAM!!
DEC Schematics were great, but so were the IPBs (illustrated parts breakdowns). All the pieces and parts numbers, right there in front of you. They were a lot of help for me when maintaining DECwriters. ✔️👍
@@acmefixer1 ah. That brings back memories. I had a rented DECwriter III in my apartment my senior year at Uni. Dialup via an acoustic coupler. Good times…
@@acmefixer1 And the part numbers made sense in a 2-5-2 numbering format the first two numbers were the class of part, the middle numbers were the number assigned to the part and the last 2 digits were the variant of the part. There was a "class" of parts for "expendable" parts and one for screws and such and so on. Then the "variant" could mean the length of a cable or a bolt and such. When Compaq bought out DEC I was shocked to discover that Compaq simply assigned seemingly random, but sequential, part numbers to the various parts of each system. It seemed like insanity compared to the well organized part numbers in DEC.
Thank you for making me feel very old, my first job (1975) was booting up the PDP8/E in the morning, this required selecting several 12 bit words on the orange & yellow piano keys and then lifting the Deposit key, when all were in memory then Run - this was called the RIM loader. It should be noted how heavy these things were, it was a three man job to lift one of then into a 19 inch rack.
@@georgegonzalez2476 We had RK05 Disc system as well that was the two word boot. How on earth do you remember the words after all these years? The RIM loader was used to load programs from Punched Paper Tape (later a proprietary Cassette Tape Loader at a mind blowing speed of 300 baud) into the blank PDPs that were in the actual product the company, Private Telephone Exchange Line Monitors.
I used to work for SCI Systems in Huntsville, AL in the mid-1980s. They made core memories which were still used by the military and NASA due to their resistance to radiation and nuclear micro-burst. The cores had become so tiny, they looked like pepper in your hand. One disadvantage of early core memories is when you read the value of a bit (1 or 0), you erased it in the process. So you had to read each bit and immediately write it back.
What a great video and summary. I worked for DEC from 1987 to 1999 (so ended up working for Compaq), and it still the best company I ever worked for. Not only from a tech point of view, but also the way we did things. We just did it as a team. That was the heritage and spirit Ken brought in. We all stood together, something I miss nowadays, to be honest. Today, ~25 years after leaving, I still know my badge number, and I’m still proud that I was part of DEC for over a decade. DECCIE for life! Too bad I can’t tell it to Ken
I worked for DEC from 1983 to 1999. At that time, everyone that worked for DEC knew that we were having access not only to new technologeis but to new ways of doing things. All employees had access to e-mail, social networks and chats well before these services were available for other people. It was like working now for Amazon o Google.
Excellent video, thanks. Worked on pdp 11/70s years ago. When I mention DEC or digital to some of my younger colleagues, I get a blank look! DEC played an instrumental role in providing "computer" systems to smaller businesses and organisations in the days when only big business and government could afford mainframes. Their VMS operating system is still on the go (supported by HP) as many core applications were developed on pdp's and then VAX systems.
My dad was a field service engineer for DEC throughout the 80s and 90s. He loved that job. I remember going to with with him especially when he had a weekend shift. It was mostly VAXen at that time but I was on awe at the equipment. I also remember that every year, the company rented an amusement park for all the employees and family.
Yeah, and the awards banquets were out of this world! Biggest shrimp I've ever seen , totally paid weekend away in locales like Toronto, Lake George, etc. Really miss those days!
The PDP-11 changed my life. I was lucky enough to attend a high school that had one in 1980, and a high school teacher that was happy to take anyone interested in how it worked under his wing. RIP Robert Russell. You were a mensch. Thank you.
My high school had some kind of a computer in it. I never even saw it until my last day there when I was just wandering around through the building. It was being used as a doorstop. That was in 1982. But we still had Dennis Ritchie as an alumni. So that's got to count for something. Even without a computing program we still managed to produce a number of computer scientists.
I also had access to play with a pdp11 in high school in Springfield, MA. I later got to work for DEC as a freelance Photographer. DEC had an awesome work environment.
For years in the 1970's I ran PDP8's for NOAA doing hydrographic work. The manual wanted the power supplies set to 5.0v and 12.0v. Ran much better at 5.3v. The 12v side was high enough. Stout machines. Noisy, but generally reliable (like decades). Thanks for the trip down memory lane 🙃
As a computer professional for the past 28 years, I’m saddened that I missed out on this age of progress. Love learning of these stories through your videos. Great work! And Thank You!
Thanks for making this video. I worked for DEC from 1977 to 1979, and again from 1981 to 1987. This brought back a lot of fond memories. DEC was the best company to work for. The employee benefits were fantastic and there were lots of opportunities for upward mobility, which was encouraged. Ken Olsen was indeed ahead of his time both technologically and socially. The first computer I worked on was the PDP-11/40, which was used as a front end to the DEC-10 and 20. There were many PDP-11 operating systems but the most formidable was the PAL-11 paper tape system. You had to load and then punch one or more paper tapes on each edit for each file of the program, and again for each assembly and link step. Good fun! The DEC-10/20 line used a 36 bit word and the CPU used ECL - a very sensitive logic unlike TTL. It was more difficult to work on. Finding problems in these circuits could take days, weeks, or even months. Try googling an image of a PDP-10 CPU backplane to get the idea. On my second term of employment I wrote firmware for the VT240 video terminal and then went on to lead a group writing VMS printer drivers for the Postscript printers that replaced older technology of the period. I miss those days. We had great fun designing cutting edge products for a great company!
Frankly its amazing you could debug anything with those wire wrap back-planes. The vt240 now that's a good terminal. I will hopefully have time in the next video to talk about the terminals more, as I only really got to mention them in passing in this video, but I try to keep these things to 20-30mins max.
@@renakunisaki Emitter coupled logic. It's a type of computer circuit that supports the highest frequencies, and thus the highest throughput. It relies on small voltage swings. Minor circuit defects were very difficult to detect using the oscilloscopes and logic analyzers of that period . Each wire or run on the circuit board had to be specially terminated to avoid the signals reflecting back on themselves and causing feedback interference. All in all a very difficult system to diagnose and repair.
Thanks for the great retrospective on the early days of DEC. My dad worked there for most of his career and I owe my own career in software as a result to DEC. DIGITAL maybe gone but not forgotten. Looking forward to the Alpha video at some point. Thanks again.
I owe so much to DEC for my understanding of computer technology. In the mid-60s, I somehow got myself on the DEC mail list to receive books like their processor handbooks. I studied these cover to cover, and I was in 6th grade at the time. When I worked at UCC in the early-70s, we used PDP-8 machines as the backbone of a world-wide network to remotely access our mainframes. A PDP-9, and later a PDP-10 provided terminal access called "FAS-BAC". It allowed running programs on the PDP-10 or on the many IBM 360 and UNIVAC 1108 mainframes. It also gave us email to others in the company and to our customers. I was also able to enter programs from the light panel, a technique I was able apply to the mainframes. In my computer science classes, learning machine code programming, the PDP-11 machine code was like a wet-dream compared to the 360 or 1108 machine codes. Thank you DEC.
At Univ. of New Orleans, we had an X-ray crystallography servo-table driven by PDP-8s. We had a PDP-10 using the KA-10 series. I was a student operator of it. Later the university upgraded that to a KI-10, and finally a KL-10. That was a bloody fast, powerful system. I had a PDP-11/15 in my chemistry lab. Finished my dissertation research doing real-time data gathering with it. Spent the next 12 years after my doctorate working as a device-driver writer for PDP-11s. My employer, TANO, sold a lot of PDP-11/40s and later, 11/44s, for oil-and-gas pipeline control systems that monitored sensors in the pipeline to track what was flowing through it. That machine was a true delight to program in MAC assembler, though we also had a decent FORTRAN compiler. The thing we really liked about the 11/44 was that it had floating point ability built in to the CPU chip rather than available through an external card, and that its memory management abilities included the ability to handle up to either 2 MB or 4 MB, I forget which. In the 1970s, either one was a LOT of memory. I loved those machines until VAXen came onto the scene. The 11/44 was a good replacement for the 11/70. We never ran UNIX on any of the 11s, though. We used RSX-11M most often, but the business office had a RSTS-E-9.
Worked for DEC from 87-94, one of the most memorable jobs I've ever had and some of the smartest interesting people I've ever worked with. The whole company was like a family. Working for DEC was like a college education. Really sad to see the way it ended up.
Reading posts from lots of forma DEC staff most of them chime with what you have written. It really is a shame DEC is nolonger with us. The other thing I noted was everyone seemed to remember their badge number.
@@RetroBytesUK LOL, yes all of us fondly remember our badge numbers, the lower the number the earlier you started working there, but until THIS week, our badge numbers were also our DCU member numbers!
@@FrankenLab What a week for me to pick for this then. I love the badge number system, I also really liked that if you left DEC and came back you kept your badge number.
I first used a PDP11/45 in 1988. The login command is 'hello'. These things were payroll and accounting machines back in the shop is working. I was a Vax guy managing the three 11/750 Vaxes and 8 more remote Vaxes. 2400 modems back then works just as well for console mode tty. I missed those days..
For the RSX operating system the “HEL” task was used as “HELlo” for logging in, but if you weren’t sure, it could also be used to obtain “HELp” before logging in.
I worked for DEC just before the compaq buyout. I find I keep referring to the culture they had created there - even now. So one of the stories was about the deskpads - this was back in the day when you had a big deskpad on your desk. One of the people were mentioning when they started at DEC, they got to their desk, here was a new deskpad - turn over one flap and it described how to introduce yourself over the phone etc. The other flap just had one message - "Everybody makes mistakes". I have never really worked anywhere else where almost everyone left their ego at the door - it was all about the learning and the outcomes.
Thanks for the enjoyable trip down memory lane. Started on PDP-11 and went to DEC JIT plant in Galway IRE in the early 1990s to benchmark a Vax9000. Great memories, great people, great times. The company I work for today still uses VMS and good to see VSI have it running on x86 architecture. Did many a VAX to AXP to IA64 migrations. Looking forward to your next video.
VMS was a great operating system. It was the impetus for Windows NT as some of the early VMS developers went on to work for Microsoft on that project. I notice an especially amazing similarity between the VMS file system and NTFS. I was on the Lotus 123v3 development team which targeted OS/x, Windows 95/NT, VAX/VMS, and about 10 different flavors of Unix and Zenix. VMS was by far the easiest to port. Everything just worked!
Data general was for most of its existence selling corporate mainframes - whereas DEC grew large by selling to departments and small businesses. DG may have made more money until the Mainframe business wilted away, but it was far less influential in the development of the modern industry than DEC.
Nicely done. As a new hire at a relatively new company (Atari in 1976) I was to put together the second computer system they had at that facility, a second (third?) hand PDP 11/20 which had 20K of core memory, two 8" floppy disk drives and a paper tape reader/punch. The other computer they had was a PDP 11/05 which I believe had 16K of semiconductor memory and also two 8" floppy disk drives and a paper tape reader/punch. A couple years later we picked up a used 11/03. All running RT-11. They were used as our only machines until we bought the first of many VAX in 1981. Look forward to your video about the VAX.
@@bobdinitto Yep. Even many of the early games we made (I always worked in the arcade division) worked with ~4k of memory (ROM/EPROM). I personally was never able to get one of my games to fit in just 2k but I tried.
I knew quite a bit about Data General from reading Soul of A New Machine. Given DEC was framed as the underdog's competition in that book, I allowed myself to believe it was just that. Glad you covered the ways Ken made DEC unique. Showed me I was wrong. Glad I now know and why.
I was fascinated by The Soul of a New Machine. It really captured the intensity of working on a high-pressure high tech project. The fact that you become obsessed with this thing you're building. The long days and nights of working tirelessly with no time off for months. Sleeping on the office floor or on the desk. Living on Chinese food and pizza. Seeing the design in everything you look at on those long drives home: The leaves on a tree. The clouds in the sky. A rock. The fact that some of the best products are developed by the smallest teams that can move quickly, while some of the larger teams can get sidetracked with feature creep and engineering conflicts that can cause delays. I had never observed the trials and tribulations of my professional life described so accurately as in that book. On a side note the manager who hired me at DEC, Richard Glantz, used to call Data General "Data Generous" because of their penchant for luring away DEC talent with offers of cash.
