Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing

DEC was a big part of my life in the 90s.

My first internship was working on a SCADA system on Vaxstations running VMS. My mom had to help me learn FORTRAN for this. (we were all unix/c at school).

My first job was as a sysadmin starting in 93 for an academic stats dept that used DECstations and were getting their first DEC alphas running OSF/1. A lot of my job at first consisted of getting the open source applications they needed running in 64 bit mode (you would not believe how many int/pointer conversions I had to fix). I remember adding a memory kit to a 3000/500 in the first month of working there. That memory kit had a retail value higher than my annual salary at the time & it was terrifying.

My next job was as research staff at at a comp sci dept doing OS research. I wrote drivers for Myricom NICs for DEC OSF/1. (and had the funniest bug.. we had to use GCC to compile the drivers, and I missed the no-fp-reg directive, so every time the driver was active, it was using floating point registers as general registers and corrupting users fp state.. You'd see applications crashing left and right with FP exceptions).

A few years later, the same dept paid me full time to help port FreeBSD to the DEC alpha, and I maintained FreeBSD/alpha until alpha was walking dead, and we killed the FreeBSD/alpha port. I got one of the first API UP1000s (one of the 3rd party alphas that used the irongate chipset from AMD), and it was my workstation running FreeBSD/alpha for years.

Although the article mentions similarities between VMS and Windows NT, it downplays just how extensive a debt NT owed to VMS.

Microsoft's Azure CTO wrote about it back in the day:

>In developing NT, these designers rewrote VMS in C, cleaning up, tuning, tweaking, and adding some new functionality and capabilities as they went. This statement is in danger of trivializing their efforts; after all, the designers built a new API (i.e., Win32), a new file system (i.e., NTFS), and a new graphical interface subsystem and administrative environment while maintaining backward compatibility with DOS, OS/2, POSIX, and Win16. Nevertheless, the migration of VMS internals to NT was so thorough that within a few weeks of NT's release, Digital engineers noticed the striking similarities.

Those similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms.

... "Why the Fastest Chip Didn't Win" (Business Week, April 28, 1997) states that when Digital engineers noticed the similarities between VMS and NT, they brought their observations to senior management. Rather than suing, Digital cut a deal with Microsoft. In the summer of 1995, Digital announced Affinity for OpenVMS, a program that required Microsoft to help train Digital NT technicians, help promote NT and Open-VMS as two pieces of a three-tiered client/server networking solution, and promise to maintain NT support for the Alpha processor. Microsoft also paid Digital between 65 million and 100 million dollars.

https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...

It probably would have made the article too long to discuss the earlier 12-, 18-, and 36-bit systems, as well as the 16-bit PDP-11 and its outsize influence on later systems.

However, a key point also is lost: DEC's early dismissal of personal computers, only to have them catch up to and eat the entire minicomputer category. Their early micros were half-hearted; the Rainbow 100 ran MS-DOS but was not PC compatible, and even lacked a FORMAT command for formatting floppy disks (you were expected to only buy preformatted disks without hub rings because they damaged the RX50 drive mechanism). The Professional 300 series, based on PDP-11 architecture, was deliberately made not fully compatible to existing PDP-11 minicomputers (and also had that RX50 floppy drive). They were so worried about cannibalizing their own business that they forgot that they could get eaten by their new competitors instead.

Very nostalgic to see the recent DEC/digital talk on HN lately. My first job out of college I wrote C++ on OpenVMS (originally on Alpha).

I remember when we had to port to OpenVMS Itanium. Biggest pita was floating point conversion. Alpha used VAX float while Itanium used the IEEE standard.

I laughed the first time I saw the exit code "%SYSTEM-W-FISH, my hovercraft is full of eels".

I still to this day own a copy of "Writing real programs in DCL". Looks like a collectors item, hahaha!

I also somewhat miss the mainframe development. We had a fantastic (albeit homegrown) build system and architecture (thin client, thick server - all C++) that was hugely enabling. Was super slick and easy to build, you could easily create previews for product people to run and test. Really tight development loops... loved it.

Seeing David Cutler mentioned brought back memories: Back in the late 1980s I wrote a patent (now long expired) for DEC in which Cutler was one of two co-inventors: "Radix-16 divider using overlapped quotient bit selection and concurrent quotient rounding and correction." [0] I've always faintly regretted that I never got to interact directly with Cutler — although the lead inventor, Dr. Ted Kehl (RIP) [1], was great to work with.

[0] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

[1] https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/seattletimes/name/theod...

I found it strange not to mention Altavista. Granted, google ate AV's lunch when they emerged, but as someone who was on the web as it started hitting CS departments (even the one where the first web spider was created), AltaVista was the thing that made the idea of a "search engine" actually seem like it was going to be a thing.

Sure, sure, pagerank was a huge step up (at the time), and larry & sergey would likely have gone down pretty much that path no matter what. But before Google, there was Altavista: fast, feeling comprehensive and pointing the way into the future.

I remember my time using an Alpha AXP nearly 30 years ago being the fastest computer I've ever used - I imagine my current laptop is far superior in speed by orders of magnitude, but the applications hadn't caught up with the CPU available.

It was also probably the most reliable. We never switched off or even logged out of the machines for 6 months to a year at a time.

> Dan Dobberpuhl was one of the original Alpha designers before he left DEC to start a chip design firm called P.A. Semi, which Apple bought in 1998 for its talent to work on their Arm processors.

P.A. Semi didn't even exist in 1998. It was founded in 2003, and was acquired by Apple in 2008.

In the early 2000s, I had a gig at AccuWeather rewriting from the ground up a non-weather web application. My work was on Windows 2000. They bought me a new Dell server for that purpose had let me have at it. But at that time, all of their main machines were VAX VMS - including their weather web servers.

