[ih] Ken Olsen's impact on the Internet

[Dave CROCKER]

On 2/7/2011 8:01 PM, Guy Almes wrote:
> Another, more mixed, is DEC's lukewarm support for the IP-based Internet,
> preferring the proprietary DECnet product line. While, technically, the DECnet
> work deserves much praise, the business dynamics of pushing DECnet in preference
> to the Internet are illustrative of blindspots that led to Digital's demise.


DEC was not lukewarm.  It was actively hostile.  It pressed for OSI because it 
thought it could control the outcome.

By the time DEC finally realized that TCP/IP was going to win, DEC was very far 
behind the curve and never really caught up.  (The Field Service guys were 
closest to the customer and saw the writing on the wall the earliest, so they 
provided funding for an Internet tech transfer lab that I started, but there was 
an entire corporate culture devoted to stovepipe solutions for customer capture 
with private solutions.)  Upper management wanted the change to IP, but there 
were about 110,000 other employees and middle-managers that had trouble buying in.

But yeah, PDP-10/Tenex for the Arpanet and later the PDP-11/Vax/Unix were hugely 
popular for hosts.

For Unix, you had to get the hardware from DEC and the software license from 
Bell Labs.  In order the help the hardware sales, DEC had a special group up in 
New Hampshire doing Unix device drivers.  At every Usenix meeting (attendance in 
those early days number of around 40-100) the team leader, Armando Stettner, 
would give a status report on the device driver work.

At the first larger meeting (300 people in Santa Monica) he got up as usual, but 
started by saying that he was tired of having people say they wanted to get both 
the hardware and the Unix software from one place, and when was DEC going to 
offer a Unix license?

So, he said, he could finally announce that DEC was indeed going to offer a Unix 
license.

He then bent down and held up a New Hampshire-style green automobile license 
plate that said UNIX, with Live Free or Die at the bottom.  He had one for every 
attendee.

I treasure mine...

d/


-- 

   Dave Crocker
   Brandenburg InternetWorking
   bbiw.net