The Jupiter super-KL-10 project, which never got past the design notes and emulation stage. There's an apocryphal story about someone handing Olsen one of the pre-Alpha VAX-on-a-chip designs and he has a very polite mini-meltdown when he realises that it literally outperforms the top water-cooled mainframe ECL VAX hardware - for just a few hundred dollars, instead of a couple of million. Gordon Bell has said that Olsen never quite understood what VLSI implied culturally and socially - never mind technically and financially. There was some incredible world-leading engineering and a progressive culture, but the vision seems to have got stuck on a peg in the 70s, kept it together in the 80s because VAX was already in place, but couldn't deal realistically with the 90s. That was really what made Apple stand out from the competition, and that kind of marketing, to users who didn't work in big offices, factories, and research labs, and didn't have degrees, was unimaginable at DEC. And plenty of approachable PR and ad spend. didn't work.Īpple meanwhile had worked out that you needed a national dealer network with stores and hands-on demos all over the country.
So when DEC did eventually try to make hardware that could compete with PCs they tried to sell it to their usual customers instead of finding new markets. DEC's culture was geared to selling to corporates and academia and trying to compete with IBM, not with smaller startups.
He seems to have been a very 1950s corporate kind of manager, and couldn't imagine computing outside of technical and corporate settings. And to be fair not many people did in the 70s. The problem was that Olsen didn't have a vision for commodity personal computing. LSI-11s did end up in small boxes, so that wasn't the problem.
In fact there was a short-lived project called Minnow which was supposed to put a KL-10 on a desk, but it was overtaken by VAX - much like the Jupiter super-KL-10 project, which never got past the design notes and emulation stage. A TTL implementation would have been difficult to squeeze into a small space, and a VLSI implementation was at least a decade away. But I doubt anyone could have made a KL-10 on a board in 1975. I guess this sort of thing is called "Life". If so, the trajectory of the Computing Industry may well have been substantially altered. I have wondered whether I should have just chucked school, and stayed at DEC to "do it". 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. 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. Ken didn't seem to understand why anybody would want to have his own computer. 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. 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. At this time, the 8008 had been released, and it was 'obvious' to me that microcomputers would 'take over'.
DEC did, in fact, have a Portable Computer. 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.
I am still in touch with him, he is still awesome like that. That summer, I wrote the spooler for the KL-10 (not yet released), and my roommate write the microcode for the KL-10. 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. I worked as an intern at DEC for two summers.