DEC: Personal Challenge, 25th Anniversary Video
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 พ.ย. 2009
- [Recorded: 1982]
This corporate documentary produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) chronicles DECs two year odyssey to bring three personal computers, the Professional 325 (PRO-325), the Professional 350 (PRO-350), and the Rainbow 100 to market a year after IBM launched their personal computer. DEC's strategy was driven by the fear was that if they did not immediately create a successful product that the Japanese who were already producing low cost IBM PC compatibles would capture the market.
The narrative follows the challenges of the CT Program Group - Avram Miller (project manager), Michael Weinstein (merchandising), Ron Ham (software), Art Williams (hardware), and Vah Erdekian (manufacturing), as they race to develop a personal computer to show at the June 1982 National Computer Conference in Houston, Texas.
This film traces the project from its conception through the design and manufacturing process and documents the intellectual and engineering challenges inherent in creating a new technology product. Gordon Bell sums up this challenge when he says, What we are trying to do with computers is to make a machine that is in fact so good that it can be an intellectual companion with humans. DEC's goal was to build from scratch a personal computer business that would create over 120,000 personal computer small systems the first year of production, and that by 1985 would be worth $3.5 billion.
Digital Equipment Corporation was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson. The video briefly traces Digitals technological history beginning with their first computer the PDP-1; the PDP-6, a timesharing computer created by four engineers including Gordon Bell; the PDP-8, the worlds first minicomputer through the PDP-11 a series of 16-bit minicomputers that sold from 1970 until the 1990s. The documentary describes Digital as the 2nd largest computer company with 68,000 employees, working in 39 countries across five continents. Digital was the leader of mini-computers controlling 38% of the market.
Catalog Number: 102695345
Lot Number: X5489.2010 - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
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The VAXmate came up in some comments as something of a failure, but it was the best computer experience I had at the time. Why? Mine had no hard disk, but enough memory to create a RAM drive.
No disk meant total silence, I mean a tablet/smartphone silence, quieter than a modern laptop, so I could work late at night and not disturb the family.
I would boot it from floppies and connect to work (I was allowed to take one home!) with a modem and get into a OpenVMS cluster and get the work done. Work then meant reading NOTES conferences, and some MAIL.
Best of all, Turbo C and Turbo Pascal were already available on the VAXmate and ran perfectly and, what appeared to me then, with zero second delay, because no I/O was involved. For small development projects and playing around in C or Pascal, it was a dream come true.
“I don’t understand why anyone would place the power switch on the back.”
1. It’s cheaper
2. It’s safer. Are you going to run mains voltages through a cable that terminates to a switch on the front?
3. Or, are you going to add the expense of a low voltage relay?
4. Or are you going to add a plastic connector bar that’s tied to to the switch on the front and pushes a power switch on the back?
5. Do you want the power switch on the front because your PC crashes a so much it’s easier reset?
6. Why do you want your computer to be off so much?
7. I think this says a lot about digital. These guys designed without careful regard to cost! If you ever have seen famous dec equipment, it’s brilliant. Good or bad, this one statement provides a lot of insight about DEC.
Also, note, I was paraphrasing!
Awesome! Thanks for the memories. Those were the good times. RIP DEC!
The Rainbow was an 8088 and a Z80 and could run CP/M-80 or MS-DOS. The DECmate II was a 6120/PDP-8 on a chip that ran its own software that goes back for several decades in the beginning, etc. Option boards allowed CPM/80 with a Z80 only OR another board with both the Z80 and an 8086 which was faster than the Rainbow's 8088. Thus, with a loaded machine it could more than triple boot.
Rest in peace, Charles Lasner.
Love that ending scene of the Mill parking lot at twilight. Such an enduring image.