Even then it caused me to reminisce on time spent on DEC VT100 and VT220s in the graduate terminal room at CMU.

Anyone remember the DEC Rainbow? My local university where I took classes during high school had some. Great keyboards just like the VT terminals.

DEC keyboards where the benchmark against which I compared all other since - most came up wanting.

DEC made a big impact on me when I was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, and even through the mid 2000s; from learning C on eagle.wesleyan.edu (VAX/VMS) to writing my undergrad thesis C++ on zoltar.ucsc.edu (alpha running dec UNIX) to socrates.cgl.ucsf.edu (alpha cluster running TruCluster) and later geneland.gene.com (alpha cluster running trucluster). The DECs were uniformly excellent, with great CPU and memory performance, along with good compilers and OS (IMHO TruCluster is the last of the great UNICES). I never bought one myself, too expensive.

Since then I've gone back and learned a lot of history about DEC, specifically how the series of PDPs were made. They had a huge impact on scientific analysis, making high speed experimental data collection and complex realtime logic relatively easy to implement.

The early days of DirecTV were actually a partnership between Hughes Electronics, USSB, Thompson Consumer Electronics (RCA), and DIGITAL. Hughes provided the satellite tech and some FCC licenses, USSB some FCC licenses, Thompson built the set top boxes, and DIGITAL ran all of the technology. Until DirecTV started to in-source their own IT operations in the mid-2000s, all of the systems to run the business were in DIGITAL facilities (the same campus where StorageWorks R&D and early manufacturing was done) in Colorado Springs. To this day, all those Colorado Springs hosted systems running Billing, Account Management and CRM are in the dec.com domain.

HP-UX has replaced most of the OSF/1 stuff by the time I joined in 2011, but OpenVMS was just being upgraded from Alpha to Itanium boxes. I doubt it will survive to make the transition to x86, but it it still the backend for most billing and account management via STMS.

Some of the billing was migrated to AT&T systems, but we halted that project because it substantially increased customer churn just migrating them from STMS to Enabler and changing the bill format, even if amounts didn't change. I guess it reminded folks that AT&T was in charge now.

I was expecting a mention of how DEC Video Terminal hardware terminal inline escape sequences are still very relevant as a de facto terminal standard.

From programming a viterbi codec on a PDP 11 in assembly to writing mapping software in C on the 11/780 running VMS in the 80's, I've had a long exposure to DEC and it's products and it has always been a joy. I don't think there was another period in my entire career where I was more productive, learned so much, and had fun doing it. Even though I'd moved off DEC by that time, it was truly a sad day when DEC was bought by COMPAQ and was no more.

I've always had a soft spot for the VAX 11-780, I now have one running VAX/VMS in my phone, thanks to SimH.

It is not frequently that one gets really pleased with a computing device so when it happens the memory lingers for a looong time. So it happened with the DEC Alpha. I vaguely recall that its overall desktop experience was less polished than the SUN workstations of that era, but its raw performance made up for it as it woud allow you to accomplish things previously beyond reach.

A similarly memorably experience would be quite elusive these days. For one thing the very concept of a powerful workstation is kinda old fashioned. But who knows, maybe the era of an "AI PC" will recreate some of the magic :-)

No mention of the DecSystem-10 or 20. I loved TOPS-20. How those machines ran so well with so many users and so little ram is a lesson in efficiency.

Worked with OpenVMS for a few years. It was great fun and lots of stories from the older colleagues who used to work at 'digital'.

The year before my freshman year of college, the Computer Science department required students to purchase either a DECStation or an Alpha. My year the required hardware was an IBM (literal) PC. I was so disappointed. My 75mhz pentium couldn't play mp3s without stuttering. I still dream about what the Alpha would have been like.

Also DLT, which was sold to Quantum and beget LTO, which is what stores our civilization's data if we need to do serious disaster recovery (as in when all stand-by replicas die at the same time and we need to restore it from off-site tapes).

My 14 year old self DREAMED of owning a DEC Alpha64 !!

I remember it being on the cover of LinuxJournal around 90's I could think/desire nothing else for 6 months :(

RIP!

I remember when the department I worked in got two DEC Alphas, we were amazed and quite happy.

I find it odd that there is no mention of RMS, the userspace filesystem view on VMS. It supported sequential, block (a.k.a. "relative") and indexed files; sequential output (the DCL command was TYPE rather than cat or more) was transparent (i.e. indexed file output was in primary key order). This was done at the file system level.

TLDR: The VMS file system supported key/value storage off the shelf (with multiple key views!).

I accidentally crashed a production VAX from userspace via an unaligned disk read on a unibus compatibility driver (they were also using the disk they assigned me for testing for swap; virtual memory machines don't run so well when the swap drive bug checks and goes offline) while developing a RSTS block I/O emulator.

I later had a small consulting gig writing a USB driver for NT. The people who hired me said that because I had experience with VMS drivers I'd be able to do it; not knowing different I said "ok" and I guess they were right.

As I understand it, Digital changed significantly after Ken Olsen left.

DEC was so great! I still have my VAX 780 pen. Nothing bad to say.

Cutler retired?!

echo VMS | tr A-Za-z B-ZAb-za ==> WNT

Gotta complain about whoever did the visual layout for this article. Their representative hardware was... a rando mid-80's ECL mainframe and a VAXstation? The company produced some of the most impactful hardware in history and these are the devices you think should be shown?

If there's a VAX, we should see the 11/780. The user-facing device should be a VT100, or plausibly an AlphaStation. Other good choices are a PDP-6 (or PDP-10) or PDP-11/45. The images in the article are just bad clip art.