I had a Nova about 30 years ago, but it was dead when I received it. It was sold to me for the two relay racks, but I had to take the dead computer. Unfortunately, the equipment was lost in a rented warehouse.
@@bobdinitto I worked to bring the Microdyne RCB2000 to market. It was the first Software Defined dual Telemetry receiver on the market. It was VXI based, and all boards built in house. We had two prototypes in Engineering that were being used to finish writing the firmware. I had the task of cleaning everything up enough to produce shippable product. That included test fixtures, test procedures and an upgrade to our entire assembly/reflow board making process. A lot of long hours, and dealing with many departments to make production and test as painless as possible.
Soul of a New Machine was quite incorrect in one important way: Those portrayed as nasty people were in fact nice folks, easy to work with; and vice-versa (in particular, there was little love for the 'leader' Tom West).
@@cheponis Often these types of "true stories" use "poetic license" to bend the truth for dramatic effect, and perhaps embellish the contributions of the author.
It was indeed an exciting time to be a computer nerd. Minicomputer companies were run by engineers, not MBAs. Sales pitches stressed obscure technical features such as a process exchange time that was a few nanoseconds quicker than the competition, or loadable microcode. For younger folks curious about that period, I'd recommend reading "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. Mr. Kidder was a journalist, not a computer geek, so his explanations are accessible to any reader. I especially related to his chapter on microcoders. I've never written microcode myself, but as a CPU technician I had to learn how to read it and single-step it. It's a whole 'nother world in there.
In 1978 at 17 years old I programmed a PDP11 to manage band candy sales. My math teacher took the programs to a junior college each night. I was hooked and 44 years later I'm still in the game. Thanks DEC and Mr. Hermann!
Fellow nerd from Oregon, USA here. I love your videos! A great balance of informative and sometimes hilarious snark! Thanks again for a wonderful peek into DEC.
I was an electronic engineer at DEC in Reading UK in the late 80s, early 90's. It was a fabulous company to work for and I loved every minute of my time there.
Very nostalgic for me. I was a user of a DEC PDP 11/70 in the 70's at a manufacturing plant, that was later replaced by a VAX/VMS cluster. DCL was a very powerful tool.
As an engineering student at the University of Hawaii in early 70's my class using the PDP 10 at MIT that was running a math analysis application remotely through what was then the Arpanet. It worked out quite well cause of the 6-hour time difference.
DEC was an outlier in what we would now call Stakeholder Capitalism. Companies need to build products for a profit, but also need to consider their Internal and External Stakeholders. Long after DEC set the example, its has taken almost 30 years to see other companies adopting similar stances. And I would argue, none have reached the scale that DEC had in its heyday.
I learned my first programming in high school. We had terminals (DECwriters) that connected via an acoustic coupler to a PDP-11 in an administration building a couple towns over. The OS was RSTS/e and the language was APL. Once home computers and modems became a thing, we'd log in at night and run chat programs we wrote. It was an early taste of what became the internet. Communicating with people in real time, live, no matter how far away. Eventually, schools went to Apple computers and the need for a network of terminals went away. I was offered the PDP-11 for free. I went to look at it and with the hard drives, it was the size of a refrigerator. I declined.
My story is almost exactly like yours. I first learned about computers at 14 in private school on a PDP11/34, also running RSTS-E. I was so enthused, the system manager took me under his wing and showed me how to mount drives and administer user accounts. I later found a PDP8 with 2K of ram, and it still sits in my parents basement. It's quite dead (capacitors blew and destroyed the power supply and logic boards), But I still look at it from time to time to flip the front switches and think of my first DEC experiences.
They were a great machine. We had one of these at my high school and I was one of the lucky kids who got to look after it. I could flick those switches to 173101 octal and reboot it faster than you would believe. 😀
It is a great kit. I picked one up last year and it was a fun build and interesting to play with. You might want to check out the IMSAI 8080 replica which uses an ESP32, it has some really neat features.
Its made by a guy Oscar in the netherlands he fanatically had the switches remanufactured in the right colors and shapes in the 2/3rds OEM sizes. He takes orders every month and a month later he ships out the kits, about $300 but you have to add your own raspberry Pi, fear not - for $40 Pi Zero v2 (with power supply & sd card) makes a great processor, its about 6x faster than the original PDP-11/70.
Awesome video, this first computer we used at school was a terminal connected to the Hatfield Poly PDP11. Every program was paper tape or punch card. We then got a BBC and a couple of RML380Zs. Good times back in the late 70s and early 80s. :)
In collage I worked on PDP-8 (Straight) serial number 7 and several PDP-8L's and a PDP-12. After collage want on to work on a Decsystem 10. I still have my DECstation Installation Kit screwdriver. It says "PDP8 more than 40,00 installed worldwide". It was a great era in computing!
Worked as Field Service Engineer from 1980 to 1994. DEC was known as the best company to work for in the USA. I first learned PDP-11 architecture in the Navy. Cecil Field used about 15 PDP 11/45's to run 3 S3 A Viking Anti submarine Warfare flight simulators. After that, straight into a job with DEC. I became the VAX specialist, then onto Alpha. Two of the best jobs I can imagine. Back then there was at least one company that actually cared about its employees. And its customers, almost to a fault. Sadly, I don't think any company like it exists today. Thanks for the video!
Great video, brought back many memories of various pdp11s. In those days quite a lot of programming was in assembler and the '11 had a very elegant and orthogonal instruction set which was very rasy to learn and use. So much better than what intel foisted on the world with the 8086
I loved the PDP-11. It was so well designed. The instruction set was simple and elegant. The unibus was revolutionary. As for the 68K vs 808x it was a no brainer: Motorola was a much more well designed and easier to use device. The fact that it had straight forward memory addressing as opposed to Intel's segmented memory architecture which has always been a major pain in the ass made it a clear winner in both circuit design and programming.
@@bobdinitto With one unfortunate downside: Segmented memory would prove to be a precursor to paged memory, which proved vital for virtual memory management and multitasking. The 68451 was an inadequate MMU, and meant systems had to either work around the broken system, such as MacOS's cooperative multitasking, or roll their own MMU. By the time Motorola fixed the problem, it was too late. IBM inadvertently put their stamp on an easily cloned desktop computer, and stumbled their way into setting the de facto standard architecture.
Probably the best 10 years of my career. I started in 1981 as a Sr Cost Accountant in the Springfield Ma plant where tape and disk drives are manufactured. Helped start up the Greenville SC PWB plant before returning to Springfield where I was promoted to Cost Accounting Mgr. Finished my career as a sales rep in Knoxville, TN. Unique company, unique products, unique culture.
Talk to any ex-dec employee including myself and they will all say Ken was a wonderful person. There are many stories about his kindness and care for his employees. From the time I started in 1976 and left in 93, he refused to lay anyone off even though the company had grown to over 100,000 employees. He was so humble it is true tat he drove around in a Ford Maverick and he wore those elbow patches on his suit sleeves. No alcohol at the company picnic either. Just a fantastic place to work. We had everything at our facility, company nurse, full cafeteria, credit union and rep's for insurance. So, you could do banking and all your insurance needs right there in the plant. I will also remember the fleet of helicopters they had that flew employees all over Mass. It as just a wonderful atmosphere to work in and much of that had to do with Ken himself. Then of course he was not the media or wall street darling as the 90's rolled in and he was forced out. That is the day, as they say, the music died for me and a whole host of employees as a new era was ushered in being led by Bob, the Butcher, Palmer who sliced and diced the entire company, selling off almost all the divisions. Those that do not know DEC don't realize they made every part of the computer system. Terminals, printers, storage options like hard drives and tape backup as well as creating their own chips and boards. I could go on and on but I will never forget in 1976 when I started I was amazed that I could actually send "mail" via a terminal to any other DEC employee no matter if they were located in the US or in Europe. This was light years before "email". DEC was doing this 30 years before on their internal networks. Still have some stuff from my days there and this brings back a lot of memories.
I worked for DEC in Galway and Clonmel from 1972 to 1991. Best company ever!! I mentioned a "DECMail" message from 1990 to a colleague a few weeks ago and she said "but, there was no internet in 1990". So I said, that we had our own intranet and email system. She had never heard of DEC and was flabbergasted. People don't realise how much of what we have today was due to the innovation of a single company. Great company and great times.
Anyone who's programmed in PDP-11 assembler knows just what an elegant instruction set it had. It was a joy to program. Nova and HP-1000 were like wind up toys in comparison to the 11.
Wow! Everyone has a story! Here's mine; When I left the Army in '82 I hired on with TRT Telecommunications in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. We had a very cool large computer room and at the center was the Telex Exchange. It was an Eltex II from Fredrick Electronics and was powered by two PDP-11/70's. With all the blinky lights and big redundant mag tapes going it was like working on the bridge of some 60's era scifi starship. It's all gone now, but what fun it was! That era came and went so fast. Thanks for posting this vid, it brought back many fine memories.
I was an EE/CS student from '78 at UNSW in Australia. We had an 11/70 running the CS department with UNIX (it was very early days and UNSW was a UNIX pioneer). It was such a lovely machine but hopelessly overloaded. I was so familiar with all aspects of that PDP-11. Once it failed and the whole department was at a standstill. We were waiting for the DEC engineer to show up and fix it and I decided to do something about this... The machine was made entirely from discrete logic and we had all the schematics - so I set about analysing what was wrong by first loading code through the frontpanel switches and localising the fault (DEC diagnostics were not really that helpful). After that, it was the CRO and logic probe. Within a few hours I had tracked the problem to a faulty XOR gate in the CPU. These were available in the school store and I managed to convince everyone that I knew what I was doing - so I set to work with the soldering iron to replace it. The machine was up and going again long before the DEC engineer appeared. The PDP/11 was such a nice piece of hardware - with a straightforward design that an undergrad could understand. Looking back, I am still amazed that I convinced the academics to let me fiddle about on their precious machine. I suspect that these days, they wouldn't even be able to overcome the "work safety" dramas associated with pushing out the CPU sub-cabinet...
Seeing all this DEC love makes me really happy. My mom worked for the company throughout most of my childhood, and when DEC was bought out, it was like there was a death in the family.
You're right about Core memory retaining data. I have a prototype DG Nova with core. A project we did was to try and read-back the contents. Took a few months of research and when it was dumped, it had part of a Fortran Linker still in it. Read date was early Sept 2020. Much as we can tell, last time the DG was run was 1978. Love my pdp11's. So your video warms my heart greatly. I have a pidp8 and 70 also. One day I'll get sufficient tu-its and build them.
Al, I have a similar story. At my first coop job in college I was assigned the task of bringing this old DG Nova II back to life (it was sitting in a corner of a huge high-bay having been retired years prior). Not only did this model have core memory, it had a very tiny optional circuit board installed on the back of the front panel. I dig around in the documents and learned it was the auto-restart option. So I tested it one day. I started to compile a program, and walked around behind the rack and pulled the plug on the whole thing. After lunch, I plugged it back in. It sprang back to life and completed the compilation no problem. To be clear, this option was not like something you’d see today that would quickly save RAM before the power dies. IIRC, it primarily did bookkeeping things like commanding the disk drives to halt. Maybe it saved a few CPU registers? I don’t remember anymore.
Wonderful video! I started working in my university as administrator for a VAX 11-750 in 1986 and there were one PDP-11 but I didn't use. We planned to buy a VAX-9000 but thankfully workstations were beginning and migrate to DEC Ultrix on high resolution screens and then to Linux on PCs... really a wonderful time... connecting the VAX to worldwide DECNET OSI network... then the Ultrix machines to Internet (at 2400 bps... quite a high speed for a whole university! hehe) the first BBS (bulletin board systems) the Usenet News, Gopher and finally WWW! I thank God for being in the right place at the right time... what a wonderful times we lived! Looking forward to see the VAX and Alpha videos! keep on rocking!
I used to have a PDP 11/23 with 2 RL drives in my room in a half height rack. I lived on the 3rd floor with no elevator, and on top of this I had to haul the thing home by tram, it was quite an operation all in all, but it worked flawlessly one put back together. I had to clean it up as it had been outside a computer labs loading dock for a week or two and got rained on.
