Oral History Interview with Gordon Bell
Recipient of the 1995 MCI Information Technology Leadership Award for
Innovation,
Computerworld Smithsonian Awards
Interviewer: David K. Allison, Curator, Division of Information Technology and Society, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Date of Interview: April 1995
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Academic BackgroundComputer
Engineering at MIT in the Late 1950'sJoining Digital
Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960Inventing
the UART to interface Teletypes. Architecting and designing the PDP-4The
PDP-5 as the forerunner to the PDP-8, The first minicomputerThe
first commercial timesharing computer – PDP-6Carnegie
Tech 1966-1972PDP-11Returning
to Digital in 1972VAXThe
VAX Strategy 12/78Leaving
Digital in the summer of 1983EthernetKen
Olsen transition from first-rate CEO to failed program managerTransition
from proprietary minicomputer standards to proprietary UNIX standardsTransition
from VAX to Prism, MIPS, and Alpha: Losing momentumThe
VAX 9000: One ECL computer, too manyMy
faith in shared memory, multiple microprocessors or “multis”Encore
– a career cul de sac, but a value experienceStarting
up NSF’s CISE Computing DirectorateNSFnet
transition to NREN and the modern InternetScience,
Engineering, Government Funding of Product Development, and TradeTransition
to belief in Clusters versus large scale multiprocessorsEpilog
and More Things to Say in May 2000 After the InterviewDKA:
You started your career as a Fulbright Scholar.
How did this happen?
GB: I had been a co-op student
at MIT working for large companies where there were seas of engineering desks,
and so I was trying to delay going to work as an engineer. I visited Gordon
Brown, the MIT head of the EE Department, who was an Australian. And he said:
“Why don’t you go to the University of New South Wales? They just started a department at their new eight year old
university and they need somebody to teach computing and get them started in
research.” So Bob Brigham, my
roommate, and I went to Australia as Fulbright scholars, taught a graduate
course, and built a pretty impressive compiler for their computer. It was the
English Electric Deuce, a follow on to the NPL National Physical Laboratory Ace
that Turing designed. It was a very
hard machine to program because its main memory was delay lines with 192, 32-bit
words and programs resided on an 8 K word drum. It had card input, and you signed up to use the computer for
short periods of time – it was used as a personal computer, albeit one you
could walk into. We wrote a compiler to optimize programs and make it easier to
use. It’s 32 word, 32-bit
memories could be displayed on a CRT, so you could interact with it.
When
I returned from Australia, my thesis advisor, Ken Stevens head of the MIT Speech
Lab hired me to the research staff. This allowed me to take courses, and
work toward a PhD. I
had little desire to get a doctorate because I had really just wanted to be an
engineer. I needed a job because I had just gotten married and Gwen was
finishing Harvard. So I followed
that path. The lab was doing really fundamental and interesting work in speech
understanding and I thought I could write a program to recognize speech.
I wrote a program called Analysis-by-Synthesis that was a way to attack
speech recognition or recognition of anything. Basically, you generate a synthetic signal from a model of speech production and then
tune and compare that with the input to impute what the sound parameters might
have been. The basic technique is still used for analysis. The 1959 paper still gets referenced. One of the students in
the lab became a professor at Tokyo
University is still pursuing the path and continues using the technique.
The
more important thing to me about the MIT experience was the use of the TX-O, a
machine that was designed by MIT’s Lincoln laboratory and one of the very
first transistorized computers. It was fast with a 6-microsecond core memory.
And it was designed for interaction, real-time, and connecting things. We
connected recorded speech through a bank of filters via an a-to-d converter.
So it was both a real time and interactive machine.
It was a personal computer used by one person at a time. It was basically
a PC. It had only 16 kilobytes of memory and paper tape I/O. I designed a
magnetic tape control because it needed to handle more data.
DKA: So you were really using
personal computers from the start.
GB: Also, that’s how I came to be a computer engineer. The tape control
was designed from modules from a 1957 startup, Digital Equipment Corporation
in nearby Maynard, MA. I
looked at the small company in an old mill building and everybody was designing
and building things just like I had always imagined engineering to be. Gee, this
is how I thought engineering was! I can actually DO design and build something
if I join DEC! They made products.
My earlier co-op engineering assignments weren’t very interesting to me. So I
joined DEC in the summer of 1960.
DKA: Before we go into that,
let me go back and talk a little bit more about MIT.
I was curious as to whether you were interested in computing as a student
there or that that interest grew or what had you hoped to go into when you first
started working as an engineer?
GB: Okay, what was computing like? I took all the computing courses MIT
offered in 1952-1957. There wasn’t even a computing option.