My Dad worked for Digital. I want to say from 1980 until late 90s until they were bought by Compaq. I forgot his role, I think he was systems or software engineer. As for location, he worked at the San Diego, CA office in Kearny Mesa on Kearny Villa Road. I born in '83 so I was still a kid and have limited memory of those days. I remember going to work with him sometimes on the weekends. That office campus was pretty big at the time. I think they occupied 3 buildings on the lot. I remember him bringing home weird random hardware; servers, laptops, desktops. I think they were either dev kits or some kind of beta testing. I remember the company being very generous on his tenure and great perks. Company gifts, vacation trips, car discounts from local dealership.
I was lucky enough to have worked for DEC and this was in Scotland and it was like working with a family of friends. Great culture too.
I am technician since 60's I work with PDP8 e, good times. Here in Brazil I have in my Museum, 2 pieces..
I was with Dave Cutlers group in Washington as one of the MicroVAX 1 hardware engineers. Right around when the Rainbow came out Bill Johnson came out to explain the rational of making the Dec's PC incompatible with the IBM PC. He said they wanted to limit volume to existing customers and thought it more as part of the terminal market. He admitted that they were worried about PCs but DECs business was based on high margin hardware. He said they could not grow the company to compete on such a low margin product. Competing in the PC market would really hurt their hardware margin. So one of the teams was so discouraged after that meeting that he ran off to help start Iris Associates (Lotus notes). The rest of us stuck with DEC for awhile until they killed off are RISC processors and the Mica OS, so the core of that group ran off to start Windows NT.
24:10 YES that is an actual dial phone.
I love the scenes with Gordon Bell. I worked with him decades later and he never changed. So enthusiastic! So much energy! He just physically rocks and sways with that energy.
Such a good job capturing the culture of DEC at the time. Amazing, brings back memories!
Thanks for posting this. We really had a good Time with DIGITAL.
Best quality, Reliable (note the capital letter) software.
RSTS/E and VMS were the best operating systems.
ComputerHistory, This video rocks.
That was a neat documentary. Thanks for posting.
Any way you cut it, DEC missed out on the biggest opportunity of the century by not introducing the world's first home microcomputer themselves. DEC was ideally positioned to invent the personal computer in the early 1970s, before the Altair 8800 took the world by storm. If DEC couldn't have beaten the Altair in 1975, DEC could certainly have introduced their own microcomputer before IBM launched the IBM PC in 1981.
DEC could have ported some PDP-11 software, such as RT-11 and UNIX, BASIC and C, and some games (like Star Trek and Advent) to their own microcomputer. Then they could have released a quality home PC to market with some great software ready to run on it from Day 1: a great Disc Operating System, languages, applications like word processing, and games. We might have been living in a whole new better world of personal computing right now, based on the PDP-11.
The focus should not have been on the DEC culture. The focus should have been on "what does the customer want?" The customers in the PC land wanted a fully DOS compatable PC. In the beginning days of DEC ,their product focus was clearly on the customer. The BIGGEST mistake of DEC was the dropping of the DECsystem 10/20 line of computers. Many fortune 500 companies got burned by that decision.
Customers sure as heck did not want to pay $5 each to use special floppy disks what where otherwise the same as far less expensive floppies.
Dropping of the PandaMate was a bigger mistake.
If the fortune 500 companies really cared they would be shoveling money into System Concepts.
The PDP-8 software involves several operating systems all by itself, including a very hot selling dedicated WP package. All operating systems could be accessed by Master Menu, an on-top utility system that could boot or do volume backup/restores to diskettes. It was not uncommon to have as many as 6 OSes on a loaded system with the color graphics board, external monitor, hard disk board and dual CPU addon board all at once.
I worked from 1981-1991 for DEC. I started in the Springfield plant, helped start up Greenville and came back to Springfield, finishing my career in Sales out of Knoxville, Tenn. I loved the company culture. It was such a dynamic environment. We were constantly encouraged to “make it happen” and we did. I had a VT100 on my desk most of that time but I had a Rainbow in my office in Greenville (and had no clue what to do with it).
