Comment by GeorgeTirebiter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GeorgeTirebiter | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

GeorgeTirebiter

I worked as an intern at DEC for two summers. During the 2nd summer between Jr and Sr year, my roommate and I got a small apartment in Marlboro within walking distance of our jobs. That summer, I wrote the spooler for the KL-10 (not yet released), and my roommate write the microcode for the KL-10. I am still in touch with him, he is still awesome like that. Anyway, I got intrigued by a hush-hush project in Maynard where a guy had taken some pdp-8 boards and with a small monitor stuffed them into a salesman's suitcase. DEC did, in fact, have a Portable Computer. At this time, the 8008 had been released, and it was 'obvious' to me that microcomputers would 'take over'. This was 1975. I invited Ken Olsen over one Sunday afternoon to chat with us co-op students and a few employees, and he came over! He must have been there a couple of hours, chatting us all up. I told him that he should put the LSI-11 into a nice small box and sell it at a competitive price, to stop all these crappy chips like the 8080, 6502, etc from gaining traction. Ken didn't seem to understand why anybody would want to have his own computer. Frustrated by not communicating the urgency properly, back in the pdp-10 group, I sent a note to Gordon Bell that DEC should forget about these crappy little 8- and 16-bit chips, and should put a pdp-10 onto a board -- and that could command a larger price, and could establish the pdp-10's instruction set as a standard. Gordon wrote back to me with a short phrase written at the top of my memo: "Do it!" Now of course I was going back to school in September, and could not do it. I have wondered whether I should have just chucked school, and stayed at DEC to "do it". If so, the trajectory of the Computing Industry may well have been substantially altered. I guess this sort of thing is called "Life". Sigh.

Fascinating story. But I doubt anyone could have made a KL-10 on a board in 1975. A TTL implementation would have been difficult to squeeze into a small space, and a VLSI implementation was at least a decade away.

In fact there was a short-lived project called Minnow which was supposed to put a KL-10 on a desk, but it was overtaken by VAX - much like the Jupiter super-KL-10 project, which never got past the design notes and emulation stage.

LSI-11s did end up in small boxes, so that wasn't the problem.

The problem was that Olsen didn't have a vision for commodity personal computing. And to be fair not many people did in the 70s.

He seems to have been a very 1950s corporate kind of manager, and couldn't imagine computing outside of technical and corporate settings. DEC's culture was geared to selling to corporates and academia and trying to compete with IBM, not with smaller startups. So when DEC did eventually try to make hardware that could compete with PCs they tried to sell it to their usual customers instead of finding new markets. And that... didn't work.

Apple meanwhile had worked out that you needed a national dealer network with stores and hands-on demos all over the country. And plenty of approachable PR and ad spend. That was really what made Apple stand out from the competition, and that kind of marketing, to users who didn't work in big offices, factories, and research labs, and didn't have degrees, was unimaginable at DEC.

I'm fascinated by DEC as a company. There was some incredible world-leading engineering and a progressive culture, but the vision seems to have got stuck on a peg in the 70s, kept it together in the 80s because VAX was already in place, but couldn't deal realistically with the 90s.

Gordon Bell has said that Olsen never quite understood what VLSI implied culturally and socially - never mind technically and financially.

There's an apocryphal story about someone handing Olsen one of the pre-Alpha VAX-on-a-chip designs and he has a very polite mini-meltdown when he realises that it literally outperforms the top water-cooled mainframe ECL VAX hardware - for just a few hundred dollars, instead of a couple of million.

> There's an apocryphal story about someone handing Olsen one of the pre-Alpha VAX-on-a-chip designs and he has a very polite mini-meltdown when he realises that it literally outperforms the top water-cooled mainframe ECL VAX hardware - for just a few hundred dollars, instead of a couple of million.

There is a fair bit of history [1] written by the author of the SIMH emulator, Bob Supnik. The page on NVAX basically confirms your story.

[1] http://simh.trailing-edge.com/dsarchive.html

the Jupiter super-KL-10 project, which never got past the design notes and emulation stage.