Great video , I had the pleasure of working with DEC for 14 years .. covered all the early consoles , PDP8's PDP11's, VAX.. this brought it all back for me .. Sigh
As a engineer in a highly competitive and stressful market, I think I could get along with ken, much like my first boss in my current career, always seems cheerful and encourages growth within his team ... but no slouch either constantly driving innovation (he worked at DEC as well)
When I was in the Navy, we had a PDP-1170 that was used for message processing. It ran RSX11. Loved the blinking lights. It was lots of fun to work with.
As a kid, when I used to wander round HMS Invincible (those were the days) I found their, well, I don't think it was a mainframe. More like a minicomputer made from tank armour. It looked like the WOPR from WarGames It had a punch card reader they actually used.
@@gregn5389 I loved working with the mainframes. I got to the point that I could just watch the lights and activity and could actually tell what it was doing. I miss those days.
I learned system programming on a PDP-1140 & PDP-1170 @ University of Maryland College Park in the late 70's. I STILL have my PDP11 Processor Handbook & Periphal Handbook. It starreted me on a 40+ year as an embedded systems programmer. A GREAT machine!
I got a job offer from DEC in Vermont in 1979 (with three increasing salary offers, no less), and like an idiot turned them down to work at a very unsatisfying electronics company that I didn't stay with for long. Even though DEC died before I would have retired, I still very much regret missing out on the (presumed) fun of working for them. It was a PDP-8/I that I learned programming on, in college. This video has inspired me to buy a PiDP-11 kit to use as a front end for my home security system, ensuring that the system will be completely opaque to anyone other than me. 🙂
I'm glad you liked the kit. I can see how you might regret missing out on DEC. Sadly for me when I was starting my career VAX was well and truly on its way out, but I did get to use Alpha and Alpha was great.
I worked in the early 80's on a Schlumberger well logging truck. It had 2 militarized PDP-11s with mag tape for bulk storage. A thermal teletype was used for the console - all keyboard activity was logged with timestamps and the scroll was preserved with the records for the job. We beat the daylights out of those computers in the field, but they did the job and just kept working. memories ...
Worked at DEC between 1969 and 1960, which I consider the golden era. You have done a good job given the time and I think fairly accurate. I hope you mention the visionary at DEC Gordon Bell in your next video. There is a book I can recommend "DEC is Dead long live DEC". It Should be required reading in Business Schools on the etablishment and impact of company culture.
@@bobdinitto Also, Bell co-authored Computer Engineering - A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design. It's excellent for understanding the engineering side history.
Hi. I as an West German engineer got trained in Kiew in 1982 as service man for the CM4.. It was a very huge deal around a steel production in Kursk. The automation was done via Swedish ASEA, whom I worked for. The knew that DEC had sold their plans plus old manifacturing machines to the only industrial computer manufacturer of the UDSSR. While our 6 weeks training we meet al the leading staff of that company... They even showed us their work in progress ( the VAX)... All that cloning has been, to my best knowledge, made with/by DEC themselves, just in the times before the embargo.... These guys trained us to repair the computers on TTL-chip level, using a single counter that toggled the micro-code puls. Very nice competed people witch struggled with their low quality produced hw. (f.x. I never before saw corroded "golden" wrap pins) Since these experiences in younger times I don't trust our daily press blabla anymore..
I was smacked with nostalgia when you showed the pdp-8, with its autumnal color theme. Flip, step, flip step, on and on to program the loader for the paper tape reader. The orange three ring binders with documentation in the one shot also brought back memories. I wish you would have shown the wire wrap rat’s nest inside the drive units. My experience with pdps was in industrial control systems. They were everywhere, once upon a time.
My first experience of programming was on a PDP 11/23 (I think. It was 40-odd years ago) using machine code which was input one word at a time direct into memory through the toggle switches on the front panel, and then saved to a punched paper tape. Oh the fun you had when the centre of the paper tape fell out and the whole reel unravelled around your feet . I also remember using magnetic core memory which was loaded from paper tape and then held the programme almost indefinitely. One lesser known characteristic of magnetic core is that it was resistant to electro magnetic pulses so was used in a number of military applications. I later worked on the DEC VAX 780 series of computers which had the luxury of a multi-user operating system, multiple processors, magnetic tape drives and 14 inch 20 surface multi-platter removable hard disk packs... all programmed in languages like Fortran. Such fun 😁
Drove by a DCU branch for years, and never realized the word "Digital" in their name was in reference to DEC, and not "e-banking". Thanks for the tidbit.
3:45 Avoiding the word “computer” was for the sake of their customers, who were mainly engineers. If an engineer at some company wanted to buy something called a “computer”, they would have nosey accountants and managers immediately wondering why they weren’t buying from the top computer company, namely IBM.
“Why aren’t we buying from the best?! Don’t we want the best!?” “No, no, you see, the functionality is the same or better, we don’t need to pay for all the service and support contracts…” “You’re talking nonsense, IBM is the best for a reason!” Ad infinitum :) No wonder there were so many IBM resellers of last-gen product, getting by on IBM’s name recognition rather than trying to compete in that slanted field.
Same reason that Hewlett-Packard sold devices like the HP85 through their calculator division and didn't put the word "computer" anywhere on the machine. The one I have still has all the original documents and the purchase order clearly identifies is as a "HP model 85 programmable calculator" - it's just a calculator with a QUERTY keyboard and a built-in CRT that you program in BASIC, and absolutely not a computer at all.
@@TrimeshSZ funny you say that, as there are still debates among people who collect desktop calculators and adding machines, whether or not to include the HP-85.
@@kaitlyn__L Well, to be honest I personally do consider the HP85 to be a desktop computer irrespective of it's market positioning. IMO, the HP9830A comes down on the "calculator" side of the line (even if not by much) and the HP85 crosses over into computer territory.
I remember the supremely satisfying sound the VT100 terminal Return key made when you hit it, when I was at University. Thanks for putting this video together.
Such good memories, first at university EE dept we used the PDP8 amongst others, then in my first company we bought truckloads of PDP11/34 for field data acquisition and VAXes in our data interpretation centers.
Had the opportunity to meet Ken when I was working at DEC in the late 80s as a lowly service tech. Such a warm and wonderful person. He would deliberately avoid the sales and management folks and would seek out the engineers. Lots of stories, including a few about the early days and avoiding the use of "Computer' at all costs! The only DEC event I ever attended that was alcohol-free....
Between 7th and 8th grades in 1973, I took a summer school course in computers. It was given at Freeport HS in NY where we had a DEC PDP-8 that was setup as an EduComp EDU300 with a mark sense card reader with 40 column paper cards that you filled out with a #2 pencil. I could write programs at home and bring the cards in to class to run and then edit them. We had one shared DECWriter printer for output. They taught us assembler using a CARDIAC cardboard computer and then BASIC on the PDP-8. The following year I took the same summer school class but now we had a DEC PDP-11/35 attached to a room full of ASR-33 teletypes with paper tape punch/ readers for saving programs. My favorite was Super Star Trek. We all would play after class. That classroom was loud! I still have some of my old programs on decks of cards and rolls of paper tape.
My father worked at DEC from 1962 to 1996. He was a designer on the PDP-6 and the lead architect and designer of the PDP-10. Digital was certainly a major part of my childhood. I remember wandering around the old mill building in Maynard; I mostly recall that it was dusty.
I worked on the PDP-6 and PDP-10s with Alan Kotok. (We were actually roommates for several years.) I worked for DEC from 1964 to 1992. That series of 36-bit machines is still my favorite computer architecture.
I worked for DEC from 1977 to 2002 (took an early retirement package from HP) and remember Alan. I was in manufacturing engineering mostly for PDP-11s and VAXes. I worked in several locations around the 495 belt over the years. It was a great place to work.
Have fond memories of the PDP 8 and the PDP 11 in my student days. The 11 was a big improvement over the 8. The 11 had a great machine code system, the mov instruction simplified memory operations. I cannot remember the 8 instruction set but it was more clunky. The 11 I wrote code for had 4K of core memory so you did not have much memory for data. I think we had a 1 Mb disk which was a cassette. It was a great machine for its time. Thanks for the nostalgia!
Old Timer Here! The first ever "computer" I ever used was a DECwriter terminal. I worked for a backwater CitiBank subsidiary in Memphis in 1978 and when they installed the terminal, I was chosen to be the operator because I was the youngest and had used a pocket calculator before! The DECwriter was a dumb terminal consisting of a keyboard and a dot matrix pin-fed printer. We connected to the Citi mainframe in NY via a pair of 300 baud modems, each the size of a small chest freezer - lots of blinking lights. I remember it used an acoustic coupler, like a cradle for the phone receiver. My mom thought it was so cool that her son "worked with computers". Now, everyone has one in their pocket. Gosh, I'm old.
I worked with a Dec PDP-8 and PDP-11 in college, NC State around 1981-83. Our assignments were to use DEC assembly language to write low level routines for terminal/device handlers, etc. Our system had 8" floppies for data storage. I may still have the books on those systems but its long since been forgotten. A side note, we also had a Data General computer for Freshman Pascal and other classes. I worked at that data center. We then had DEC Vax systems at our hospital but I never worked directly with them.
Also great in gaming history, the PDP-1 had what is arguably one of the very first _video_ games, Spacewar. Also, Tetris was programmed on an Electronika 60, a Russian PDP-11 clone.
I must admit I did wrestle with should I go down the spacewars rabbit hole. I decided not in the end, I take it you spotted the footage of sapce wars in the video.
I knew one of the original authors of Spacewar (SRR) who actually got called as an expert witness in a court case between two of the major video game companies (each accusing the other of stealing their patented idea). Steve produced his original, dated, printout of Spacewar source, from before either company had a computer, proving there was "existing practice" (a legal patent term), thus invalidating both of their patent claims.
Well, good presentation. I worked for DEC for many many years. Supported TOPS, VAX/VMS, ALPHA, System 5, OSF/1, OpenVMS, most programming languages, hardware support, engineering, networking, clusters, etc. Ricky from IBM, Ret formerly of DEC
My Dad's old workplace (Prentice Computing Centre at Queensland University) had several DEC heavy iron mainframes - KL10s? - but I remember tucked around a corner was a PDP11 managing terminals spread across the uni and I think there was an 8 hiding behind a wall of racks. Thanks for bringing those memories back.
Thank you for this video. Yes, Ken Olsen was a decent man. In January 1979 I hired on as a Sr. Engineer. What a ride. Somewhere buried under antique radios in storage, is a PDP 8E. a KSR 33 tty, some RX02's and a VT100. I wonder if I will dig em out before I die.
I signed on in January 1979, too, as an LCG field engineer. They sent me to months and months of training in Bedford, Mass. I worked in the Washington, D.C. area in CC704.
@@SeaMower Over in Bedford? Did you ever make it to Corporate in Maynard? I lived on the Corner of Thompson and Walnut. I literally could spit off my front porch and hit the side of Mill Bldg. 5. Each day I battled traffic to my facility in Woburn. How do we DM?
When I went to junior college we had a lab with a PDP/11. I remember using the different terminals around campus and the times someone in the lab would shut down the computer without telling anyone. It was still cool to get to use a computer at the time and you had to sign up to be on a terminal in the lab and sign off for the next person to use it.
Ahh… The good old days. We were an OEM networking company in the late 70’s that standardized on the PDP 11/40 as network nodes. Great company and great products
Man...I remember as a maintenance technician in the USAF working on PDP 11/23 PDP 11/44 and VAX 11/751...the bane of my existence was maintaining and aligning the tape drive, TU-78! As maint folk we would mostly enter small routines in PDP assembly...I wished I still had the little assembly card that was like a little cheatsheet. Pretty neat stuff!
My father worked for AT&T/Bell Network for many years - I remember him taking me to the central office in north Florida, and seeing PDP-11s there. The Bell System used them for recording and processing long distance billing. I remember the colored "piano switches" and flashing lights...