They were Silicon Valley before Silicon Valley invented itself.
My dad worked for them too, also in sales. I think he started with them in 81-82 and stayed until the early 90s. We lived in Framingham, Atlanta, and Dallas.
We were a Dec shop and had a few of those PCs.
I played with the Rainbow a bit later.
Thanks for posting this.
What was interesting to me, was watching the body language (lots of arms folded in meetings), and noting that Ken Olsen's quote "we had an obligation" to do it, doesn't have the same passion as "we built computers we wanted to use ourselves" (attributable to Woz and others at Apple)
The focus on 'beating' the Japanese in the PC market, seemed to show a focus on the wrong competitors. How many of you use an MSX system today?
I appreciate what you are saying. Trying to discern how an advanced global company like DEC failed where Apple succeeded is interesting. My guess is Apple focused less on computers for scientists and engineers and more on everyday user applications- word processing, spreadsheets, etc. It is fascinating that Apple was started by people who could never afford products DEC made in the 70’s.
They say it was a 68000 based system with an NEC graphics chip and 256K of RAM, and it looked a lot like an Apollo workstation, so that's my guess ... they eventually got bought by HP, but they were never really a PC company. If so, then its interesting that the people the DEC engineers and program managers were most impressed by, made high end workstations for industrial desgin specialists .. people just like them, and the DEC PC reflected that.
A good way to put it. People who don't actually care about anything abound these days. DEC got a lot right. What they got wrong killed them. Some of it was the usual "not invented here" syndrome. They were farting around with RX50s while I was using 1.2 MB HD floppies on a SCSI interface to the PDP-8. RX50 can't format and is a mighty 400 KB on one side with the additional minor reliability problem of 10 sectors/track in SSDD.
As IBM discovered, there really wasn't a 'strategy' that could 'fix' the virus that was the commodity PC they unleashed. I'm thankful, because productive computers were otherwise incredibly expensive.
If IBM hadn't let Microsoft license it's OS, and hadn't used commodity parts, history would be very different. Microsoft is to blame as much as any company
RIP DEC
Those were the days. Wonder if the 68k box was a Fortune system.
One of the problems with the DEC Pro (which is the machine in the video) is was essentially a single board PDP-11 - which was awesome right? Except they deliberately broke it - so you couldn't run any PDP-11 software on this desktop PC. Probably because they were worried it could cut into mini computer sales. If it had been a micro PDP-11 - they could have had a major breakthrough. Instead it was a flop because no-one adopted it.
Never mind the fact that - even in the 80s the writing was on the wall that Microcomputers would replace mini's and mainframes.
To be fair, they did release the "Professional Tool Kit" which did allow you to drop to a true DCL RSX11M+ shell. Then you could recompile applications, and get stuff running like a real pdp11.
However it was a pain in the rear, and the Professional/380 never supported split I/D mode which crippled the max program size. I'm re-writing the overlays for Empire now to get it running in 2020....
@@czperiod2576 Oh very interesting stuff!
@@czperiod2576 I wrote most of the SDK (Tool Kit) documentation for the Pro 350 and 325. The RT-11 developers in the Pro group knew it was in big trouble the day the decision came down to put RSX-11M/Plus on it. They knew that forcing application developers to write ODL (do it yourself memory management) files would be a disaster. Most of them quit the group and went back upstairs to 5-5.
RT-11 was a single-user operating system, which was exactly what the Pro needed. The only downside of RT-11 was that it didn't have a directory structured file system. Instead of developing one, the effort went into coding P/OS, a decision that by itself demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the reason why people were buying personal computers: to run applications, not operating systems.
The people in the Pro group knew it was over when word came down that the Visicalc developers had given up on making it run on the Pro. Visicalc was the first spreadsheet and by itself might have made the Pro a success.
@@barryrogoff6764 Thanks for that remarkable insight. Do you think, as others say, full compatibility with the PDP-11 (depending how you define it) was broken on purpose ?
