To understand why working in VMS Engineering was such a big deal, you have to understand what Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was. In the 70s and 80s, DEC wasn’t just a computer company; it was the alternative to the “Big Blue” monopoly of IBM.
The Mill in Maynard
Founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in an old wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, DEC changed the world by shrinking the computer. Before DEC, computers were “Mainframes”—room-sized monsters that cost millions and required a priesthood of technicians to run.
Ken Olsen’s vision was different. He wanted computers to be interactive tools for scientists and engineers. This led to the PDP (Programmed Data Processor) series and eventually the legendary VAX, which I worked on. These were “minicomputers”—still large by today’s standards, but small enough to fit in a lab and “cheap” enough for a university or a mid-sized business to own.
The Peak: 1980s Dominance
By the time I was sitting in those meetings about “longnames” and IP addresses, DEC was the second-largest computer company on the planet. We had over 100,000 employees. We weren’t just following the industry; we were leading it:
- Networking: We essentially co-invented Ethernet.
- Clustering: DEC was the first to make multiple computers work together as one logical unit (VAXclusters).
- The Internet: We built AltaVista, the world’s first truly fast web search engine, and ran the hardware that powered much of the early internet.
So, What Happened?
If we were so advanced, why aren’t you buying a “DEC Laptop” today? It’s a classic case of an engineering-driven company missing a massive cultural shift.
Ken Olsen famously (and perhaps apocryphally) doubted the need for a “personal” computer in the home. DEC’s culture was built on high-margin, high-performance systems for “eggheads.” When the PC revolution arrived, powered by cheap chips from Intel and software from Microsoft, DEC tried to compete with the Rainbow 100, but it wasn’t fully IBM-compatible and failed to catch on.
By the early 90s, the “minicomputer” market was being squeezed from both sides: powerful PCs from below and the new “Alpha” chips (which were amazing but late) from above. In 1992, Ken Olsen was forced out. By 1998, the remains of the giant were sold to Compaq for $9.6 billion—at the time, the largest merger in tech history. A few years later, Compaq itself was absorbed by Hewlett-Packard (HP).
The Legacy
Though the name is gone, DEC’s DNA is everywhere. The lead architect of VMS, Dave Cutler, eventually went to Microsoft and used what he learned at DEC to build Windows NT—the foundation of every version of Windows you use today.
Being in that VMS lab wasn’t just a job; it was like being at the center of the computing universe right before the big bang of the modern internet.
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