That quote from Olsen was about mainframe computers. Do you have a room-sized computer in your home? No? Well, Olsen was correct, you see.
Ah, the good old days. My first job was being a gofer, printer monkey, tape-hanger, etc. at a local college’s computer center. They had a DECsystem 20. When I went away to college in 1984, our computer center was all VAX—at first an 11/785, 11/780, and 11/750, then they put in an 8650 and 8600 (I think) and ditched the 11/750. We had to do all our IBM work in batch, sent down a phone line to Virginia Tech and back again once an hour (as a student operator, I got to put the phone in the acoustic coupler and flip the switch!).
I always did think VMS was an excellent operating system from a user standpoint. I don’t know about the technical side of it, but I always liked using it.
}:-)4
Why would you need >512K RAM?
Say what you will about KO but he was worlds ahead of any of the new crop of bimbos we like to call CEOs. Like all company officials he made mistakes but he was right more than wrong. We wouldn’t be where we are today w/o the KOs of the world.
The thing that stopped me from buying DEC and going to SUN, SGI, Pyramid, and etc was the DEC sales force in the mid 1980s. Dealing with them was like pulling teeth to get technical questions answered. Their SEs were usually top notch, but my sales guy was a pain in the butt. If you were not a big customer, you got third rate service. I caught our sales guy, who had the appropriate first name of ‘Dick’, in a blatant, bald face lie. He response was, “Where else are you going to for a VAX?” Sadly my boss loved him as he got a steak dinner one or twice out of him.
Olson didn’t kill DEC, palmer did. everytime they made money, he’d whack them with more restructuring costs. he fired his best SW engineer, who went to microsoft and wrote WNT as a followup from VMS. when he decided to design WNT on the intel platform rather than the faster, cooler Alpha that DEC had, that was the death knell.
My town is the home of DEC, and the big mill is still there, I have been inside it many times. The clock tower is interesting in itself, and is the longest continually operating clock tower in New England with the original mechanism. They gave a tour of it last year, and the tin reflectors behind the clock faces have signatures all over them from famous people thoughout the years, Henry Ford, things like that.
When I was in the USN back in the mid-seventies, the Navy, Detroit Diesel Allison and Rolls Royce were doing research (ICEMS, Inflight Engine Condition Monitoring System) to see if they could install sensors on our A-7 Corsairs TF-41 engines that would measure turbine temperatures, rpm, vibration levels and so on, in an effort to determine by analysis if an engine was going to fail prematurely. I was chosen to take part as a jet mechanic, and it was my first introduction to a real mainframe computer, a PDP-11. Lots of blinken lights and address switches, but most surreal to me was the paper tape. I found it hilarious and fascinating at the same time. It seemed so primitive, yet simultaneously, so advanced.
And so it went...:)
Vertical isn’t what killed DEC. Olsen’s ego and autocratic direction of DEC killed it. DEC had great products up until the end of their VAX cycle, but they never evolved beyond the VAX. DEC completely missed the boat on PCs, and while DECnet was great in its day, DEC only reluctantly embraced TCP/IP, and when they did, they came out with over-priced and proprietary networking products, and Cisco kicked their ass.
DEC never developed a successor to the VAX, and Sun, SGI, and others kicked their ass. DEC devolved into a dinosaur in every way. The death blow was when DEC hired their legions of technically ignorant sales folks to harass their customers to buy obsolete products, using DEC’s proprietary “VUPS” performance measure for their failing VAX line, because the industry-standard MIPS showed just how pathetic the VAXen were when compared to the new minicomputers developed by SUN, SGI, and the rest.
DEC also completely refused to listen to their customers, presumably because Olsen didn’t want to hear what they had to say. All of their technologically-savy customers told them that RISC, TCP/IP networking, UNIX, and PCs were the technologies of the future and that the ship they were traveling on was soon going to be capsized by the tsunami of new technologies unless they got with the program. But all we heard back from DEC was the sound of chirping crickets.
It was a bit sad when DEC died, because they started out so great. But in the end, DEC died in the bed Olsen made for them, and they deserved it.