[HN Gopher] Work at the Mill Or, the Story of Digital Equipment ...
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Work at the Mill Or, the Story of Digital Equipment Corporation
Author : rbanffy
Score : 51 points
Date : 2025-02-10 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| cpr wrote:
| I _loved_ visiting the Mill back in the day when I was part of
| the crews buying DECSystem-20 's for Columbia University and
| later the Fairchild AI Lab.
|
| What a great place to work, and hanging out with the OS
| developers like Dan Murphy was just icing on the cake.
| bee_rider wrote:
| DEC is a cool name. _Digital Equipment_ , serious stuff. Sadly
| the era of three punchy letter names is over. What have we got
| now?
|
| "Apple" (random word, even worse, it is a type of plant or
| something), "Facebook" (like a type of yearbook?) "Google"
| (sounds like they make candy or something), or "Intel" (who
| knows? -tel is just what companies ended their names with in the
| 80's and 90's).
|
| DEC. What do they make? Equipment. What kind? Digital.
|
| IBM would be good if the middle word wasn't "business." Business?
| Eh. Lame. The business is an aside, it is here to justify the
| machines. E, because Equipment is solid and physical.
|
| ARM? Looks good at first. But then you find out... the A stands
| for Acorn. What the hell are we doing here, gardening? No.
| Terrible. We want D, for Digital, because we're in the figure,
| the era of ones and zeros, not acorns.
|
| AMD? Actually that name is OK as well.
| fragmede wrote:
| But who _doesn 't_ make digital equipment these days? Even
| tractors and other farming equipment is chock full of digital
| equipment. And what kind of device isn't or has some sort of
| advanced micro device in it? Those companies might as just well
| merge into one megacorp named Stuff, for all it really means,
| if we're going off of company names being useful.
|
| something something computer science; naming things.
| lsllc wrote:
| Although Acorn designed the ARM chip in 1983 as the Acorn RISC
| Machine, in 1990 it was changed to Advanced RISC Machine.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Name
| bee_rider wrote:
| Bah, they can change the official name, but we know the
| truth.
|
| Anyway, they don't sell machines. They sell designs.
| criddell wrote:
| Are you suggesting DRM would be a better name than ARM?
| rbanffy wrote:
| ART, for Advanced RISC Technology ;-)
|
| We all knew RISC technology was going to change everything.
| fredoralive wrote:
| Acorn took that acronym as well with an Acorn RISC
| Technologies division near the end: https://chrisacorns.com
| putinghistory.org.uk/docs/Acorn/ART/A...
| bregma wrote:
| Maybe DRE (Digital RISC Equipment)? Of course, if you're
| using the whole ARM a DRE might get uncomfortable.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Eh, they don't even sell machines anyway? They sell chip
| designs. Maybe they should be called something like "RISC
| Intellectual Property." Then they can start selling a
| flagship chip, call the One. The ad copy writes itself
| practically.
|
| Announce your presence: RIP One.
| wbl wrote:
| Chicago Bridge and Iron. It's not in Chicago, doesn't make
| bridges, and doesn't use iron.
| riedel wrote:
| Interesting read. Our lab was founded inside a campus engineering
| center of digital. So we still have some memorabilia (like a
| 'cyber cafe' sign from digital) lying around. Actually digital
| research in Germany was sold to SAP, which didn't have research
| at the time (SAP actually pretty much scrapped their research
| division pretty much about 10 year since they seemingly never
| grew really fond of it)
| pmcjones wrote:
| I visited the Mill in the mid-1980s. There was still a smell of
| lanolin in the stairwells.
| neilv wrote:
| The photo of the VT05 in the article doesn't do it justice:
|
| http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/vt05.html
|
| https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/File:DEC_VT05_1217...
|
| This was before my time, but I imagine that the looks said _the
| future is now, and you 're piloting a spaceship as you code_.
| pryelluw wrote:
| This is legit cool. Makes me want to fire up the 3d printer.
| layer8 wrote:
| If you ignore the white portion, it almost looks like a laptop.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| I miss when hardware had designs this radical
| itronitron wrote:
| Interesting, the Mill has a number of various startups as tenants
| now. I think Monster used to have it's main office there.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I'm in my late 40s and have been a software engineer in New
| England since graduating college. We moved to Massachusetts in
| 1986, my father went to work at a startup company that was across
| the street from a DEC building and was in the DEC ecosystem.
|
| The pervasiveness of DEC here is amazing even after all these
| years. My father in law also spent almost his entire career at
| DEC and retired as an HP employee. One of my mentors in my late
| 20s (older Gen X) started his career there. I've known many other
| people who worked at Digital.
|
| My only real exposure was being like 10-12 years old and getting
| trucked to the office during "crunch time" and I got to sit at
| the console on a VAX at one point and got to play early text
| based games on it. This was weirdly right in the machine room at
| the operating console as there was some rework project in the
| room that my father had to be present for. Later on at my first
| internship in the mid 1990s I had a QA job and I had to test
| software and I remember having to install on both Ultrix and DEC
| Unix and I got to use some of the Alpha machines.
|
| There are still all these buildings and artifacts all over the
| place from DEC all over MA. I bank with DCU. When I was in middle
| school my best friend and fellow computer nerd's father worked at
| another Massachusetts institution.. EMC.
|
| I never got pushed into software but it seemed to be pre-
| ordained... we always had computers and I was given free rein to
| play with them starting in the early-mid-80s but not really
| allowed to have video games and we always had business type
| machines and not the more fun consumer oriented stuff.
| icedchai wrote:
| DEC influence was definitely all over the north east! The first
| multi-user system I dialed into was a VAX/VMS box. I went to a
| college that had almost all DEC systems - mostly DECstations
| (MIPS) and Alphas. I later worked at software company full of
| tons of ex-Digital folk, running most of their software on
| Alphas running VMS and Tru64 (aka Digital Unix.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Beyond DEC, there were many minicomputer and related companies
| in Massachusetts in their heyday. They weren't all on Route 128
| (including DEC) but that was the shorthand.
|
| I VERY briefly worked for EMC after they acquired Data General
| which was a DEC spinoff.
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