On Saturday afternoon, my wife and I went to a memorial service for her longtime friend’s dad. He died in May after a brief illness. My wife and her friend go back over forty years, to the early 1980s. None of us can believe that so much time has passed. That decade seems like yesterday, but in reality that was a lifetime ago!
The service was held at a country club in western Connecticut. It was a very nice place and the bar staff were friendly. Wine and beer were free, but they charged for my G&Ts and my wife’s cosmos. The bar bill was quite reasonable, but of late our alcohol consumption is not what it was just a few years ago. Perhaps we are returning to a pre-pandemic baseline.
Getting back to the 1980s, in a bored moment today I stumbled across a video on YouTube from 1982 about the creation of the Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) Professional 325 and Professional 350 personal computers. The company was in a rush to get them out in time for a big computer show in Houston that June.
What really got me was how dated everyone in the video looked. You see all the guys wearing shirts and ties, something you never see today, and definitely not something you would see at a tech company today.
In terms of the depiction day-to-day life at the office, not much is different from today. The meetings, the long hours, the stress—so little has changed. But you did not see people at each other’s throats. I suspect that is because they had the leadership and personnel needed to get the job done. Nobody was asked to do the work of three people. And, everyone was good at their job and not expected to go outside of their area of expertise.
And that scene with the phone call—made on rotary dial telephone, no less!—was brilliant. Imagine solving a critical problem today with a quick five-minute phone call and not this endless back-and-forth email/text BS.
Note also how everyone was actually engaged in doing things directly related to the project, not just sitting in hours of meetings talking about what needed to be done. They actually worked on getting the product out. If a discussion was needed, it happened on the factory floor and was over in five minutes.
Did this all work out for Digital? No. Sixteen years after this video was released, the company was acquired by Compaq. Coincidentally, Compaq was founded in Houston in 1982, the same time that show happened.
The Professional line of computers was set up to fail. Technologically, they were wonderful and really better than any other computer on the market. But, the business guys at DEC thought these computers would cannibalize sales of high-margin minicomputers. Thus, the Professional line was way overpriced compared to IBM PCs, and none of the popular software was ported to it. DEC’s other lines of PCs, the DECMate II and Rainbow 100, did not fare any better.
Fun fact: the printers you see twenty-five minutes into the video was the same kind I had in high school and college. I owned a Rainbow 100 and it got me through high school and college. Overall, my Rainbow was a really good machine.
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