The Tragic Tale of DEC, the Computing Giant That Died Too Soon
I worked as an intern at DEC for two summers.  During the 2nd summer between Jr and Sr year, my roommate and I got a small apartment in Marlboro within walking distance of our jobs.  That summer, I wrote the spooler for the KL-10 (not yet released), and my roommate write the microcode for the KL-10.  I am still in touch with him, he is still awesome like that.  Anyway, I got intrigued by a hush-hush project in Maynard where a guy had taken some pdp-8 boards and with a small monitor stuffed them into a salesman&#x27;s suitcase. DEC did, in fact, have a Portable Computer.  At this time, the 8008 had been released, and it was &#x27;obvious&#x27; to me that microcomputers would &#x27;take over&#x27;.  This was 1975.  I invited Ken Olsen over one Sunday afternoon to chat with us co-op students and a few employees, and he came over!  He must have been there a couple of hours, chatting us all up.  I told him that he should put the LSI-11 into a nice small box and sell it at a competitive price, to stop all these crappy chips like the 8080, 6502, etc from gaining traction.  Ken didn&#x27;t seem to understand why anybody would want to have his own computer.  Frustrated by not communicating the urgency properly, back in the pdp-10 group, I sent a note to Gordon Bell that DEC should forget about these crappy little 8- and 16-bit chips, and should put a pdp-10 onto a board -- and that could command a larger price, and could establish the pdp-10&#x27;s instruction set as a standard. Gordon wrote back to me with a short phrase written at the top of my memo: &quot;Do it!&quot;  Now of course I was going back to school in September, and could not do it.  I have wondered whether I should have just chucked school, and stayed at DEC to &quot;do it&quot;.  If so, the trajectory of the Computing Industry may well have been substantially altered.  I guess this sort of thing is called &quot;Life&quot;. Sigh.