The scuttlebutt in the Boston area at the time was that DEC was frantically trying to debug one or more ECL prototypes, engineers working in 3 shifts, 24 hours a day. Further, that the head designer was poached from the IBM mainframe world, and did not understand what made a PDP-10 fast.

In particular, unlike the KL-10 which had a 72 bit wide FPU, its was 36 bits wide, which after the lateness was the final straw for its viability in the marketplace. And people marveled that DEC was willing to throw away a $100 million a year business, $275 million today, supposedly a lot of dedicated PDP-10 and Decsystem-20 shops declined to move to the Vax, which they could predict would be a bad long term move.

All this is at the Nth hand rumor level, but from some people who were very interested in the architecture's fate, some with purchasing influence if not capability. It sounds like you have some better sources. The Olsen never groked VLSI tidbit is fascinating, and I suppose credible.

The KC-10, which you were referring to, had one (long) shift of very dedicated engineers, and the lead engineer came from ITEL which made IBM compatible mainframes. He had (an easy to understand) fundamental misunderstanding about PDP-10 architecture which impacted functionality, not performance, as the KC-10 was going to be the fastest machine DEC ever made. He caught mono, and found his misunderstanding while stuck at home with the hardware manuals.

The thing that actually killed the KC-10 (and the KS-10 desktop successor) was the VAX, which Gordon Bell went all in on.

As far as pdp-10 on a board, I knew the LSI-11 was an 8-bit microcoded processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MCP-1600 In fact, the "EIS/FIS" instruction set option was just another ROM available as an optional chip. And, given that my roommate was doing the KL-10 microcode, I had some idea how you could trade microcode space for actual hardware execution units. So, yes, my original idea was to use the LSI-11 (Western Digital) base chips with different / more microcode. Yes, it would have been slow. But it would have been a pdp-10. Years later, Gordon Bell told me that somebody had built a pdp-10 on a board. I think it may have been an internal project (not the KS10), a hack like the 'pdp-8 in a suitcase' that I saw in Maynard. I need to ask him.

I, too, have difficulty understanding the killing of the pdp-10 line; what often goes unnoticed is the very high level of capability in Marlboro (vs e.g. Maynard). When I started as a co-op student, I wanted to work in Maynard with the pdp-11 folks, which I thought was the cat's meow. But wiser folks told me, "Hey, you should consider yourself special, as they are putting you in the pdp-10 group!" And of course they were right. So when DEC canceled the '20, they also -- effectively -- broke up the best / brightest concentration of computer geeks in the whole company. It's difficult to appreciate the pride the pdp-10 group took in their machines - after all, they were the machines for AI research and were the first machines on the ARPAnet. And, as anybody alive today knows, 32 bits isn't quite enough, but 36? nee 72? Ahhh... ;-)

Ken was a very bright engineer. He used his engineering skills to 'engineer' DEC, I think. I asked him if he thought DEC was competing with IBM, he said "No, we serve different markets." I wish I remembered more about that conversation that day. DEC was only 18 years old at the time.

I've always wondered what the computing landscape would be like if DEC hadn't been so desperately afraid of undercutting their mini/mainframe business, and unwilling to serve the small business and/or home markets.

All of their early micros were hobbled in some way to make them not-quite-compatible; the Rainbow, despite running MS-DOS, was not IBM PC compatible, and the Professional series had incompatibilities with standard PDP-11 systems. The Rainbow didn't even include a FORMAT command for formatting floppy disks; you were expected to buy preformatted ones from DEC, and using standard 5.25" floppies with hub rings was a good way to kill your floppy drive due to the RX50's mechanical design.

Probably the best shot at a home PDP-11 came via Heathkit with the H11 and H11A machines, but that was a small niche.

Even when they finally admitted to themselves that micros were the way of the future, they concentrated on the enterprise market, to the exclusion of all else. Back when the Alpha was the performance king, I would have loved to be able to have one, but the cost was well out of reach of mere mortals.

In my experience, the main reason these companies fail and especially why acquisitions don’t turn out well is the assumption that the way you do business and the people you have are just successful in their own right and will just take in the new sheep and keep fleecing the larger flock. It doesn’t work like that.

