Thank you so much for your write up. It brought up both good and bad memories. I have not read your other articles yet, but perhaps you could consider two things:
1) Writing an article strictly about the good things about working at Digital. And/or
2) Move your postscript to an Introduction at the beginning of your articles.
Very well written! I read the full piece out loud to my wife and kids, in a raspy Bogart voice. They grasped not half of the jokes (well, the wife did) but they loved every bit of it. https://slimerancher2.io
Sounds similar, albeit different scale, to some of my experiences at Xerox (PARC/ASD) and at Apple (1982-1996). In terms of the 'crazy all-hands meeting with CEO' scene, I asked at an Apple all hands how '50% gross margin or bust' was going to work on commodity subsets of our sales portfolio, like RAM or laser toner cartridges. I was told I just didn't understand accounting. It was, apparently, rude to point out that 50% of zero is zero.
Although on paper it would seem counterintuitive for there to be competing divisions, wasn't corporate espionage a real thing back then?
With Moore's law and all, the technology was moving so fast back then, could a company like DEC afford to just drop multiple projects when new technology comes along? It seems like DEC's downfall was more about bad timing than anything else. I guess they should have cancelled Aquarius as well, but at that point it would be like going back to square one, wouldn't it?
And some of us were working to architect the memory subsystem of the other victim of that war, Crystal. As I recall, a 16 way fully interleaved, 32 way pseudo interleaved design that could deliver data to the micro at cache level speeds. Screaming performance. But it wasn’t the water-cooled beast that Ken saw as the best choice.
A decision that resulted in the system architect, Dave Cutler, leaving for Microsoft to lead the development effort for Windows NT. If only...........
Thank you so much for your write up. It brought up both good and bad memories. I have not read your other articles yet, but perhaps you could consider two things:
1) Writing an article strictly about the good things about working at Digital. And/or
2) Move your postscript to an Introduction at the beginning of your articles.
Blessings.
multi bilion silos competing inside company.. happened later, in Motorola. See this https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/September-2014/What-Happened-to-Motorola/
Very well written! I read the full piece out loud to my wife and kids, in a raspy Bogart voice. They grasped not half of the jokes (well, the wife did) but they loved every bit of it. https://slimerancher2.io
Sounds similar, albeit different scale, to some of my experiences at Xerox (PARC/ASD) and at Apple (1982-1996). In terms of the 'crazy all-hands meeting with CEO' scene, I asked at an Apple all hands how '50% gross margin or bust' was going to work on commodity subsets of our sales portfolio, like RAM or laser toner cartridges. I was told I just didn't understand accounting. It was, apparently, rude to point out that 50% of zero is zero.
Although on paper it would seem counterintuitive for there to be competing divisions, wasn't corporate espionage a real thing back then?
With Moore's law and all, the technology was moving so fast back then, could a company like DEC afford to just drop multiple projects when new technology comes along? It seems like DEC's downfall was more about bad timing than anything else. I guess they should have cancelled Aquarius as well, but at that point it would be like going back to square one, wouldn't it?
And some of us were working to architect the memory subsystem of the other victim of that war, Crystal. As I recall, a 16 way fully interleaved, 32 way pseudo interleaved design that could deliver data to the micro at cache level speeds. Screaming performance. But it wasn’t the water-cooled beast that Ken saw as the best choice.
A decision that resulted in the system architect, Dave Cutler, leaving for Microsoft to lead the development effort for Windows NT. If only...........