I was introduced to the DEC PDP 11 series in 1983 when I went to work for Rockwell International as a field service tech and installer of the Rockwell Galaxy ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) phone system used in large call centers. Continental Airlines bought the first one in '73 if I remember correctly and used it all the way to '96. Now those rows of equipment racks are replaced by one small tower or less with the advent of VOIP and powerful processors..
Thanks for the video, saw the dual-door floppy I was trying to remember for a comment on another video about the complete BYTE collection, sweet thanks. Also there is a cool video about the DEC engineer that went on to create Windows NT. Strange how Dec was at the center of a lot of things (incl. AtariST GEM desktop)
Anyone who has used these machines with the dual 5 1/4 inch floppy disks will remember their very characteristic noise caused by the stepper motors driving the heads with a "buzz buzz"
I worked for DEC UK. In today's tech world we use a lot of things, products, concepts that DEC originated, co-originated with universities, commercialised, productised or in other ways enabled. I'm talking about various data storage technologies, storage virtualisation, networking, clustering, data centre virtualisation, RISC processors, multi-core processors, speech tech, multimedia tech, power control, operating systems - and many more things which DEC either originated, co-originated, enabled, advanced, commercialised or productised. In the mid-late 1980s DEC was looking like it might even become top dog in the computer business, and working there you truly felt valued and looked after. But a series of missed boats and bad decisions meant that the company began to slide in the early 1990s. By the mid 1990s a lot of long term employees were in shock because DEC was disbanding complete departments at almost zero notice and the asset strippers were in selling off chunks of the corporation (networks dvision, storage devision etc) and DEC was behaving just like companies have to when they are under existential threat. There's a great lesson there for anyone today in a large corporate that is doing well and can cosset its employees. Multi-core processors is an interesting one - the Multi-core Intel processor you may well be using right now, might owe its existence to DEC. The DEC Alpha processor had multicore processing in about 1994 or so. When they started asset stripping DEC, one of the things to get sold off was the semi-conductor division, which designed and fabricated Alpha processors. The buyer was Intel. Another interesting thing to reflect on is the striking number of design similarities beteen DEC's VMS operating system and early versions of Microsoft's Windows NT. Yes, DEC was an interesting company - a fairly short lifetime compared to - say IBM or HP - but it's contribution to modern information technology cannot be overstated.
This is an awesome video, I am looking forward to the vax and alpha videos. I used to have a pair of alpha servers first running nt3.51 nt for alpha, and later running lotus notes server on Linux. I loved the alpha boxes so much and I often wanted a pop-11 for at home but haven’t hot one yet
I was fortunate to work for DEC's competitor Data General from 1977 to 1983. I was trained on a PDP/11 in college and wanted a job at DEC and they gave me an offer, but it was in a region I didn't want so off to DG I went. Those were awesome times with explosive growth in minicomputer sales, but the PC was starting to infiltrate the workplace by the time I left that segment of the industry. Those companies were too in love with their "babies" and unwilling to accept the possibility a PC-grade machine could impact them in a measurable way. Obviously, they became the new dinosaurs; the same fate as many of the mainframe manufacturers they replaced a couple of decades earlier.
Thank you for the trip down memory lane. I was introduced to computer science using a DEC PDP-8 while a senior at William Tennent Senior High School. I was fortunate to start then, because the next year, the high school replaced all their PDP-8s (they had 5 or 6) with TRS-80s -- which would not have been nearly as much fun. From there, I continued using DEC equipment at Bucks County Community College where they had a DEC System 10 running TOPS-10 for a mainframe and the computer lab had a PDP-8 that we were allowed to play with. I actually held a core memory card in my hands. I think it was 1 KB and the PDP-8 could hold 4 of those cards for a whopping 4 KB max memory configuration (I think -- that was a long time ago). Until I watched this video, I don't think I ever understood why the PDP-8 had a 12-bit word size, but now it makes sense knowing that the character encoding standard when it was designed was 6 bits. At my university, we had a DEC System 20 running TOPS-20 and at my first job after graduation I used a VAX 11/780. I really liked your video.
I spent 3 years at college using the PDP 8/e series of boxes and have many happy memories of talking and working with the DEC engineers. The beliefs and standards at top level in the US came across the water and was instilled all the way through the teams - nothing was ever too much trouble for the engineers, software teams or even reception when the phone system got you lost. Amazing, even 40+ years later, I still remember them fondly. Two things you did not cover - some of the DEC drives where encased in concrete to reduce vibration - try carrying them upstairs and fitting them in the racks - took three of us (engineer, tutor and student - self) to lift them! The second is that the drives sometimes would not boot without a boot loader installed from paper tape. We needed to manually enter the initial loader using the switches to read the console tape that contained the 'high speed' optical tape driver, then read in the basic OS from optical tape that then allowed the disk to boot - time from start to finish was around 20 minutes...
When I finished my time in the USAF in 1973. I was rehired by Singer, but in R&D. They had DG Novas for graphics design of chips. I didn't get to programming right away, but they eventually purchased a Systron Donner chip test set, which used a PDP-11/05. That's the first mini I programmed, first in BASIC, then machine language, then assembly. Singer R&D was my "bootstrap". O was fortunate enough to land a job with Bell Labs in 1978 and was surrounded with PDP-11s running UNIX. I had programmed other micros and minis, but the PDP-11 had the most elegant instructions, with no need to use an accumulator to do operations. I learned C language and developed in that language for 25 years with a couple years programming in C++. I am still fond of the PDP-11 instruction set, which closely fits the higher level C language. x++ = y++ assembled into mov (Rj)++,(Rk)++. I programmed on VAX for awhile. The instruction set is a greatly expanded PDP-11.
My connection with DEC is on two fronts. In 1992, I was a cook at TGIFridays. My favorite customer was a DEC employee that looked like Chuck Norris. He tipped great. The other connection was around the same time. I was connecting to BBS systems by modem. On one BBS, I found a dialing sequencer similar to the one in the movie War Games. One night of dialing, I found a modem connection to DEC. So, I logged in and started snooping. Fearing FBI agents would be knocking on my door any minute, I stayed on for a few minutes, then got off and stayed off for a week. In hind sight, I realize I had only connected to some primitive online store, but it was cool and scary to connect to another computer without them knowing who I was.
That PDP11 replica is outstanding!!!! Absolutely screams 1970s (and I love it!!!!) And with that, I am now caught up and watched all your videos. Time for some more. ;)
I am working on one, it might take a little bit longer than normal as it involves building something a little bit more complex than the usual, and some other youtube people.
I learned most of my earliest programming on a PDP-8/E that my High School bought in (I think) 1971. I then went on to do A LOT of PDP-11 programming at the MIT Model RR Club (TMRC), where eventually there were 3 PDP-11s under the layout running programs that controlled various parts. They relied on the fact that they were core memory and didn't need to be reloaded each time the layout was powered on, they just came up running (well, usually). I now have a basement full of DEC computers (and a few non-DEC), but none of them are regularly working, I keep hoping to have the time and energy on getting them back. Two PDP-8s, several PDP-11s and myriad LSI-11s and MicroVAX machines, along with a huge set of spare parts.
I had a friend in high school whose dad was a lifelong DEC employee. He helped the engineers at GM try to develop the Wankel rotary engine and then went on to help NASA engineers at the Michoud plant. Of course I had no idea at the time how cool the stuff he was working on was so I missed a big opportunity to learn from him. He loved the company though and was crushed when it closed.
I'm from the town where DEC was headquartered, grew up on the hill overlooking the mill to the south. If you look in old storerooms, you can find DEC machines lying around to this day. The engineering teacher at Maynard High School worked for DEC at one point, and related the origin of the sales tagline "The first computer small enough to be stolen"
In about 1968, the company I worked for at the time sent me on a one week PDP8 assembler programming course. I probably learnt more in that week than in the whole of my electronics degree course. Despite having had no previous knowledge about computers, I came home at the end of that week completely spellbound - everything was so clear. I understood not only the software, but also the hardware. So I decided to design and build my own! I didn't stick to the PDP8 design, but "improved" it (with hindsight, a big mistake because of the lack of software). For example, mine had 4 accumulators as compared to the one of the PDP8. It took me two years, working evenings and weekends. Sadly, it was out of date before it was finished, but there weren't many people around in the 60's with their own computer and I learnt a lot from the project.
I should probably mention calling it America Standard Code 2 was intended to be a joke. It would seem its a joke only me and one other person found funny. One error that was real and not a joke, that Lawrence pointed out was when talking about core memory, I explained it wrong. It's not that the ring is magnetised or not to represent 0 or 1, its the direction of flux is used to determine 0 or 1 the ring is always magnetised.
I was going to call you out on that! Glad I read the comments first.
Now on to the rest of the video to see if you picked up on VAX being their tenth try at getting virtual addressing to work.
I got the ASCII joke... I forget which episode of Red Dwarf it was, but Kryten referred to ASCII code as ASC-Two code. 😂 Well played.
I found it funny too! Funny II :)
I'm surprised you didn't mention there are a few PDP-11's still in operation controlling nuclear power plants!
Thank you for pointing this out. :-)
As someone who is blind from birth, I will always remember this company for creating the DEC Talk. One of the first, and definitely one of the best, speech synthesizers. Back in the 70s. They were extremely expensive in the beginning, but they got better and cheaper. Evolving into an internal card, for PC, serial external device, and finally simply software. One of my favorite synthesize voices ever. An early version of it may be heard if you ever listen to Stephen Hawking speak. I don't know the story behind it, but I find it hard to believe it was a business case based on profit potential
I had a friend who worked on DecTalk (Martin Minow, RIP). He used to claim it was the only bug-free product he'd ever shipped.
Did you ever hear it sing? They had all these demo files to tweak it so it could sing (actually very well). A DECtalk singing "New York" by Frank Sinatra is something everybody needs to experience :) :) :)
@@mayorsnorkum4005 I heard about those but I never bothered. For me this thing was an incredibly useful tool. Allowed me to do things i otherwise would not. So silly gimmicks like that didn't do much for me
I was tangentially associated with the development of DECTalk as it was produced by the Terminals Business Unit of which my group was a part. It was quite a revolutionary product. I remember observing QA engineers testing the very early versions. I was fascinated by it. I worked with Martin Minow, he was a great guy. Very smart, professional, and NICE!
@@bobdinitto that's great. It is wonderful to hear from people who had something to do with this fantastic product
I worked for Ken from 1993 to 2000. I loved every minute of it.
Sad he was deposed. Palmer has a lot to answer for selling off database divisions and others (networking?) and the bean counters being short sighted dropping the $1 licenses to universities. I went to Uni in 1988-90 and DEC were strong there probably for that so impressed with DEC VAX/VMS my initial career was a VMS Sys Admin, even had a 11/730 as home computer, doubled up as a large space heater too. But did impress those seeing it when the RA80 spun up like a jet fighter. Nothing like an 160lb (one draw filing cabinet) holding around ~120MB... Later upgraded to VAX 11/750 and got a TU80 tape drive - luxury!
@@rw-xf4cb I worked for Digital from the end of 1987 to the middle of 1993. Robert Palmer(not the singer) was a corporate raider that sold a lot of Digital intellectual property to various entities. I was based out of the South Central Area whose boss was Michael Jackson(not the singer). I was a principal software specialist.
Good times until the end. Got an offer from Oracle to work in California but even with doubling my salary it did not make sense with the high cost of a house in California compared to the cost of mine in Houston, Texas.
@@rw-xf4cb Loved the 750s and the 785s.
Worked with them at Brooks AFBs and the UTHSC in the early to mid 80s. Kudos to you for finding an alternative heating source that had computing power.
DEC changed the world. By inventing the mini computer, they started the "embedded" computing revolution: computers that are used to control machines or chemical plants instead of merely being used to crunch numbers for researchers or accountants. Now, there are innumerably more "embedded" computers than regular ones, even if you count a smartphone as a regular computer.
And they were instrumental in developing UNIX. Another great contribution that changed the world, as it has become the most widely used OS.
Another nice thing about core memory which I took advantage of (as a service engineer) was, if your computer had an I/O problem so it couldn’t load any code, you could take its memory boards over to another computer of the same model, load the I/O diagnostics, bring them back and plug them in and presto! You could run diags on the broken computer to find out why it was broke! Try doing that with DRAM!!
