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's suitcase. DEC did, in fact, have a Portable Computer.  At this time, the 8008 had been released, and it was 'obvious' to me that microcomputers would 'take over'.  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'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's instruction set as a standard. Gordon wrote back to me with a short phrase written at the top of my memo: "Do it!"  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 "do it".  If so, the trajectory of the Computing Industry may well have been substantially altered.  I guess this sort of thing is called "Life". Sigh.