@@lawrenceshadai4966 If existing PDP-11 applications were ever tested on the Pro I never heard about it. The focus of the Toolkit developers was always on new applications that would unfortunately never exist. The Pro Group's managers didn't understand why consumers bought personal computers. Otherwise, they would have moved heaven and earth to get applications like Visicalc working.
The original MS Windows was NOT written for the PC, but actually for the Rainbow, yes, Windows 1.0, later revised for the PC.
And then of course there was the VAXmate. Can there be any other example of what to NOT pursue yet they did? And in the end the product was withdrawn because the hard disk burned up in the badly cooled plastic case. And this was the SAME EXACT DISK that was used several years ago successfully in the DM II, not better but there it didn't have a heat problem.
@pixelr0 Not sure, all I know is my PC bluescreens constantly.
In the part of the video at the 1982 National Computer Conference the two main project people were checking out the competition and at 32:01 the look at a computer. The conversation at 32:20 goes like this:
First guy "what do you think of those guys"
second guy "I think their the best, fortunately their small"
First guy "yeah"
Does anyone know what company they are talking about?
They were talking about Compaq....
In the end, didn't Dec put all their hope in the Alpha AXP CPU?
You're right -- they're all wrong, just a bunch of people who at a minimum weren't there (like you, I was, also), who probably aren't very bright, and who may well not have even been born when the events in question happened! They are looking at the past through very cracked lenses.
The floppies were fine, it was that the systems themselves were not IBM Compatible. And yes, the machines could run CP/M (including Concurrent CP/M) or DOS.
This is correct. And this is where Compaq, and other clone makers, won, eventually taking the market away from IBM. If DEC understood this, and made a fully IBM-compatible PC instead of ones with incompatible version of MS-DOS, that didn't run IBM applications, they might still be around today.
ALinearfailure is occured on Minute 26:53 one man of the team said there is a vertical withe line in the mnid of the screen. This failure is a Horizontal Deflection Problem - exact in the mid of the screen the Triangle Mode Amplifire that make the Ray running from the left to the right the speed of this am changed. So you can see this vertical line exat int he mid of the Screen. This is inacceptable. The solution is to compar the Center Triangleamplifire with a Comperator and lower the Brightness. Or you found out why the speed is exact in the mid a little bit to slow!? (Maybe a Transistor to Transistor overgiven Problem - one Transisitor of the Amp is still not open andthe other is not cloest at this moment).
+Volker King I think I understand what you're saying but, it may be a little late.
Non-standard implies there even was a standard. that's hindsight. Yes, it became a standard. DEC's RX50 sucked, but there were others making PC-like machines with HIGHER capacity disks at the time than IBM, such as Victor 9000, which almost beat IBM at the beginning.
Sorry, I'm not a native english speaker, can someone reupload this with some processing on the audio, so it has less hiss and less compreesed?
u won😄
I wonder what ever happened to this attitude towards programming, doubt these people would have ever tolerated the kind of sloppy bloat we deal with now.
Avram Miller. Whatever happened to him?
Just say`m Impressed ----Top+side to side. and elegant/like perfected almost
Avram, what is the link to your blog? I just traded in my Blackberry for a Motorola-Built Android Smartphone, so here we all are again, so many years later -- "It's the Apps, Stupid."
Look him up on Facebook, today is his birthday... I'm related to him through my grandfather somehow. He contacted me on ancestry a few years ago. Seems like a great, brilliant man.
Same track density as HD, but same writing speed as IBM 360K floppies. Sort of the worst-of-all-worlds, and you had to purchase pre-formatted diskettes [preferably from Maxell MD1DD-RX50]. Ironically, years later 22DISK and Teledisk came along from a third-party guy who knew a lot about RX50 that used the PC HD diskette drives to make proper RX50 format. On the DM III+ they USED TEAC HD drives and dumbed it down to 1/2 of an RX50!