Yeah Buddy! Also, DEC Schematics were well done.
DEC Schematics were great, but so were the IPBs (illustrated parts breakdowns). All the pieces and parts numbers, right there in front of you. They were a lot of help for me when maintaining DECwriters. ✔️👍
@@acmefixer1 ah. That brings back memories. I had a rented DECwriter III in my apartment my senior year at Uni. Dialup via an acoustic coupler. Good times…
@@acmefixer1 And the part numbers made sense in a 2-5-2 numbering format the first two numbers were the class of part, the middle numbers were the number assigned to the part and the last 2 digits were the variant of the part. There was a "class" of parts for "expendable" parts and one for screws and such and so on. Then the "variant" could mean the length of a cable or a bolt and such. When Compaq bought out DEC I was shocked to discover that Compaq simply assigned seemingly random, but sequential, part numbers to the various parts of each system. It seemed like insanity compared to the well organized part numbers in DEC.
Thank you for making me feel very old, my first job (1975) was booting up the PDP8/E in the morning, this required selecting several 12 bit
words on the orange & yellow piano keys and then lifting the Deposit key, when all were in memory then Run - this was called the RIM loader.
It should be noted how heavy these things were, it was a three man job to lift one of then into a 19 inch rack.
Fortunately we had a RKO5 hard disk. The boot code was just two words:
30: 6743 // I/O function 3 on device 74
31: 5031 // jump to 31
@@georgegonzalez2476 We had RK05 Disc system as well that was the two word boot.
How on earth do you remember the words after all these years?
The RIM loader was used to load programs from Punched Paper Tape (later a proprietary Cassette Tape Loader at a mind blowing speed of 300 baud) into the blank PDPs that were in the actual product the company, Private Telephone Exchange Line Monitors.
I used to work for SCI Systems in Huntsville, AL in the mid-1980s. They made core memories which were still used by the military and NASA due to their resistance to radiation and nuclear micro-burst. The cores had become so tiny, they looked like pepper in your hand. One disadvantage of early core memories is when you read the value of a bit (1 or 0), you erased it in the process. So you had to read each bit and immediately write it back.
What a great video and summary.
I worked for DEC from 1987 to 1999 (so ended up working for Compaq), and it still the best company I ever worked for.
Not only from a tech point of view, but also the way we did things. We just did it as a team. That was the heritage and spirit Ken brought in.
We all stood together, something I miss nowadays, to be honest.
Today, ~25 years after leaving, I still know my badge number, and I’m still proud that I was part of DEC for over a decade. DECCIE for life!
Too bad I can’t tell it to Ken
I worked for DEC from 1983 to 1999. At that time, everyone that worked for DEC knew that we were having access not only to new technologeis but to new ways of doing things. All employees had access to e-mail, social networks and chats well before these services were available for other people. It was like working now for Amazon o Google.
Excellent video, thanks. Worked on pdp 11/70s years ago. When I mention DEC or digital to some of my younger colleagues, I get a blank look! DEC played an instrumental role in providing "computer" systems to smaller businesses and organisations in the days when only big business and government could afford mainframes. Their VMS operating system is still on the go (supported by HP) as many core applications were developed on pdp's and then VAX systems.
Used by polled ecg unit at the John Radcliffe hospital which I helped install and maintain around group of bemused nurses.
My dad was a field service engineer for DEC throughout the 80s and 90s. He loved that job. I remember going to with with him especially when he had a weekend shift. It was mostly VAXen at that time but I was on awe at the equipment. I also remember that every year, the company rented an amusement park for all the employees and family.
Very similar memories/experiences for me growing up.
Yeah, and the awards banquets were out of this world! Biggest shrimp I've ever seen , totally paid weekend away in locales like Toronto, Lake George, etc. Really miss those days!
Yep. I just posted on my time with DEC. That weekend you referred to is called the "DECservice Awards" company appreciation ceremony.
Thank you for using the correct multiple of VAX. You don't see many nowadays who know.
The PDP-11 changed my life. I was lucky enough to attend a high school that had one in 1980, and a high school teacher that was happy to take anyone interested in how it worked under his wing. RIP Robert Russell. You were a mensch. Thank you.
That's awesome, respect for Mr Russell
My high school had some kind of a computer in it. I never even saw it until my last day there when I was just wandering around through the building. It was being used as a doorstop. That was in 1982. But we still had Dennis Ritchie as an alumni. So that's got to count for something. Even without a computing program we still managed to produce a number of computer scientists.
I also had access to play with a pdp11 in high school in Springfield, MA. I later got to work for DEC as a freelance Photographer. DEC had an awesome work environment.
For years in the 1970's I ran PDP8's for NOAA doing hydrographic work. The manual wanted the power supplies set to 5.0v and 12.0v. Ran much better at 5.3v. The 12v side was high enough. Stout machines. Noisy, but generally reliable (like decades). Thanks for the trip down memory lane 🙃
As a computer professional for the past 28 years, I’m saddened that I missed out on this age of progress. Love learning of these stories through your videos. Great work! And Thank You!
I learned all about computers on the PDP11, followed by the VAX. Then moved on to UNIX
Thanks for making this video. I worked for DEC from 1977 to 1979, and again from 1981 to 1987. This brought back a lot of fond memories. DEC was the best company to work for. The employee benefits were fantastic and there were lots of opportunities for upward mobility, which was encouraged. Ken Olsen was indeed ahead of his time both technologically and socially. The first computer I worked on was the PDP-11/40, which was used as a front end to the DEC-10 and 20. There were many PDP-11 operating systems but the most formidable was the PAL-11 paper tape system. You had to load and then punch one or more paper tapes on each edit for each file of the program, and again for each assembly and link step. Good fun! The DEC-10/20 line used a 36 bit word and the CPU used ECL - a very sensitive logic unlike TTL. It was more difficult to work on. Finding problems in these circuits could take days, weeks, or even months. Try googling an image of a PDP-10 CPU backplane to get the idea. On my second term of employment I wrote firmware for the VT240 video terminal and then went on to lead a group writing VMS printer drivers for the Postscript printers that replaced older technology of the period. I miss those days. We had great fun designing cutting edge products for a great company!
Frankly its amazing you could debug anything with those wire wrap back-planes.
The vt240 now that's a good terminal. I will hopefully have time in the next video to talk about the terminals more, as I only really got to mention them in passing in this video, but I try to keep these things to 20-30mins max.
What's ECL?
@@renakunisaki Emitter coupled logic. It's a type of computer circuit that supports the highest frequencies, and thus the highest throughput. It relies on small voltage swings. Minor circuit defects were very difficult to detect using the oscilloscopes and logic analyzers of that period . Each wire or run on the circuit board had to be specially terminated to avoid the signals reflecting back on themselves and causing feedback interference. All in all a very difficult system to diagnose and repair.
@@bobdinitto It is what the CRAY supercomputers used, because it WAS so damned fast when it worked.
Thanks for the great retrospective on the early days of DEC. My dad worked there for most of his career and I owe my own career in software as a result to DEC. DIGITAL maybe gone but not forgotten. Looking forward to the Alpha video at some point. Thanks again.
I owe so much to DEC for my understanding of computer technology. In the mid-60s, I somehow got myself on the DEC mail list to receive books like their processor handbooks. I studied these cover to cover, and I was in 6th grade at the time. When I worked at UCC in the early-70s, we used PDP-8 machines as the backbone of a world-wide network to remotely access our mainframes. A PDP-9, and later a PDP-10 provided terminal access called "FAS-BAC". It allowed running programs on the PDP-10 or on the many IBM 360 and UNIVAC 1108 mainframes. It also gave us email to others in the company and to our customers. I was also able to enter programs from the light panel, a technique I was able apply to the mainframes. In my computer science classes, learning machine code programming, the PDP-11 machine code was like a wet-dream compared to the 360 or 1108 machine codes. Thank you DEC.
At Univ. of New Orleans, we had an X-ray crystallography servo-table driven by PDP-8s. We had a PDP-10 using the KA-10 series. I was a student operator of it. Later the university upgraded that to a KI-10, and finally a KL-10. That was a bloody fast, powerful system. I had a PDP-11/15 in my chemistry lab. Finished my dissertation research doing real-time data gathering with it. Spent the next 12 years after my doctorate working as a device-driver writer for PDP-11s. My employer, TANO, sold a lot of PDP-11/40s and later, 11/44s, for oil-and-gas pipeline control systems that monitored sensors in the pipeline to track what was flowing through it. That machine was a true delight to program in MAC assembler, though we also had a decent FORTRAN compiler. The thing we really liked about the 11/44 was that it had floating point ability built in to the CPU chip rather than available through an external card, and that its memory management abilities included the ability to handle up to either 2 MB or 4 MB, I forget which. In the 1970s, either one was a LOT of memory. I loved those machines until VAXen came onto the scene. The 11/44 was a good replacement for the 11/70. We never ran UNIX on any of the 11s, though. We used RSX-11M most often, but the business office had a RSTS-E-9.
Worked for DEC from 87-94, one of the most memorable jobs I've ever had and some of the smartest interesting people I've ever worked with. The whole company was like a family. Working for DEC was like a college education. Really sad to see the way it ended up.
Reading posts from lots of forma DEC staff most of them chime with what you have written. It really is a shame DEC is nolonger with us. The other thing I noted was everyone seemed to remember their badge number.
@@RetroBytesUK LOL, yes all of us fondly remember our badge numbers, the lower the number the earlier you started working there, but until THIS week, our badge numbers were also our DCU member numbers!
@@FrankenLab What a week for me to pick for this then. I love the badge number system, I also really liked that if you left DEC and came back you kept your badge number.
@@RetroBytesUK Remember my badge number? It's the combination to my safe!
Nice companies just like nice guys finish last.
I first used a PDP11/45 in 1988. The login command is 'hello'. These things were payroll and accounting machines back in the shop is working. I was a Vax guy managing the three 11/750 Vaxes and 8 more remote Vaxes. 2400 modems back then works just as well for console mode tty. I missed those days..
For the RSX operating system the “HEL” task was used as “HELlo” for logging in, but if you weren’t sure, it could also be used to obtain “HELp” before logging in.
My God, that is more VAXen than the CMU Physics Department had when I was going there.
I worked for DEC just before the compaq buyout. I find I keep referring to the culture they had created there - even now. So one of the stories was about the deskpads - this was back in the day when you had a big deskpad on your desk. One of the people were mentioning when they started at DEC, they got to their desk, here was a new deskpad - turn over one flap and it described how to introduce yourself over the phone etc. The other flap just had one message - "Everybody makes mistakes". I have never really worked anywhere else where almost everyone left their ego at the door - it was all about the learning and the outcomes.
Same here, loved every second there.
I loved being a DEC engineer from 1983 to 1988 - Fabulous server and well loved by customers, reliable too.
Thanks for the enjoyable trip down memory lane. Started on PDP-11 and went to DEC JIT plant in Galway IRE in the early 1990s to benchmark a Vax9000. Great memories, great people, great times. The company I work for today still uses VMS and good to see VSI have it running on x86 architecture. Did many a VAX to AXP to IA64 migrations. Looking forward to your next video.
VMS was a great operating system. It was the impetus for Windows NT as some of the early VMS developers went on to work for Microsoft on that project. I notice an especially amazing similarity between the VMS file system and NTFS. I was on the Lotus 123v3 development team which targeted OS/x, Windows 95/NT, VAX/VMS, and about 10 different flavors of Unix and Zenix. VMS was by far the easiest to port. Everything just worked!
VMS is still the best general purpose operating system ever written.
I worked with it for years.
Data general was for most of its existence selling corporate mainframes - whereas DEC grew large by selling to departments and small businesses. DG may have made more money until the Mainframe business wilted away, but it was far less influential in the development of the modern industry than DEC.
Nicely done. As a new hire at a relatively new company (Atari in 1976) I was to put together the second computer system they had at that facility, a second (third?) hand PDP 11/20 which had 20K of core memory, two 8" floppy disk drives and a paper tape reader/punch. The other computer they had was a PDP 11/05 which I believe had 16K of semiconductor memory and also two 8" floppy disk drives and a paper tape reader/punch. A couple years later we picked up a used 11/03. All running RT-11. They were used as our only machines until we bought the first of many VAX in 1981. Look forward to your video about the VAX.