There was a course in digital design, courses in switching theory,
numerical analysis courses, and several courses in machine language programming.
I learned to program the IBM 650 and 704. MIT had a 704 or 709, and the 7090
didn’t appear till 1960. MIT’s Whirlwind was the machine that was the
progenitor of real time, interactive, and air traffic control.
I was fascinated with digital systems design and computers.
DKA: Interactive computing and
SAGE?
GB: Yes, all of that. So that was the fascination. And the TX-0 was the
machine that was attractive to all of us. So when I saw DEC introducing the
PDP-1 as a follow-on to the TX-0, I wanted to be part of it.
DKA: But as a student had you
had access to the TX-0 wouldn’t this have changed things?
GB: It wasn’t on campus
until 1958.
DKA: When you came back?
GB: When I came back from Australia in 59 the TX-0
had just been installed. But no, there was not hands-on computing when I
was a student, although we could sign up for some time on the IBM 650.
It was only research associates or graduate students that had access to
the machines because they were for research.
The speech lab was a prime user.
DKA: And yet you knew that this was the area of engineering that you wanted
to make your life?
GB: Yeah, it was the same way
that I think of when everybody gets fascinated with computers. They are
interactive and you are creating a living entity. TX-0 had a debug program to
write programs on line, symbolically. And it was the fascination with the
interaction that at least I found exciting. Because as a student I had run
programs on the IBM 650 and Whirlwind but they were usually batch processed
where someone else runs your programs and you get printouts, but it wasn’t the
same thing. Its conceivable I wouldn’t have gotten into computing if I
hadn’t had the interactive experience.
I
had online or personal experience when I was in Australia with the Deuce. And it
was really used as a large personal computer, one person at a time that you
signed up to use. That is the way machines were scheduled before batch
processing.
DKA: One last thing I want to
ask you about that you know that what seems like second nature to your
experience on the TX-0 is a style of computing that is so far distant from what
people think of now when they think of computing. Maybe you can just briefly
describe what it was like to do something on the TX-0 with its oscilloscope and
keyboard. Just what was it like to
do something with that machine?
GB: Well, in a funny way I don’t think it was that much different from
today for programming. You sat and wrote programs like you do today with paper
and pencil or directly into an editing program. I think people still do that or they should at least.
The great programmers I know like Dave Cutler still writes programs, desk
checks it, and then compiles and runs them in a test environment. In that case
the program was typed in using an off-line Flexowriter to create a punch paper
tape. The tape was translated using a compiler or assembled and then loaded into
the computer directly or via some kind of loader together with a debugging
program that let you look at the program. The debug phase is virtually the same
thing you have today but now it’s more of a single system.
The nice interpretive environments like Visual Basic are all-in-one
environments for creation and debugging.
DKA: Now you started to talk a
few minutes ago about the atmosphere at Digital when you first joined...
GB: And why it was that
exciting?
DKA: I am interested in hearing why it was such an important company and is
still such an important company in the history of computing. You might want to
talk a little bit about that early phase and I’m sure you met Ken Olsen at
that time and some of the other people there. Tell me about the atmosphere
there.
GB: My badge number 80 when I joined. What really struck me was that it was
a startup in this mill building. In fact my office when I left DEC was still
building 12, the ground floor, of a 3-story building that was pretty much the
headquarters building. As a civil
war woolen mill it was totally open, and the offices were made into semi-private
offices by putting up partitions made with ordinary doors. It was quite open but
yet everyone had there own private space unlike what I would call the aircraft
company engineering offices of the 1960s with a sea of desks butted together
where you looked at someone to your
right and left and across your desk. Something about the seas of desks I guess bothered me about
engineering, and what was attractive about DEC was that I was the second
computer engineer. There were
circuit engineers, but I was the second one that came to build computers.
DKA: But of course Digital didn’t start to build computers when they
started in 1957; they built the modules and they had just, I guess, at this time
made the decision that they were in fact going to go further and build computers
and that’s why they begin hiring people like you. Tell me about the
discussions that you had before you came on board.
GB: I don’t exactly remember
my first visit. I don’t think I
made very many visits, but I went out to buy modules and discuss a particular
circuit that I didn’t quite understand and how it worked. It was a circuit
that had been invented at Lincoln labs. It did exactly what you wanted to do
that solved a nasty timing problem and nobody else had one that was anything
like it. It was an
integrating single shot. You needed
something like that to build tape units, or rather it made the design of my tape
controller a lot easier to do, so I went out to talk about that and their tape
read/write circuits.