[to be compatible, not better].
Amazing. DEC was too slow to respond to personal computers. Olsen believed that people will never put a computer in their homes. DEC gave us so much ground breaking technology but failed to foresee the PC revolution and when they did, they did it with unsuitable business model. And it was too late. Wish the company had been here. They were brilliant engineers but bad businessmen.
Just to be clear. Olsen's quote was always misinterpreted. It was said long before personal computers and he was talking about mini computers and home automation controlled by minicomputers.
Olsen was all about protecting his margins and his product line. It resulted in some absolutely inane system decisions (the pdp11/60 was incredible but crippled with 18 bit only mode because it would undercut 11/70's and Vaxes) and ultimately doomed the company.
Which is weird since DEC prospered by exploiting IBM's lack of a minicomputer. Funny they made exactly the same mistake.
Wish I could take my i5 8 gig 500 gb laptop back in time and break all there minds lol....
Dec really missed the personal computer market in the late 1970's with the PDT11/150. This was a pdp11/03, 64k memory, two floppy disks, and 4 serial ports all in a self contained desktop office unit. It was (and is) a true personal computer.
I believe the first version of Multiplan (the first spreadsheet) ran on it.
However DEC realized it could cut into sales of existing pdp11 minicomputers and thus sold it as a "terminal server". By protecting their high margin items they eventually doomed the company.
Now... Well I have a 380 and a pdt11. Every once in awhile I'll drag it out of the closet, fire it up, and think of what could have been.....
What is a 380?
@@ShazzPotz Dec Professional/380 system. It was a true desktop with multitasking, multi-user OS, memory protection, nice graphics, and such back in 1982 or so when your choice was CPM or a 64k IBM PC. Dec took one look at it, realized it would undercut sales of the VAX, then turned it into a gosh darn terminal for the 8700/8800 systems.
Not the last time they did this, when they realized that the CVAX chip which cost like $20 to make could outperform their 3 year million dollar+ Vax 8900 they promptly crippled CVAX which made the developers leave and build Windows NT.....Oh well.
@@czperiod2576
Thanks for telling me what a 380 is. I own a PDP-11/03 from the late 1970s, with 2 x 8-inch floppy drives, running RT-11. The whole thing is mounted in a cabinet on caster wheels about the size of a dishwasher, It is the computer from my university that I first learned about CPUs, assembly language programming, operating systems, mass storage, etc. Years later when they were totally obsolete, my university wanted to get rid of them, and I bought one plus a VT100, cheap for nostalgia. Now it just sits in the basement gathering dust.
@@ShazzPotz Neat! I think I have the same system, does it have a really nice wood top with pdp11V03 on it or something?
To be honest it probably works, and there are forums of people who will help you with it. Glad that you saved it from being crunched!
I was given a castoff dec rainbow when I first started out as an engineer at tymnet in the late 80's, it didn't run msdos so I never had much use for it. Much later I worked for DEC in Colorado Springs before it was sold to Compaq, yeah I missed the glory years, but what a ride if you got in at the right time. LOL!! all the people are white in the video, those were the glory days!
It certainly should have run MS-DOS, just not a DOS compatible with PC-DOS. Every clone back then, other than Compaq, ran incompatible versions of "MS-DOS": applications for IBM's PC-DOS didn't run on these other hardware platforms. I guess the idea was custom BASIC programs would still run the same, and really big name software providers could port to each computer separately. But The Rainbow did have it's version of Microsoft's OS. You're memory is failing you, ol' white guy!
@1:20 - "The Japanese will walk away with it". Well, close.....China did.
Does anyone know why DEC never became REALLY successful in PCs? They NEVER got anywhere close to 38% market share. How high % did they get?
Actually I looked into is some more and I see how this went terribly, terribly wrong: Their DEC Rainbow was INCOMPATIBLE in just about every way. 400K floppies (!), BIOS, normal PC disks would not work. Worthless invention. NOT a PC compatible, it was DEC compatible (=non-compatible).