I imagine working at Atari in that period must have been fascinating.
Amazing how much we got done with so little memory back then!
@@RetroBytesUK Indeed. A wild E coupon ride using old Disneyland parlance. I rode it for 27 years.
@@bobdinitto Yep. Even many of the early games we made (I always worked in the arcade division) worked with ~4k of memory (ROM/EPROM). I personally was never able to get one of my games to fit in just 2k but I tried.
I knew quite a bit about Data General from reading Soul of A New Machine. Given DEC was framed as the underdog's competition in that book, I allowed myself to believe it was just that.
Glad you covered the ways Ken made DEC unique. Showed me I was wrong. Glad I now know and why.
I was fascinated by The Soul of a New Machine. It really captured the intensity of working on a high-pressure high tech project. The fact that you become obsessed with this thing you're building. The long days and nights of working tirelessly with no time off for months. Sleeping on the office floor or on the desk. Living on Chinese food and pizza. Seeing the design in everything you look at on those long drives home: The leaves on a tree. The clouds in the sky. A rock. The fact that some of the best products are developed by the smallest teams that can move quickly, while some of the larger teams can get sidetracked with feature creep and engineering conflicts that can cause delays. I had never observed the trials and tribulations of my professional life described so accurately as in that book.
On a side note the manager who hired me at DEC, Richard Glantz, used to call Data General "Data Generous" because of their penchant for luring away DEC talent with offers of cash.
I had a Nova about 30 years ago, but it was dead when I received it. It was sold to me for the two relay racks, but I had to take the dead computer. Unfortunately, the equipment was lost in a rented warehouse.
@@bobdinitto I worked to bring the Microdyne RCB2000 to market. It was the first Software Defined dual Telemetry receiver on the market. It was VXI based, and all boards built in house. We had two prototypes in Engineering that were being used to finish writing the firmware. I had the task of cleaning everything up enough to produce shippable product. That included test fixtures, test procedures and an upgrade to our entire assembly/reflow board making process. A lot of long hours, and dealing with many departments to make production and test as painless as possible.
Soul of a New Machine was quite incorrect in one important way: Those portrayed as nasty people were in fact nice folks, easy to work with; and vice-versa (in particular, there was little love for the 'leader' Tom West).
@@cheponis Often these types of "true stories" use "poetic license" to bend the truth for dramatic effect, and perhaps embellish the contributions of the author.
It was indeed an exciting time to be a computer nerd. Minicomputer companies were run by engineers, not MBAs. Sales pitches stressed obscure technical features such as a process exchange time that was a few nanoseconds quicker than the competition, or loadable microcode.
For younger folks curious about that period, I'd recommend reading "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. Mr. Kidder was a journalist, not a computer geek, so his explanations are accessible to any reader. I especially related to his chapter on microcoders. I've never written microcode myself, but as a CPU technician I had to learn how to read it and single-step it. It's a whole 'nother world in there.
In 1978 at 17 years old I programmed a PDP11 to manage band candy sales. My math teacher took the programs to a junior college each night. I was hooked and 44 years later I'm still in the game. Thanks DEC and Mr. Hermann!
Fellow nerd from Oregon, USA here. I love your videos! A great balance of informative and sometimes hilarious snark! Thanks again for a wonderful peek into DEC.
I was an electronic engineer at DEC in Reading UK in the late 80s, early 90's. It was a fabulous company to work for and I loved every minute of my time there.
Very nostalgic for me. I was a user of a DEC PDP 11/70 in the 70's at a manufacturing plant, that was later replaced by a VAX/VMS cluster. DCL was a very powerful tool.
As an engineering student at the University of Hawaii in early 70's my class using the PDP 10 at MIT that was running a math analysis application remotely through what was then the Arpanet. It worked out quite well cause of the 6-hour time difference.
DEC was an outlier in what we would now call Stakeholder Capitalism. Companies need to build products for a profit, but also need to consider their Internal and External Stakeholders. Long after DEC set the example, its has taken almost 30 years to see other companies adopting similar stances. And I would argue, none have reached the scale that DEC had in its heyday.
I learned my first programming in high school. We had terminals (DECwriters) that connected via an acoustic coupler to a PDP-11 in an administration building a couple towns over. The OS was RSTS/e and the language was APL. Once home computers and modems became a thing, we'd log in at night and run chat programs we wrote. It was an early taste of what became the internet. Communicating with people in real time, live, no matter how far away. Eventually, schools went to Apple computers and the need for a network of terminals went away. I was offered the PDP-11 for free. I went to look at it and with the hard drives, it was the size of a refrigerator. I declined.
Part of me would really like an original PDP-11, the other part of me knows its completely impractical and would have declined too.
My story is almost exactly like yours. I first learned about computers at 14 in private school on a PDP11/34, also running RSTS-E. I was so enthused, the system manager took me under his wing and showed me how to mount drives and administer user accounts. I later found a PDP8 with 2K of ram, and it still sits in my parents basement. It's quite dead (capacitors blew and destroyed the power supply and logic boards), But I still look at it from time to time to flip the front switches and think of my first DEC experiences.
They were a great machine. We had one of these at my high school and I was one of the lucky kids who got to look after it. I could flick those switches to 173101 octal and reboot it faster than you would believe. 😀
That's such a beautiful computer (replica). I'd love to get my hands on one of those, proper switches are just so satisfying.
It is a great kit. I picked one up last year and it was a fun build and interesting to play with. You might want to check out the IMSAI 8080 replica which uses an ESP32, it has some really neat features.
Mine is currently waiting in an airport in Australia, really looking forwards to getting it.
Its made by a guy Oscar in the netherlands he fanatically had the switches remanufactured in the right colors and shapes in the 2/3rds OEM sizes. He takes orders every month and a month later he ships out the kits, about $300 but you have to add your own raspberry Pi, fear not - for $40 Pi Zero v2 (with power supply & sd card) makes a great processor, its about 6x faster than the original PDP-11/70.
Awesome video, this first computer we used at school was a terminal connected to the Hatfield Poly PDP11. Every program was paper tape or punch card. We then got a BBC and a couple of RML380Zs. Good times back in the late 70s and early 80s. :)
These are really upscale CRT terminals. We had a DECwriter in our lab.Obviously, this sucked a lot when trying to use the thing for games.
In collage I worked on PDP-8 (Straight) serial number 7 and several PDP-8L's and a PDP-12. After collage want on to work on a Decsystem 10. I still have my DECstation Installation Kit screwdriver. It says "PDP8 more than 40,00 installed worldwide". It was a great era in computing!
Worked as Field Service Engineer from 1980 to 1994. DEC was known as the best company to work for in the USA. I first learned PDP-11 architecture in the Navy. Cecil Field used about 15 PDP 11/45's to run 3 S3 A Viking Anti submarine Warfare flight simulators. After that, straight into a job with DEC. I became the VAX specialist, then onto Alpha. Two of the best jobs I can imagine. Back then there was at least one company that actually cared about its employees. And its customers, almost to a fault. Sadly, I don't think any company like it exists today. Thanks for the video!
I worked for DEC in the early 80's. One of the best tech jobs I ever had!
Great video, brought back many memories of various pdp11s. In those days quite a lot of programming was in assembler and the '11 had a very elegant and orthogonal instruction set which was very rasy to learn and use. So much better than what intel foisted on the world with the 8086
that exactly is the reason why Motorola 68k family was way better than x86, as they were allegedly inspired by PDP-11
I loved the PDP-11. It was so well designed. The instruction set was simple and elegant. The unibus was revolutionary. As for the 68K vs 808x it was a no brainer: Motorola was a much more well designed and easier to use device. The fact that it had straight forward memory addressing as opposed to Intel's segmented memory architecture which has always been a major pain in the ass made it a clear winner in both circuit design and programming.
@@bobdinitto With one unfortunate downside: Segmented memory would prove to be a precursor to paged memory, which proved vital for virtual memory management and multitasking. The 68451 was an inadequate MMU, and meant systems had to either work around the broken system, such as MacOS's cooperative multitasking, or roll their own MMU.
By the time Motorola fixed the problem, it was too late. IBM inadvertently put their stamp on an easily cloned desktop computer, and stumbled their way into setting the de facto standard architecture.
Probably the best 10 years of my career. I started in 1981 as a Sr Cost Accountant in the Springfield Ma plant where tape and disk drives are manufactured. Helped start up the Greenville SC PWB plant before returning to Springfield where I was promoted to Cost Accounting Mgr. Finished my career as a sales rep in Knoxville, TN. Unique company, unique products, unique culture.
Talk to any ex-dec employee including myself and they will all say Ken was a wonderful person. There are many stories about his kindness and care for his employees. From the time I started in 1976 and left in 93, he refused to lay anyone off even though the company had grown to over 100,000 employees. He was so humble it is true tat he drove around in a Ford Maverick and he wore those elbow patches on his suit sleeves. No alcohol at the company picnic either. Just a fantastic place to work. We had everything at our facility, company nurse, full cafeteria, credit union and rep's for insurance. So, you could do banking and all your insurance needs right there in the plant.
I will also remember the fleet of helicopters they had that flew employees all over Mass. It as just a wonderful atmosphere to work in and much of that had to do with Ken himself. Then of course he was not the media or wall street darling as the 90's rolled in and he was forced out. That is the day, as they say, the music died for me and a whole host of employees as a new era was ushered in being led by Bob, the Butcher, Palmer who sliced and diced the entire company, selling off almost all the divisions.
Those that do not know DEC don't realize they made every part of the computer system. Terminals, printers, storage options like hard drives and tape backup as well as creating their own chips and boards. I could go on and on but I will never forget in 1976 when I started I was amazed that I could actually send "mail" via a terminal to any other DEC employee no matter if they were located in the US or in Europe. This was light years before "email". DEC was doing this 30 years before on their internal networks. Still have some stuff from my days there and this brings back a lot of memories.
I worked for DEC in Galway and Clonmel from 1972 to 1991. Best company ever!! I mentioned a "DECMail" message from 1990 to a colleague a few weeks ago and she said "but, there was no internet in 1990". So I said, that we had our own intranet and email system. She had never heard of DEC and was flabbergasted. People don't realise how much of what we have today was due to the innovation of a single company. Great company and great times.
Anyone who's programmed in PDP-11 assembler knows just what an elegant instruction set it had. It was a joy to program. Nova and HP-1000 were like wind up toys in comparison to the 11.
Wow! Everyone has a story! Here's mine; When I left the Army in '82 I hired on with TRT Telecommunications in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. We had a very cool large computer room and at the center was the Telex Exchange. It was an Eltex II from Fredrick Electronics and was powered by two PDP-11/70's. With all the blinky lights and big redundant mag tapes going it was like working on the bridge of some 60's era scifi starship. It's all gone now, but what fun it was! That era came and went so fast. Thanks for posting this vid, it brought back many fine memories.
I was an EE/CS student from '78 at UNSW in Australia. We had an 11/70 running the CS department with UNIX (it was very early days and UNSW was a UNIX pioneer).
It was such a lovely machine but hopelessly overloaded.
I was so familiar with all aspects of that PDP-11.
Once it failed and the whole department was at a standstill. We were waiting for the DEC engineer to show up and fix it and I decided to do something about this...
The machine was made entirely from discrete logic and we had all the schematics - so I set about analysing what was wrong by first loading code through the frontpanel switches and localising the fault (DEC diagnostics were not really that helpful).
After that, it was the CRO and logic probe.
Within a few hours I had tracked the problem to a faulty XOR gate in the CPU. These were available in the school store and I managed to convince everyone that I knew what I was doing - so I set to work with the soldering iron to replace it. The machine was up and going again long before the DEC engineer appeared.
The PDP/11 was such a nice piece of hardware - with a straightforward design that an undergrad could understand.
Looking back, I am still amazed that I convinced the academics to let me fiddle about on their precious machine.
I suspect that these days, they wouldn't even be able to overcome the "work safety" dramas associated with pushing out the CPU sub-cabinet...
