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UW CSEP 590 - The Birth and Passing of Minicomputers

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The Birth and Passing of Minicomputers: From A Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) Perspective1957-1998. 41 yrs., 4 generations: transistor, IC, VLSI, clusters - winner take allHow computer classes form…and die.Not dealing with technology =change = disruptionGordon Bell 11 October 2006On History…1. "God alone knows the future, but only an historian can alter thepast." -- Ambrose Bierce2. "A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it."--Mark Twain3. "The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened." -- Peter Berger4. "History, a distillation of rumour." -- Thomas Carlyle5. "Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried towrite his memoirs." _-David Ben Gurion6. "No harm's done to history by making it something someone would want to read." -- David McCullough7. "History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth." -- E.L. Doctorow8. "People always seemed to know half of history, and to get it confused with the other half." -- Jane Haddam9. "All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography." -- Ralph Waldo EmersonDigital’s Trials by Technology…With time, “high” tech becomes a commodity.“DEC found guilty of violating Moore’s Law …” –gbell1. Designing and building first transistor circuits.1957-19652. Transition to integrated circuits & modulo 8 bits 1965-19753. Design with VLSI; manufacturing VLSI 1975-20024. Design of “clusters” as the ultimate computer 1983- ????5. Quadruple whammy c1983 – “killer” micros, UNIX: PC, Workstations, CMOS AND UNIX , as “standards”Anyone can manufacturer computers in their dorm!“You mean to say, our new ECL mainframe is not equal to our latest CMOS chip?” –Ken Olsen c19906. Fail to exploit: networks, WWW, printers, clusters…http://research.microsoft.com/users/gbell/Digital/DECMuseum.htm1. Bell’s Law that opens the page and is on my page and Wikipedia. I will open with a bit about laws.2. Computer, October 1984 that gives the coming and going of the 100 mini companies. 1984 was the time of transition to micros. Startups used UNIX and micros that had performance competitive with minis. Also note my article in Science on “Multis” is important because it became the standard g0t computers.3. Listing of Minicomputer companies 1960-1984 and super-minicomputer and mini-supercomputer companies 1984-1995.4. Digital 41 Year History CDpublished 30 April, 1998 with key events and timeline... with photos and facts about machines (alpha to PDP-1), module, the mill, and people! A nice reference with time, bullets, and photos.5. COMPUTER ENGINEERINGBell, C. G., C. Mudge, J. McNamara,, Digital Press 1978 has the origin of DEC from the circuits that came from MIT Lincoln Laboratory. It has the story of how the PDP-5 was created as a component. PDP-5 begot the PDP-8 that was the “classic” or archetypical mini. The same story can be told about micros as components.6. The Bell Appendix for Edgar H. Schein's book “DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC”Berett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2003. The appendix describes Bell's view of What Happened such that Digital was first sold to Compaq in 1998 and then to HP in 2002. Digital aka DEC was only 41 years old. It has some technology, but it is management too. I am not a fan of Christian’s use of DEC as the poster child to illustrate Innovator’s Dilemma or disruptive technology…7. Note the VAX Strategy, similar to the IBM 360 plan, and then Sun’s “All the wood behind one arrow”.8. Note the transition to distributed computing and the Ethernet presentation. The complete Ethernet Announcement by Bell (Digital), Noyce (Intel), and Liddle (Xerox) slides and script (PDF 7MB) was made in New York City on February 10, 1982 by the DIX group, followed by announcements in Amsterdam, and London. Note my presentation included: "the network becomes the system"... Can you recall a similar mantra that SUN Microsystems later appropriated?9. See the three articles on the PDP-11 on “the address space problem”: a. Bell, C. G… and W. Wulf, "A New Architecture for Mini-Computers -- The DEC PDP-11,SJCC, pp. 657-675 (1970).b. What we learned from the PDP-11, published by myself and Bill Strecker in 1975. c. Retrospective on the PDP-11Bill Strecker with a retrospective about VAX and Alpha, 1995. 10. Family Tree of Digital's Computers Poster created in 1980, shows the evolution of all of all computer models and times they were introduced since 1960… my favorite way to represent historyBob Supnik has simulators for the DEC machines Papers on Simulation and Historic Systems. Searching for specific machines and people usually get a lot more than you want or need. E.g. http://www.pdp8.org/, www.pdp11.org www.pdp10.org, www.vax.org are sites about specific minis including simulators.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporationlists all the machine families.The 41 year life and trials ofDigital Equipment Corp. aka DEC• 1960: Birth of DEC from MIT Lincoln Lab… its evolution• 1965-1984+?: Birth and death of the minicomputer industrybuilt with LSI to be replaced by multiple, microprocessors• Theory: Bell’s Law (of Computer Classes)• 1978: VAX and the VAX Strategy to become number 2• 1985-: PCs, workstations, “killer micros” and standards take on all comers • The DEC Organization and Culture... What happened?• Summary…•Stories– PDP-1; ITT Store & Forward Switch… UART– PDP-6 from PDP-3. Compiler– PDP-5 how it was created & PDP-8– PDP-11 at CMU– VAX and VAX Strategy… address bit problem– Ethernet DIX, Liddle,Digital’s aka DEC’s Origin and Plan …1957: Ken Olsen, Harlan Anderson, Stan Olsen --leave MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory as transistor circuit and computer designers; collect $70K from American Research and Development –VCBusiness plan: design, manufacture, sell logic modules… and eventually use the earnings and modules for building computersSee also www.computerhistory.orghttp://research.microsoft.com/users/gbell/Digital/DECMuseum.htmMovie celebrating the PDP-1 Birth, Spacewar, etc. http://www.computerhistory.org/events/index.php?id=1142978073Some Financial & Size, Dates, Factoids1957: Founded @ $70K. 5 Mhz logic modules.


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UW CSEP 590 - The Birth and Passing of Minicomputers

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