They eventually sold the Multia [1] which wasn't all that expensive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Multia

>All of their early micros were hobbled in some way to make them not-quite-compatible

All the minicomputer makers suffered from this to greater or lesser degrees. I think their micros were so compatible with the IBM PC relative to the completely vertical silos that their minis lived in--own chips, own systems, own disks, own apps, etc.--that they just couldn't see that mostly-compatible == incompatible. Furthermore, as another comment noted, they were reluctant to even sell in computer stores much less something radical like mail order.

Thank you for sharing such an interesting tale. Life is one of those journeys where you're presented forks in the road that you can only see a little way down and you need to choose just one, always to wonder what the other fork held.

You’re killing it in an alternate Universe.

Thanks. That made me smile. Maybe so!

Thanks for sharing.

Life is full of these should-I-take-this-train moment.

Thank you for sharing your story! It is really interesting to hear these kind of anecdotes. Who knows what kind of ripple effect would have happened had you stayed at DEC, but that thinking goes both ways. There is a relevant xkdc comic regarding how there is always going to be “what if” moments in your life.

This is what makes HN HN, thanks for sharing.

What a great story.

Gordon did half the job. Told you to "do it", but didn't ensure that you had the ability to do so.

What a pity.

Incredible story! The DEC Alpha that eventually emerged was ultimately responsible for Linux universality in the mid-1990s. As Linux was originally written to take advantage of 68k based home PCs like the Atari and Amiga. DEC basically gifted one to the Helsinki CS dept in hopes they would port a free unix to it. The environment back then for workstations was wonderfully heterogeneous: HP Apollo, SGI, Sun, DEC and even the NeXT Color Cube all tried to differentiate and dominate. But were all subsumed by commodity x86 Linux on PCI architecture and the explosion of web servers running apache ;)

Linux: A Portable Operating System

https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/index_files/linus.pdf

Linus’s thesis contradicts this.

The original Linux was not only extremely PC-centric, it wallowed in features available on PC's and was totally unconcerned with most portability issues other than at a user level. The original Intel 80386 architecture that Linux was written for is perhaps the example of current CISC design, and has high-level support for features other current CPU's would not even dream about implementing (see for example [CG87]). Linux did not even try to avoid using the x86 features available to those early versions — quite the opposite. Linux started out as a project to find out exactly what you could do with the CPU, and as such it used just about every feature of the CPU you could find ranging from using segments for inter-process protection to hardware assisted process switching.

However, the initial unportable approach was a case of an unportable implementation rather than an inherently unportable design. The goal of being compatible with other UNIX's resulted in a system that had portable interfaces despite the implementation details. That portable design essentially made Linux itself reasonably portable.

The first Linux that was based on a architecture different from the Intel 80386 was the port of Linux to the Motorola 680x0 family that actually got started rather early in the development of Linux. However, the original Linux/68k project was not really concerned with portability, but rather with making Linux run on 68k-based Amiga and Atari computers.

...

While the Linux/68k project was in itself a huge step forward, the real portability work began when the author was offered an Alpha system by Digital in the hope of making Linux work on the new Alpha architecture. Very early it became clear that in order to be able to maintain both the stable Intel-based platform and support a new and in some respects radically different platform the kernel really needed some major re-engineering to make it fundamentally more portable. The issues and the end result is what is described in this paper.

Looks like I got my timeline somewhat backwards! Initial Linux build was the 32-bit x386 version, though 68k amiga portability also started rather early. Ultimately resulting in a variant for the 64-bit dec alpha, after receiving an AlphaStation 500. My recollection of the AlphaStation circa 2000: it was indeed a powerhouse for CAD type apps, though Silicon Graphics would come to dominate in arenas like Hollywood. Thanks for clarifying ;)

Being very pedantic, Linux was very much built for 386 architecture. The 68K had a number of features missing that Linux originally leveraged from the x86 world. Atari and amiga were not initial targets for the runtime.

The very first port of Linux To a different architecture was 68k, but it was really rough. Linus did then do the port over to the dec alpha as well as fix the aspects that were overly wedded to i386.

I would also argue that to a very large degree Linux’s success was driven by the rising of x86 is the dominant compute platform for server architectures. It’s universality was very much a second order effect, and the paying off of technical debt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com