I
met Ben Gurley who was head of computer engineering and came from Lincoln
Laboratory, like many of the early DEC employees. He had come a year before and had just built the PDP-1. I met
everybody, the whole team -- Ken, Harlan Anderson, Ben and Dick Best, the chief
engineer.
By
the way, that is a title we have since lost. I think it’s a wonderful title
that people should use. Now it’s the chief technology officer, but I think
chief engineer is a wonderful and better title. I really enjoyed interaction
with Ben and the whole crew and in fact they very shortly made me an offer and I
immediately accepted it. DEC looked exactly like the place engineers should be
in and work. The manufacturing was
in the next building.
I
had grown up in a small town and had no idea what an engineer was other than in
my mind and had decided I wanted to be one at about age 10.
I went straight from Kirksville, Missouri, against the recommendation of
a college math teacher friend of my father’s. He said you don’t want to go
to MIT, you’ll be competing with all these guys from eastern prep schools. Why
they all have had calculus and all you’ve had is algebra.
I went anyway.
DKA: And so, but then you did
not know what an engineer was, but you did want to build things and Digital gave
you that…
GB: Yes, so I had it in my mind what an engineer was.
I did many different things, including writing floating-point
subroutines, designing tape controllers, and a drum controller for one of the
first time-sharing systems that Bolt, Bernanek, and Newman had ordered.
The main thing was that as an engineer I wasn’t part of a huge
hierarchy, but rather I had the responsibility for a product.
I also wrote a manual on I/O control that I’m still proud of because
the techniques and philosophy of how to do I/O using interrupts and direct
memory access endured and influenced other architectures. I also helped
establish DECUS, the DEC user’s group, patterned after IBM’s Share, to help
get open and free software.
My
first big project was the project engineer to make a telegraph line switch to
replace IT&T torn-tape switching centers with a PDP-1.
This gave me an appreciation for communications and for reliable
telegraphy. But what I am most
proud of is inventing the first UART or universal asynchronous receiver
transmitter for bringing a communication line into the computer.
DKA: So you had some early experience with networking communications and
computing services.
GB: Yes, that fondness for
communication came right from the beginning.
DKA: Now you’re well known for some early work on the PDP-4. I wonder if
you might want to talk about the difference between the “4” and the “1”
and why that was an important machine at Digital.
GB: Well the “4” was also
an 18-bit computer like the “1” but it was not compatible with it. It was
the first computer I had designed from scratch.
I think I wrote in Computer Engineering, a book about DEC’s computers,
the importance of compatibility. The same thing could have been said about the
PDP-1’s lack of compatibility with the TX-0.
Like virtually all hardware engineers, I didn’t have an appreciation
for software investment and architectural compatibility. But one’s ego takes over and we reason that we can make a
better order code or architecture. This
is why there were so many early computer architectures, and even now a large
number of variants of digital signal processing computers. The “4” was the
progenitor of the “7, 9, and 15”.
The
PDP-5 was really the forerunner to the minicomputer. It’s successor, the PDP-8
was what we think of as the classic minicomputer. Because of the way it was rack
mounted, it was clearly a component to be incorporated with some other system.
Other systems of the day were primarily stand-alone.
DKA: Well, I was going to ask you actually to contrast the series that came
out of the “4” and the “8” and you’ve begun to do that. You might want
to be somewhat more explicit about what that first line was targeted at, what
were the innovations, and contrast that to the line that led up to the “8”,
and of course we should talk about the 11 and the VAX. But I think the way to do
it is maybe just be comparative about what were the objectives of each technical
line and how those were achieved.
GB: Well, the “4” became a
line that was designed to meet a couple of goals. One it was designed as a
control computer for the Foxboro Control Company and needed to be lower cost
than the PDP-1. One application I
remember was to control a Nabisco baking factory. There was a lot of concern at
the board because we might be liable if the computer stopped or dumped flour
into the river. But the “4” used different circuits and we ran things slower
and got economy not using all transistors.
It used capacitor, diode, and transistor logic to run at a clock speed of
1 Mhz instead of the PDP-1’s 5 Mhz. In retrospect we should have used the
PDP-1 order code. By running the “4” slower we reduced the price from $120
to $60 thousand. We also used a Teletype for the console because I disliked the
modified IBM Selectric typewriters because they were unreliable, unlike the old
fashioned, indestructible Teletypes. We were the first computer company to use
Teletypes.
DKA: So a lot of the purpose of
that whole line was to meet a market demand and the pricing.
GB: The “4” was cost and aimed at process control and real time data.
It had several innovative features, for example any register could act as a
counter and so it would allow you to collect data directly from external
sources. Although it didn’t have index registers, certain memory registers
were automatically incremented or decremented when accessed.