Seeing all this DEC love makes me really happy. My mom worked for the company throughout most of my childhood, and when DEC was bought out, it was like there was a death in the family.
Brilliant video! Thanks for the history lesson. DEC's PDP machines feature heavily in MIT's 1950-60s computing/AI lab story, "Hackers".
Fascinating! I had no idea DEC was so ahead of the curve socially - Now I want to build a PiDP11!
You're right about Core memory retaining data. I have a prototype DG Nova with core. A project we did was to try and read-back the contents. Took a few months of research and when it was dumped, it had part of a Fortran Linker still in it. Read date was early Sept 2020. Much as we can tell, last time the DG was run was 1978. Love my pdp11's. So your video warms my heart greatly. I have a pidp8 and 70 also. One day I'll get sufficient tu-its and build them.
Having your own Novan, now that ls a cool machine to have. I love that it held its memeory contents for so long.
Al, I have a similar story. At my first coop job in college I was assigned the task of bringing this old DG Nova II back to life (it was sitting in a corner of a huge high-bay having been retired years prior). Not only did this model have core memory, it had a very tiny optional circuit board installed on the back of the front panel. I dig around in the documents and learned it was the auto-restart option. So I tested it one day. I started to compile a program, and walked around behind the rack and pulled the plug on the whole thing. After lunch, I plugged it back in. It sprang back to life and completed the compilation no problem. To be clear, this option was not like something you’d see today that would quickly save RAM before the power dies. IIRC, it primarily did bookkeeping things like commanding the disk drives to halt. Maybe it saved a few CPU registers? I don’t remember anymore.
Wonderful video! I started working in my university as administrator for a VAX 11-750 in 1986 and there were one PDP-11 but I didn't use. We planned to buy a VAX-9000 but thankfully workstations were beginning and migrate to DEC Ultrix on high resolution screens and then to Linux on PCs... really a wonderful time... connecting the VAX to worldwide DECNET OSI network... then the Ultrix machines to Internet (at 2400 bps... quite a high speed for a whole university! hehe) the first BBS (bulletin board systems) the Usenet News, Gopher and finally WWW! I thank God for being in the right place at the right time... what a wonderful times we lived! Looking forward to see the VAX and Alpha videos! keep on rocking!
I used to have a PDP 11/23 with 2 RL drives in my room in a half height rack. I lived on the 3rd floor with no elevator, and on top of this I had to haul the thing home by tram, it was quite an operation all in all, but it worked flawlessly one put back together. I had to clean it up as it had been outside a computer labs loading dock for a week or two and got rained on.
Great video , I had the pleasure of working with DEC for 14 years .. covered all the early consoles , PDP8's PDP11's, VAX.. this brought it all back for me .. Sigh
We love good guy Ken Olsen :')
As a engineer in a highly competitive and stressful market, I think I could get along with ken, much like my first boss in my current career, always seems cheerful and encourages growth within his team ... but no slouch either constantly driving innovation (he worked at DEC as well)
When I was in the Navy, we had a PDP-1170 that was used for message processing. It ran RSX11. Loved the blinking lights. It was lots of fun to work with.
As a kid, when I used to wander round HMS Invincible (those were the days)
I found their, well, I don't think it was a mainframe. More like a minicomputer made from tank armour.
It looked like the WOPR from WarGames
It had a punch card reader they actually used.
RSX 11M kernel was written by Dave Cutler who wrote half of VMS KERNEL, went to Microsoft and wrote Windows NT kernel
@@gregn5389 I loved working with the mainframes. I got to the point that I could just watch the lights and activity and could actually tell what it was doing. I miss those days.
I learned system programming on a PDP-1140 & PDP-1170 @ University of Maryland College Park in the late 70's. I STILL have my PDP11 Processor Handbook & Periphal Handbook. It starreted me on a 40+ year as an embedded systems programmer. A GREAT machine!
I got a job offer from DEC in Vermont in 1979 (with three increasing salary offers, no less), and like an idiot turned them down to work at a very unsatisfying electronics company that I didn't stay with for long. Even though DEC died before I would have retired, I still very much regret missing out on the (presumed) fun of working for them. It was a PDP-8/I that I learned programming on, in college. This video has inspired me to buy a PiDP-11 kit to use as a front end for my home security system, ensuring that the system will be completely opaque to anyone other than me. 🙂
I'm glad you liked the kit. I can see how you might regret missing out on DEC. Sadly for me when I was starting my career VAX was well and truly on its way out, but I did get to use Alpha and Alpha was great.
I worked in the early 80's on a Schlumberger well logging truck. It had 2 militarized PDP-11s with mag tape for bulk storage. A thermal teletype was used for the console - all keyboard activity was logged with timestamps and the scroll was preserved with the records for the job. We beat the daylights out of those computers in the field, but they did the job and just kept working.
memories ...
Worked at DEC between 1969 and 1960, which I consider the golden era. You have done a good job given the time and I think fairly accurate. I hope you mention the visionary at DEC Gordon Bell in your next video. There is a book I can recommend "DEC is Dead long live DEC". It Should be required reading in Business Schools on the etablishment and impact of company culture.
Gordon Bell was the driving force behind all of early DEC engineering however sadly I never got to meet him. I would love to see a video about him.
@@bobdinitto Also, Bell co-authored Computer Engineering - A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design. It's excellent for understanding the engineering side history.
Hi. I as an West German engineer got trained in Kiew in 1982 as service man for the CM4.. It was a very huge deal around a steel production in Kursk. The automation was done via Swedish ASEA, whom I worked for. The knew that DEC had sold their plans plus old manifacturing machines to the only industrial computer manufacturer of the UDSSR. While our 6 weeks training we meet al the leading staff of that company... They even showed us their work in progress ( the VAX)... All that cloning has been, to my best knowledge, made with/by DEC themselves, just in the times before the embargo.... These guys trained us to repair the computers on TTL-chip level, using a single counter that toggled the micro-code puls. Very nice competed people witch struggled with their low quality produced hw. (f.x. I never before saw corroded "golden" wrap pins)
Since these experiences in younger times I don't trust our daily press blabla anymore..
I was smacked with nostalgia when you showed the pdp-8, with its autumnal color theme. Flip, step, flip step, on and on to program the loader for the paper tape reader. The orange three ring binders with documentation in the one shot also brought back memories. I wish you would have shown the wire wrap rat’s nest inside the drive units. My experience with pdps was in industrial control systems. They were everywhere, once upon a time.
I totally agree. There was something really satisfying in toggling in the boot-strap loader so that you could load the paper tape.
My first experience of programming was on a PDP 11/23 (I think. It was 40-odd years ago) using machine code which was input one word at a time direct into memory through the toggle switches on the front panel, and then saved to a punched paper tape. Oh the fun you had when the centre of the paper tape fell out and the whole reel unravelled around your feet . I also remember using magnetic core memory which was loaded from paper tape and then held the programme almost indefinitely. One lesser known characteristic of magnetic core is that it was resistant to electro magnetic pulses so was used in a number of military applications. I later worked on the DEC VAX 780 series of computers which had the luxury of a multi-user operating system, multiple processors, magnetic tape drives and 14 inch 20 surface multi-platter removable hard disk packs... all programmed in languages like Fortran. Such fun 😁
Drove by a DCU branch for years, and never realized the word "Digital" in their name was in reference to DEC, and not "e-banking". Thanks for the tidbit.
3:45 Avoiding the word “computer” was for the sake of their customers, who were mainly engineers. If an engineer at some company wanted to buy something called a “computer”, they would have nosey accountants and managers immediately wondering why they weren’t buying from the top computer company, namely IBM.
“Why aren’t we buying from the best?! Don’t we want the best!?”
“No, no, you see, the functionality is the same or better, we don’t need to pay for all the service and support contracts…”
“You’re talking nonsense, IBM is the best for a reason!”
Ad infinitum :)
No wonder there were so many IBM resellers of last-gen product, getting by on IBM’s name recognition rather than trying to compete in that slanted field.
Same reason that Hewlett-Packard sold devices like the HP85 through their calculator division and didn't put the word "computer" anywhere on the machine. The one I have still has all the original documents and the purchase order clearly identifies is as a "HP model 85 programmable calculator" - it's just a calculator with a QUERTY keyboard and a built-in CRT that you program in BASIC, and absolutely not a computer at all.
@@TrimeshSZ funny you say that, as there are still debates among people who collect desktop calculators and adding machines, whether or not to include the HP-85.
@@kaitlyn__L Well, to be honest I personally do consider the HP85 to be a desktop computer irrespective of it's market positioning. IMO, the HP9830A comes down on the "calculator" side of the line (even if not by much) and the HP85 crosses over into computer territory.
@@TrimeshSZ I must admit that's how I view the HP85 too.
I remember the PDP11 as the system that controlled the auction clocks at the largest flower auction in the world in the Netherlands in the 80's.
Aalsmeer. Fascinating place.
I think those PDP-11s at the flower auction were upgraded with binary-compatible Ospreys.
@@andrewscarr8943 I only remember they had a custom drawer for connectivity with the buyers on the auction floor
I remember the supremely satisfying sound the VT100 terminal Return key made when you hit it, when I was at University. Thanks for putting this video together.
I was too busy listening to the music to notice what you did wrong. Thank's for the link!🎧
Such good memories, first at university EE dept we used the PDP8 amongst others, then in my first company we bought truckloads of PDP11/34 for field data acquisition and VAXes in our data interpretation centers.
Had the opportunity to meet Ken when I was working at DEC in the late 80s as a lowly service tech.
Such a warm and wonderful person. He would deliberately avoid the sales and management folks and would seek out the engineers.
Lots of stories, including a few about the early days and avoiding the use of "Computer' at all costs!
The only DEC event I ever attended that was alcohol-free....
So does that mean that the sales and management folks would not consider Ken such a warm and wonderful person?
Between 7th and 8th grades in 1973, I took a summer school course in computers. It was given at Freeport HS in NY where we had a DEC PDP-8 that was setup as an EduComp EDU300 with a mark sense card reader with 40 column paper cards that you filled out with a #2 pencil. I could write programs at home and bring the cards in to class to run and then edit them. We had one shared DECWriter printer for output. They taught us assembler using a CARDIAC cardboard computer and then BASIC on the PDP-8.
The following year I took the same summer school class but now we had a DEC PDP-11/35 attached to a room full of ASR-33 teletypes with paper tape punch/ readers for saving programs. My favorite was Super Star Trek. We all would play after class. That classroom was loud!
I still have some of my old programs on decks of cards and rolls of paper tape.
My father worked at DEC from 1962 to 1996. He was a designer on the PDP-6 and the lead architect and designer of the PDP-10. Digital was certainly a major part of my childhood. I remember wandering around the old mill building in Maynard; I mostly recall that it was dusty.
I worked on the PDP-6 and PDP-10s with Alan Kotok. (We were actually roommates for several years.) I worked for DEC from 1964 to 1992. That series of 36-bit machines is still my favorite computer architecture.
I worked for DEC from 1977 to 2002 (took an early retirement package from HP) and remember Alan. I was in manufacturing engineering mostly for PDP-11s and VAXes. I worked in several locations around the 495 belt over the years. It was a great place to work.
Have fond memories of the PDP 8 and the PDP 11 in my student days. The 11 was a big improvement over the 8. The 11 had a great machine code system, the mov instruction simplified memory operations. I cannot remember the 8 instruction set but it was more clunky. The 11 I wrote code for had 4K of core memory so you did not have much memory for data. I think we had a 1 Mb disk which was a cassette. It was a great machine for its time. Thanks for the nostalgia!
Old Timer Here! The first ever "computer" I ever used was a DECwriter terminal. I worked for a backwater CitiBank subsidiary in Memphis in 1978 and when they installed the terminal, I was chosen to be the operator because I was the youngest and had used a pocket calculator before! The DECwriter was a dumb terminal consisting of a keyboard and a dot matrix pin-fed printer. We connected to the Citi mainframe in NY via a pair of 300 baud modems, each the size of a small chest freezer - lots of blinking lights. I remember it used an acoustic coupler, like a cradle for the phone receiver. My mom thought it was so cool that her son "worked with computers". Now, everyone has one in their pocket. Gosh, I'm old.
