Digital Equipment Corporation, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Digital Equipment Corporation comes up
Google Part II: Alphabet (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:53:20 Ben Gilbert So you had Jeff Dean and Sanjay Jemawat coming from DEC.
Google Part I: Origins of Search. How the Best Business in Human History Happened (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 49:34 Ben Gilbert DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation.
- ▶ 49:36 David Rosenthal DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory, which was their Palo Alto research lab.
- ▶ 49:46 David Rosenthal But DEC, I mean, the company we talked all about in our Microsoft series, where Dave Cutler came from, wrote Windows NT, you know, legendary, legendary company.
- ▶ 50:03 David Rosenthal Judy Faulkner wrote Epic on a DEC minicomputer, right?
- ▶ 50:42 Ben Gilbert Oh, and this makes sense because DEC hardware would be pretty well suited for this.
- ▶ 50:52 David Rosenthal This is why it was a research project at DEC.
- ▶ 52:28 David Rosenthal So when AltaVista spins out of deck and launches as a commercial company and entity in and of itself, it's big claim to fame is its index.
- ▶ 53:19 David Rosenthal I mean, AltaVista had great hardware from deck,
- ▶ 53:29 Ben Gilbert But if they had to be their own company, it is an extremely expensive company to run to have all that deck hardware for search, which we should say doesn't have a great business model yet.
- ▶ 53:59 Ben Gilbert As you can imagine, the powers that be at DEC are pushing really hard on, can we sell more of these boxes?
- ▶ 54:07 Ben Gilbert Do they really want to be the ones developing the best search engine, or really what they want is for other people to be developing stuff like this, see it as a proof of concept, and then start their own companies to buy more and more DEC…
- ▶ 1:00:34 David Rosenthal Jeff Dean, who they also recruit around the same time, from the senior engineer at deck.
- ▶ 1:05:43 Ben Gilbert How do I design a system when I can't count on a whole bunch of stuff from the underlying hardware that I would get to count on if it was a fancy deck server?
- ▶ 1:28:23 David Rosenthal So the very first project that Jeff Dean did when he came over from DEC is Larry and Sergey and Erz told him, all right, the VCs say we got to sell ads.
The Steve Ballmer Interview · Acquired
- ▶ 9:00 Steve Ballmer And then you had this little upstart try again called digital equipment.
- ▶ 9:05 Steve Ballmer Very important in our story because Dave Cutler, who was kind of the father of NT, Windows NT, he came from digital equipment and they were, they were fighting.
- ▶ 9:24 Steve Ballmer And all the initial Microsoft software was developed actually on deck computers, digital equipment equals deck.
- ▶ 9:30 Steve Ballmer And Dec had a nice business, but it was a lot smaller than IBM.
- ▶ 33:48 Steve Ballmer Dave Cutler had been the, uh, architect of the VMS operating system for digital equipment.
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 41:33 David Rosenthal A data general or deck mini computer is going to cost you about 70,000 dollars.
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 1:12:22 David Rosenthal One of their original licensees was DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, like OG, way back in the day.
- ▶ 1:12:30 David Rosenthal So they took the ARM architecture, and they tuned it for performance, and they called what they did at DEC, their version of ARM that they created, strong ARM, and that product line within DEC would later be acquired by Intel, of all…
- ▶ 1:12:59 David Rosenthal So a bunch of the core engineers on the team, like the DEC team that have been working with ARM from back in the day, and they're like, we just got acquired by Intel.
- ▶ 1:13:27 David Rosenthal Lineage of all of Apple Silicon, probably the most valuable, defensible part of Apple today in terms of technology, was Armandec to Intel to PA Semi to Apple.
- ▶ 1:13:51 David Rosenthal With Intel and DEC in the middle.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 3:42:21 David Rosenthal Amitabh had also come from DEC, which is where Dave came from.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 16:20 David Rosenthal I think probably for the first time in its history, certainly in the computing era of IBM's history, and that was the Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC.
- ▶ 16:38 David Rosenthal I said, it's a DEC PDP-X.
- ▶ 16:42 David Rosenthal So, what's DEC?
- ▶ 16:44 David Rosenthal They're the mini-computer company.
- ▶ 16:55 David Rosenthal DEC had been started by this guy, Ken Olson, from MIT, and what they did, he had this brilliant insight that would play out over and over and over again in technology, that I'm not gonna go compete with IBM head-on, I'm not gonna make…
- ▶ 18:49 David Rosenthal So the first deck machine, when it comes out, the PDP one a few years before this time, it was priced at a 120,000 dollars.
- ▶ 19:19 David Rosenthal And so DEC kind of creates a new market for computing.
- ▶ 19:32 David Rosenthal He totally looks up to deck and what deck's done.
- ▶ 19:36 David Rosenthal Now, the deck and mini-computer UI is still the same as the mainframe.
- ▶ 22:02 David Rosenthal There is a local startup coming out of the University of Washington called the Computer Center Corporation, or C-Cubed, and the business plan behind C-Cubed was that they were gonna get a bunch of decks, a bunch of PDP, eights, tens, 11,…
- ▶ 24:52 David Rosenthal It was written as a fun side project by some MIT engineers in the early days of DEC, and then that became Nolan Bushnell's inspiration for starting Atari and Pong and Space Base.
- ▶ 35:49 David Rosenthal I told Paul, DEC can't sell any more PDP-Eights now.
- ▶ 36:35 David Rosenthal So they think, okay, what's clearly going to happen here is all the big computer companies, you know, IBM, DEC, the big Japanese computing companies, they see this, they're going to get into this business.
- ▶ 47:14 David Rosenthal Bill and Paul originally thought that it was gonna be the IBMs, the DEXs, the Japanese companies who are gonna make the first microcomputers.
- ▶ 48:37 David Rosenthal Was like a deck, you know, like a 120,000 dollar mini computer.
- ▶ 1:27:26 David Rosenthal Mainframes and even mini computers with DEC, you know, all these machines are at least sixteen-bit, if not thirty-two-bit computing machines.
- ▶ 1:29:19 David Rosenthal IBM has already lived through missing a computing expansion era once with DEC and the mini computer.
- ▶ 1:29:29 David Rosenthal They just let DEC take that market.
- ▶ 1:29:42 Ben Gilbert People in our industry know about DEC.
- ▶ 1:29:44 Ben Gilbert People in the broader world never knew about DEC.
- ▶ 1:54:05 David Rosenthal Other than DEC gained a foothold.
- ▶ 3:10:16 David Rosenthal But then in October, 1988, as they're heading towards divorce, Microsoft hires Dave Cutler away from deck.
- ▶ 3:10:37 David Rosenthal Dave at DEC wrote the whole operating system that DEC ran on, Vax, and so poaching him away to come work at Microsoft, both like, he's the guy that's gonna build an enterprise-ready, take share away from
- ▶ 3:42:57 Ben Gilbert Did DEC really challenge IBM?
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 1:31:33 Ben Gilbert And then there were times where it wasn't growing at all because the servers were down and they had to work directly with, I feel like it was like, I don't know if it was deck or sun, but someone to like come help us fix whatever we're…
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 16:36 Ben Gilbert Until 2000, they were servers from Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC.
- ▶ 17:35 Ben Gilbert Captured by, say, a deck or an Oracle or an IBM.
- ▶ 18:07 David Rosenthal Rather than deck.
- ▶ 33:05 Ben Gilbert And they would just buy the most expensive, souped up server they possibly could from DEC or whoever else, and they would just try to make it through Christmas.