As a world-class expert on what really happened, I find it amusing all the opinions of people here just about all of whom are totally wrong.
Yes, weird discs and dual boot. I used one for a few years. Build quality + bundled software were superb. Floppy drives were utter rubbish. Crap idea, poorly executed.
Fantastic machine otherwise.
In 1963 DEC entered the mainframe market with their PDP-6, largely a failure. In 1968 the PDP-6 was improved and released as the PDP-10 mainframe, very popular among Fortune 500 companies. In 1979 they produced the their last model of PDP-10. In 1983 DEC completely abandoned their mainframe products, which caused a lot of damage to the Fortune 500 companies that depended on them. DEC deliberately went out of their way to hide what they did. When the VAX 9000 came out, DEC product literature proclaimed it was DEC's first mainframe. Who would buy a mainframe from a company if they knew they had sunk all of their mainframe customers in the past? To this day, small children who can't be bothered with reading history books think that DEC only produced minicomputers, not mainframes. DEC fooled you in order to cover up their ugly past.
but of course, that wouldn't matter when IBM's PC and clones, starting with Compaq, started dominating. The mainframe market was becoming unprofitable anyways. Also what "small children" are reading computer history books?!?!?! If college students are reading, they certainly know DEC for VAX, and PDP-11, which launched Unix. Nobody is trying to fool anyone about this, do you need to take your medication?
@@squirlmy WOW what great information. No one would have known that part of the story.
@@squirlmy Have you ever read either of these two? "Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC): A case study of indecision, innovation and company failure" Goodwin, D.T., 2016. (259 pages). --- "DEC: The mistakes that led to its downfall" by David T. Goodwin, Roger G. Johnson, Birkbeck College, University of London, 2017. (10 pages)
Clearly this is a room full of clueless men.
I have been in enough group projects in grad school with international students to have learned a thing or two on different methodologies on getting a job done.
The founder is right about one thing, "Pride", intolerable pride from the white male students in the group, insufferable, maddening pride, especially from the European males.
The Chinese put a lot of long hours into projects and they bring what I call the "good enough" mindset. They focus on practical goals and humble resources to get the job done. Good when all designs have been completed. Not so good in the creative phase.
East Asians, the Japanese and South Koreans. They have a nice combination of creativity, hard work ethics and practicality. But I have also seen this culture completely ruined whenever a single white male entered the group project. His tremendous ego and arrogance tends to take over the group and things fail. The most modest white male tends to morph into a demi god when surrounded by Asians. A strange dynamics.
Females, tend to too often give into the males, again especially when a white male exerts himself. Good ideas are never brought up. Too often females follow along with incredibly bad ideas. Too often she focuses on maintaining relationships above other goals.
Leadership is important and with engineers, they focus too much on perfection and creativity. Same applies with the artists or designers. With people in marketing or accounting in charge, they lose the creativity and quality, they focus too much on the budget and perception.
A good leader needs to be all three, a engineer, a accountant and a marketing person. Hence, almost impossible to find a good leader for a tech company. One can go through thousands of resumes on monster.com and not find one person with the right background, academically and experience wise.
Just try implementing the Japanese methodology in America. It will fail every time. We just don't have the values to make it work. We have incredible creativity and the gusto to try new ideas, but terrible at implementing it and it is getting worse. Our labor force is horrible.
i can't figure out if this is the wisest, or simply the most racist, comment I have ever read.
The United States creates. The industrial revolution, computers. We invent new processes.
We design.
The rest of the world follows. The Chinese attempt to copy and steal, that's just a fact.
I'm not butt hurt about it like you are, but that's just a fact.
I hold the highest regards for the United States being the world leaders in technology and innovation.
It was clearly the most racist comment.
I pointed that out but Tube deleted my comment. Nothing but woke jackasses that work there.