My 25 Years at Digital Equipment Corporation (1966–1991)
I don't have many readers here, but some stories deserve to be written down anyway. I worked at Digital Equipment Corporation from 1966 to 1991 — a quarter century that took the company from a scrappy minicomputer maker in an old wool mill to the second-largest computer company on Earth, and then into the decline that eventually ended it. When I joined in 1966, DEC was already proving something IBM didn't want to hear: that smaller, cheaper machines you could actually sit down and work with beat room-sized mainframes fed by punch cards. The PDP-8 had just shown the world that a computer could fit on a workbench instead of behind glass walls. That was the spirit I walked into — engineers who cared more about getting the machine right than about the quarterly numbers. The 1970s were, in hindsight, the best years. The PDP-11 reshaped software (Unix and C were both born on one), and then Gordon Bell's team built the VAX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O89XmbCkeQ4&list=LL...