Work at the Mill: The story of Digital Equipment Corporation
47 comments
·February 10, 2025ben7799
cbm-vic-20
If you're in New England, it's definitely worth a visit to the Rhode Island Computer Museum in Warwick, RI. They have a staggering amount of DEC stuff, including rare stuff like one of the nine remaining PDP-9 systems, a PDP-12, most models of the PDP-11 series, and a PDP "Straight" 8, the best looking computer ever made. And a bunch of later VAX machines, DECSystems, etc.
https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipme...
The Retro-Computing Society of RI, a few miles away in Providence, also has a bunch of DEC stuff, also including a PDP-12. These might be the closest working PDP-12s in existence.
ghaff
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.
lttlrck
The first time I saw the WWW was on an Apollo workstation running NCSA Mosaic.
This was at Portsmouth Uni in the UK. Those were all replaced with HP PA-RISC workstations after HP bought Apollo.
Apollo was founded in Chelmsford MA where I, coincidentally, bought my first house :-)
icedchai
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.)
2OEH8eoCRo0
Basically all my cool college professors worked at DEC. Their impact in the Greater Boston area is huge and lingers. Don't forget Wang!
acrophiliac
If you're interested in DEC history and haven't read "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder, you owe it to yourself to get a copy. A Pulitzer Prize winner and IMO one of the best tech books ever written. It is a captivating book that chronicles the creation of Data General's Eclipse MV/8000 computer from the engineers' point of view.
abraae
One insight from that great book I've always liked was when the CEO tells the team "no mode switch". His directive was about backwards compatibility with the old instruction set. With hindsight the team realise this was a useful constraint that led to a better product.
In my experience many junior developers love mode switches, because they aren't sufficiently scared of complexity. "Yeah, lets add a setting to turn on or off advanced mode. Then the power users and the noobs will all be happy!".
After some time in the trenches it becomes clear to most that mode switches lead to combinatorial complexity and should be avoided at all costs.
ghaff
A huge number of DEC kernel engineers also ended up working on the Linux kernel as Red Hat employees in Westford, MA.
I dotted lined into Tom West for a time at Data General and, later, had a >decade stint at Red Hat where I got hired on by a senior ex-DEC person.
partomniscient
Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution is also worth a read, particularly the early part of the book which covers in detail stuff like the guys at MIT writing and playing Spacewar! on the PDP-1 in 1961. They even built their own joysticks.
musicale
> DEC VT100 at the Living Computer Museum, image by Jason Scott
LCM RIP.
I wish I'd managed to visit it before it shut down.
neilv
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.
DrillShopper
I miss when hardware had designs this radical
null
KerrAvon
tbh if y'all sat in front of it I don't think you'd find it that compelling in reality
layer8
If you ignore the white portion, it almost looks like a laptop.
pryelluw
This is legit cool. Makes me want to fire up the 3d printer.
jamesy0ung
It's interesting how we've come full circle. Some of the engineers who worked at DEC later worked at PA Semi and Apple after the acquisition, helping develop Apple Silicon. DEC's Alpha workstations running Unix were among the most powerful systems of their time, and now, decades later, Apple Silicon has brought us back to high-performance RISC Unix workstations — just with a different flavor of ARM instead of Alpha.
jksmith
Great thread. Love DEC/VAX history. But as soon as I saw a pic of Robert Palmer with his hair product and 2k suits in 1990, I knew then end was near. I mean yeah Ellison at Oracle was similar at the time, but this was DEC!, not just a database engine.
I bought a rack-mount Alpha back in the early 90's running Symbolics on it. Probably all I need to say about that.
choult
Nice to see a mention of Reading UK in there - for those interested, DEC's first UK office was upstairs at what is now a Brewdog bar.
These days, I can frequently be found in said space on Wednesdays, practicing my improv skills.
shawn_w
My college was a DEC shop in Massachusetts, and I learned how to program in labs full of dumb X terminals with creative names connected to Alpha servers running Digital Unix. There were still a few Ultrix workstations around. Never used VMS aside from the class registration system; no VAX for us students.
Kind of miss those days.
cpr
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.
riedel
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)
itronitron
Interesting, the Mill has a number of various startups as tenants now. I think Monster used to have it's main office there.
brk
Yes it’s been a startup office space for the last quarter century. I did a few startups in various spaces there. And Monster was HQd there in their heyday as well. There were many artifacts of DEC still around the campus.
technothrasher
There was a brew pub in the building on the South side of the mill pond for a few years that I used to go to quite a bit, and when my son was a toddler and we were looking for a daycare place, there was one in the basement of one of the Mill buildings. But it felt weird and closed in so we opted for somewhere else. The closest I get these days is the Indian restaurant across the street.
pmcjones
I visited the Mill in the mid-1980s. There was still a smell of lanolin in the stairwells.
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.