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Alas, poor DEC, I knew him well
Jun. 8th, 2011 09:49 pmHere's a significant image of corporate hubris.
DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was an industry leader from the 1960s until it faded with a whimper in the mid-1990s. The company created several major lines of micro and minicomputers, including the PDP's, the VAX and MicroVAX, and the whole Alpha line. They also produced some remarkably efficient and powerful operating systems, most notably RSTS/E and OpenVMS. They failed to keep up with the shift toward desktop computing power, though, and in 1998 the remains of their assets were bought up by Compaq. The photo shows the graphical console login screen generated by the last (2000, version 7.3) distribution of OpenVMS for VAX hardware. Notice how Compaq promptly "rebranded" OpenVMS as their own, replacing the copyrights and blasting their logo across the screen in screaming red letters. It wasn't their work, except in a legal sense. The designs they were claiming were all done by Digital, some of them as much as 20 or more years earlier.
Compaq only lasted another four years, before being gobbled up in turn by Hewlett Packard. The current versions of OpenVMS (8.3 and 8.4) run on the DEC Alpha processors which are no longer manufactured, but still in use outside the US for the most part, and the HP Itanium, a 64 bit processor that was HP's answer to the Alpha. Those versions loudly proclaim Hewlett Packard as copyright holder, though much of the code remains identical to the original Digital model. HP hasn't been doing so well in the last couple of years, either.
Somehow, though, American corporations have become utterly wrapped up in the notion that appearance counts more than reality. Putting their name on something makes it "theirs" whether they originated or built the object or not. And the history of Compaq and HP shows the futility of this idea.
The screen image, by the way, was snapped off the monitor of a machine running Linux and acting as an X-terminal for a virtual (emulated) VAXServer 3900 (SIMH software) with OpenVMS 7.3 running. I've fiddled on and off with this setup for nearly four years trying to get that particular screen display to come up. There are several bugs in the 1999 DECWindows (DEC's version of X) that made it difficult to achieve, I think I've just about found the needed workarounds for all of them. Some were never officially documented in anything that remains available today. No, I won't be trying to fix them, but I'll probably write up a complete explanation of what I've learned, with the necessary steps to work around it.
Storm warnings and high winds keeping us up, even though the shearer is coming tomorrow. Thank goodness the front passing through should lower the temperatures to something more practical for sheep wrestling.
DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was an industry leader from the 1960s until it faded with a whimper in the mid-1990s. The company created several major lines of micro and minicomputers, including the PDP's, the VAX and MicroVAX, and the whole Alpha line. They also produced some remarkably efficient and powerful operating systems, most notably RSTS/E and OpenVMS. They failed to keep up with the shift toward desktop computing power, though, and in 1998 the remains of their assets were bought up by Compaq. The photo shows the graphical console login screen generated by the last (2000, version 7.3) distribution of OpenVMS for VAX hardware. Notice how Compaq promptly "rebranded" OpenVMS as their own, replacing the copyrights and blasting their logo across the screen in screaming red letters. It wasn't their work, except in a legal sense. The designs they were claiming were all done by Digital, some of them as much as 20 or more years earlier.
Compaq only lasted another four years, before being gobbled up in turn by Hewlett Packard. The current versions of OpenVMS (8.3 and 8.4) run on the DEC Alpha processors which are no longer manufactured, but still in use outside the US for the most part, and the HP Itanium, a 64 bit processor that was HP's answer to the Alpha. Those versions loudly proclaim Hewlett Packard as copyright holder, though much of the code remains identical to the original Digital model. HP hasn't been doing so well in the last couple of years, either.
Somehow, though, American corporations have become utterly wrapped up in the notion that appearance counts more than reality. Putting their name on something makes it "theirs" whether they originated or built the object or not. And the history of Compaq and HP shows the futility of this idea.
The screen image, by the way, was snapped off the monitor of a machine running Linux and acting as an X-terminal for a virtual (emulated) VAXServer 3900 (SIMH software) with OpenVMS 7.3 running. I've fiddled on and off with this setup for nearly four years trying to get that particular screen display to come up. There are several bugs in the 1999 DECWindows (DEC's version of X) that made it difficult to achieve, I think I've just about found the needed workarounds for all of them. Some were never officially documented in anything that remains available today. No, I won't be trying to fix them, but I'll probably write up a complete explanation of what I've learned, with the necessary steps to work around it.
Storm warnings and high winds keeping us up, even though the shearer is coming tomorrow. Thank goodness the front passing through should lower the temperatures to something more practical for sheep wrestling.
