I’ve written before about my time at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 1990s, working on a disastrous incentive program to build Alpha

The Enemy Within - The Mad Ned Memo

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2021-05-26 11:30:14

I’ve written before about my time at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 1990s, working on a disastrous incentive program to build Alpha workstations. This one is another tale of Digital, but for it we need to go back a decade earlier. Back to 1986 when I joined the company, fresh out of college.

I grew up in the late 70s/early 80s, idolizing DEC. It was the cool computer tech company that had produced the PDP-8 mini, which I learned to program on, and later the VAX 11/780, which I had used in some of my earliest computer courses I took while still in high school. Thinking they were the best computer company may have been primacy bias on my part, perhaps. But there was no debating that Digital was a dominant force in the market, holding the number two computer manufacturer spot, behind IBM, and a desirable place for a new engineer to work.

But by the time I was a Senior in college, it was strangely not I that went looking for a job at DEC; it was DEC that found me. I had in fact “uneven” grades let’s say, and I was really just searching to find a job of any sort, as graduation neared. As fate would have it though, a school alumni who worked at Digital came by, looking for a college hire. The professor who’s lab I worked in recommended me, and the next thing you know, I was renting my first car, to drive out to Shrewsbury, Massachusetts for an interview.