I worked with a Dec PDP-8 and PDP-11 in college, NC State around 1981-83. Our assignments were to use DEC assembly language to write low level routines for terminal/device handlers, etc. Our system had 8" floppies for data storage. I may still have the books on those systems but its long since been forgotten. A side note, we also had a Data General computer for Freshman Pascal and other classes. I worked at that data center. We then had DEC Vax systems at our hospital but I never worked directly with them.
Also great in gaming history, the PDP-1 had what is arguably one of the very first _video_ games, Spacewar. Also, Tetris was programmed on an Electronika 60, a Russian PDP-11 clone.
I must admit I did wrestle with should I go down the spacewars rabbit hole. I decided not in the end, I take it you spotted the footage of sapce wars in the video.
I knew one of the original authors of Spacewar (SRR) who actually got called as an expert witness in a court case between two of the major video game companies (each accusing the other of stealing their patented idea). Steve produced his original, dated, printout of Spacewar source, from before either company had a computer, proving there was "existing practice" (a legal patent term), thus invalidating both of their patent claims.
@@mikep3226 Nice! 🤣
Well, good presentation. I worked for DEC for many many years. Supported TOPS, VAX/VMS, ALPHA, System 5, OSF/1, OpenVMS, most programming languages, hardware support, engineering, networking, clusters, etc.
Ricky from IBM, Ret formerly of DEC
My Dad's old workplace (Prentice Computing Centre at Queensland University) had several DEC heavy iron mainframes - KL10s? - but I remember tucked around a corner was a PDP11 managing terminals spread across the uni and I think there was an 8 hiding behind a wall of racks. Thanks for bringing those memories back.
Thank you for this video. Yes, Ken Olsen was a decent man. In January 1979 I hired on as a Sr. Engineer. What a ride. Somewhere buried under antique radios in storage, is a PDP 8E. a KSR 33 tty, some RX02's and a VT100. I wonder if I will dig em out before I die.
I signed on in January 1979, too, as an LCG field engineer. They sent me to months and months of training in Bedford, Mass. I worked in the Washington, D.C. area in CC704.
@@SeaMower Over in Bedford? Did you ever make it to Corporate in Maynard? I lived on the Corner of Thompson and Walnut. I literally could spit off my front porch and hit the side of Mill Bldg. 5. Each day I battled traffic to my facility in Woburn. How do we DM?
When I went to junior college we had a lab with a PDP/11. I remember using the different terminals around campus and the times someone in the lab would shut down the computer without telling anyone. It was still cool to get to use a computer at the time and you had to sign up to be on a terminal in the lab and sign off for the next person to use it.
Ahh… The good old days. We were an OEM networking company in the late 70’s that standardized on the PDP 11/40 as network nodes.
Great company and great products
Man...I remember as a maintenance technician in the USAF working on PDP 11/23 PDP 11/44 and VAX 11/751...the bane of my existence was maintaining and aligning the tape drive, TU-78! As maint folk we would mostly enter small routines in PDP assembly...I wished I still had the little assembly card that was like a little cheatsheet. Pretty neat stuff!
I love the light hearted presentation you did, Thank you for posting.
My father worked for AT&T/Bell Network for many years - I remember him taking me to the central office in north Florida, and seeing PDP-11s there. The Bell System used them for recording and processing long distance billing. I remember the colored "piano switches" and flashing lights...
I was introduced to the DEC PDP 11 series in 1983 when I went to work for Rockwell International as a field service tech and installer of the Rockwell Galaxy ACD (Automatic Call Distributor) phone system used in large call centers. Continental Airlines bought the first one in '73 if I remember correctly and used it all the way to '96. Now those rows of equipment racks are replaced by one small tower or less with the advent of VOIP and powerful processors..
Thanks for the video, saw the dual-door floppy I was trying to remember for a comment on another video about the complete BYTE collection, sweet thanks. Also there is a cool video about the DEC engineer that went on to create Windows NT. Strange how Dec was at the center of a lot of things (incl. AtariST GEM desktop)
Anyone who has used these machines with the dual 5 1/4 inch floppy disks will remember their very characteristic noise caused by the stepper motors driving the heads with a "buzz buzz"
Awesome video! Been thinking of building one of those PiDPs for a while, looks like a relatively easy build so might pick one up! Thanks!
It's a great kit! Really the only slightly tricky bit is getting (and keeping) all the switches nicely aligned until they're soldered in.
I worked for DEC UK. In today's tech world we use a lot of things, products, concepts that DEC originated, co-originated with universities, commercialised, productised or in other ways enabled. I'm talking about various data storage technologies, storage virtualisation, networking, clustering, data centre virtualisation, RISC processors, multi-core processors, speech tech, multimedia tech, power control, operating systems - and many more things which DEC either originated, co-originated, enabled, advanced, commercialised or productised.
In the mid-late 1980s DEC was looking like it might even become top dog in the computer business, and working there you truly felt valued and looked after. But a series of missed boats and bad decisions meant that the company began to slide in the early 1990s. By the mid 1990s a lot of long term employees were in shock because DEC was disbanding complete departments at almost zero notice and the asset strippers were in selling off chunks of the corporation (networks dvision, storage devision etc) and DEC was behaving just like companies have to when they are under existential threat. There's a great lesson there for anyone today in a large corporate that is doing well and can cosset its employees.
Multi-core processors is an interesting one - the Multi-core Intel processor you may well be using right now, might owe its existence to DEC. The DEC Alpha processor had multicore processing in about 1994 or so. When they started asset stripping DEC, one of the things to get sold off was the semi-conductor division, which designed and fabricated Alpha processors. The buyer was Intel.
Another interesting thing to reflect on is the striking number of design similarities beteen DEC's VMS operating system and early versions of Microsoft's Windows NT.
Yes, DEC was an interesting company - a fairly short lifetime compared to - say IBM or HP - but it's contribution to modern information technology cannot be overstated.
This is an awesome video, I am looking forward to the vax and alpha videos. I used to have a pair of alpha servers first running nt3.51 nt for alpha, and later running lotus notes server on Linux. I loved the alpha boxes so much and I often wanted a pop-11 for at home but haven’t hot one yet
I was fortunate to work for DEC's competitor Data General from 1977 to 1983. I was trained on a PDP/11 in college and wanted a job at DEC and they gave me an offer, but it was in a region I didn't want so off to DG I went. Those were awesome times with explosive growth in minicomputer sales, but the PC was starting to infiltrate the workplace by the time I left that segment of the industry. Those companies were too in love with their "babies" and unwilling to accept the possibility a PC-grade machine could impact them in a measurable way. Obviously, they became the new dinosaurs; the same fate as many of the mainframe manufacturers they replaced a couple of decades earlier.
Thank you for the trip down memory lane.
I was introduced to computer science using a DEC PDP-8 while a senior at William Tennent Senior High School. I was fortunate to start then, because the next year, the high school replaced all their PDP-8s (they had 5 or 6) with TRS-80s -- which would not have been nearly as much fun.
From there, I continued using DEC equipment at Bucks County Community College where they had a DEC System 10 running TOPS-10 for a mainframe and the computer lab had a PDP-8 that we were allowed to play with. I actually held a core memory card in my hands. I think it was 1 KB and the PDP-8 could hold 4 of those cards for a whopping 4 KB max memory configuration (I think -- that was a long time ago).
Until I watched this video, I don't think I ever understood why the PDP-8 had a 12-bit word size, but now it makes sense knowing that the character encoding standard when it was designed was 6 bits.
At my university, we had a DEC System 20 running TOPS-20 and at my first job after graduation I used a VAX 11/780.
I really liked your video.
I spent 3 years at college using the PDP 8/e series of boxes and have many happy memories of talking and working with the DEC engineers.
The beliefs and standards at top level in the US came across the water and was instilled all the way through the teams - nothing was ever too much trouble for the engineers, software teams or even reception when the phone system got you lost. Amazing, even 40+ years later, I still remember them fondly.
Two things you did not cover - some of the DEC drives where encased in concrete to reduce vibration - try carrying them upstairs and fitting them in the racks - took three of us (engineer, tutor and student - self) to lift them!
The second is that the drives sometimes would not boot without a boot loader installed from paper tape. We needed to manually enter the initial loader using the switches to read the console tape that contained the 'high speed' optical tape driver, then read in the basic OS from optical tape that then allowed the disk to boot - time from start to finish was around 20 minutes...
When I finished my time in the USAF in 1973. I was rehired by Singer, but in R&D. They had DG Novas for graphics design of chips. I didn't get to programming right away, but they eventually purchased a Systron Donner chip test set, which used a PDP-11/05. That's the first mini I programmed, first in BASIC, then machine language, then assembly. Singer R&D was my "bootstrap". O was fortunate enough to land a job with Bell Labs in 1978 and was surrounded with PDP-11s running UNIX. I had programmed other micros and minis, but the PDP-11 had the most elegant instructions, with no need to use an accumulator to do operations. I learned C language and developed in that language for 25 years with a couple years programming in C++. I am still fond of the PDP-11 instruction set, which closely fits the higher level C language. x++ = y++ assembled into mov (Rj)++,(Rk)++. I programmed on VAX for awhile. The instruction set is a greatly expanded PDP-11.
My connection with DEC is on two fronts. In 1992, I was a cook at TGIFridays. My favorite customer was a DEC employee that looked like Chuck Norris. He tipped great.
The other connection was around the same time. I was connecting to BBS systems by modem. On one BBS, I found a dialing sequencer similar to the one in the movie War Games. One night of dialing, I found a modem connection to DEC. So, I logged in and started snooping. Fearing FBI agents would be knocking on my door any minute, I stayed on for a few minutes, then got off and stayed off for a week. In hind sight, I realize I had only connected to some primitive online store, but it was cool and scary to connect to another computer without them knowing who I was.
That PDP11 replica is outstanding!!!! Absolutely screams 1970s (and I love it!!!!)
And with that, I am now caught up and watched all your videos. Time for some more. ;)
I am working on one, it might take a little bit longer than normal as it involves building something a little bit more complex than the usual, and some other youtube people.
I learned most of my earliest programming on a PDP-8/E that my High School bought in (I think) 1971. I then went on to do A LOT of PDP-11 programming at the MIT Model RR Club (TMRC), where eventually there were 3 PDP-11s under the layout running programs that controlled various parts. They relied on the fact that they were core memory and didn't need to be reloaded each time the layout was powered on, they just came up running (well, usually). I now have a basement full of DEC computers (and a few non-DEC), but none of them are regularly working, I keep hoping to have the time and energy on getting them back. Two PDP-8s, several PDP-11s and myriad LSI-11s and MicroVAX machines, along with a huge set of spare parts.
I had a friend in high school whose dad was a lifelong DEC employee. He helped the engineers at GM try to develop the Wankel rotary engine and then went on to help NASA engineers at the Michoud plant. Of course I had no idea at the time how cool the stuff he was working on was so I missed a big opportunity to learn from him. He loved the company though and was crushed when it closed.
I worked at DEC in the 80's. I Still remember my employee badge number and I'm a member of DCU Credit Union.
I'm from the town where DEC was headquartered, grew up on the hill overlooking the mill to the south. If you look in old storerooms, you can find DEC machines lying around to this day. The engineering teacher at Maynard High School worked for DEC at one point, and related the origin of the sales tagline "The first computer small enough to be stolen"
In about 1968, the company I worked for at the time sent me on a one week PDP8 assembler programming course. I probably learnt more in that week than in the whole of my electronics degree course. Despite having had no previous knowledge about computers, I came home at the end of that week completely spellbound - everything was so clear. I understood not only the software, but also the hardware. So I decided to design and build my own! I didn't stick to the PDP8 design, but "improved" it (with hindsight, a big mistake because of the lack of software). For example, mine had 4 accumulators as compared to the one of the PDP8. It took me two years, working evenings and weekends. Sadly, it was out of date before it was finished, but there weren't many people around in the 60's with their own computer and I learnt a lot from the project.
That PiDP would look great near your front door at Christmas. DEC the halls and all that.
Great video! My first laptop was a Digital Hinote Vp475 back in the 90s.. nice and slim...It was way ahead of it's time!