The
“5” was an interesting story, too. One of the first applications that we
looked at for the “4” was to control a nuclear reactor at Chalk River,
Ontario. Ed DeCastro, a special systems engineer, and I went up there in the
dead of winter to talk to them about their system. The “4” was doing the
control and a special system that Ed was going to design was doing data
collection. It had a rack full of
counters, A-to-D converters and lots of buttons and switches. So I said: “Gee,
why don’t we make a tiny tiny computer to do data collection.” I think we
started out with maybe a 10-bit computer. I asked: “What’s the smallest
computer that can do the job?” It
evolved from 10 to 12 bits. The
analog conversion was done by using a D-to-A converter on the accumulator.
That idea came from the LINC computer that Wes Clark had designed at
Lincoln Lab for laboratory use. Wes influenced my thinking about architecture
and I/O.
DKA: And the “5” led to the
“8”. Let’s talk now about
that transition from the “5” to the “8” because the “8” was such an
important product in Digital’s history. Maybe you want to talk both about its
objectives and why it became so successful.
GB: The “5” was built as a control computer, but the machine that was
very important was its successor the PDP-8. The “5” occupied one or two
cabinets whereas the “8” was less than a half cabinet.
The net result is systems could be built that were significantly smaller.
In many cases the “8” was put in other manufacturer’s packages.
Let
me digress. The transition to make a PDP-8 really occurred because of another
machine -the PDP-6. After doing the
PDP-4, I went to work on the PDP-6
which was DEC’s big machine and the world’s first timesharing computer.
We didn’t think it was that big, but it turned out to be quite a large
machine with a 36-bit word length. It was patterned after the standard word
length of the day, the IBM 7090 that came out in 1960. The PDP-6 was built using
the original 5 Mhz and 10 Mhz modules that were interconnected using a
hand-wired backpanel in two bays or 2
x 12 x 25 modules. Many women
worked in the Maynard Mill to do the wiring.
On the PDP-6, we found out that the many wires and corresponding wiring
errors meant that it just took too long to debug, making it quite costly. Now in
retrospect we should have never plugged modules in. It should have all been
checked even with people checking, but women did point to point wiring to build
the machine. So I investigated buying a wiring machine from Gardner Denver.
The original came from IBM, and Univac also used it.
The net result was being able to produce PDP-8s in high volume and at
lower cost. It allowed us to introduce the PDP-8 with its 12 bit word, 4 Kw
memory, and Teletype for $18K.
DKA: And you began to really
open new markets.
GB: Yes. In fact the idea of OEMs or Original Equipment Manufacturers came
from the “8”. That is selling
it to other companies who would resell it as part of another larger system,
whether it’s a controller for a cigarette making machine or factory or a test
instrument. So the “8” was really a transition to another way to market
computers. Today, most of the
adding on is software as in the thousands of Independent Software Vendor
companies.
DKA: You might want to talk a little bit about the computer market at that
time the “8” was introduced because it had gelled in a certain way and DEC
was beginning to find its position in the market. How did that look to you at
the time?
GB: We ought to look at the
market in the mid 60s. This is right at the time when integrated circuits were
being introduced in the mid 60s. The
million dollar or so mainframe market was described as Snow White and the 7
Dwarfs -- IBM and its competitorDKA:
Burroughs, CDC or Control Data Corp, GE, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. All
targeting electronic data processing for large corporations.
So
the minicomputer was a totally different kind of machine for a different market.
The PDP-1 sold for $120,000. But it had only an 18-bit word.
Who could use an 18-bit computer? Well,
you can get a 36-bit computer by just doubling it up and mostly it works. SDS,
Scientific Data Systems, was introducing 24-bit machines in the early 60s, but
they were also young. DEC and Computer Controls Corporation were contemporary
startups. So there were really only a few companies. First off, there were few
competitors because you had to design your own circuits.
DEC’s basis technology was circuit design or as we would say now,
barrier to entry. So a computer was
just an assemblage of the logic circuits, built to interpret an architecture,
and the software. From where it was
as a startup, all that remained was to put the circuits together.
In
those days, the software consisted of a bunch of independent routines. There was
nothing like an operating system to manage the computer. When you ran a program
you basically pulled together a bunch of software components and ran them.
DKA: So you had a core of innovative aspects to your company that nobody
else really competed against. As you say, it’s a full service at a certain
extent but also at a level that was below in terms of complexity and price point
what the other companies were doing.
GB: Well no, I would say we
were at the same complexity level, but we were producing low cost, high volume
machines and this allowed them to be used in a number of different markets. And
because DEC had the modules, other companies could take the modules and build
their own systems and write the program for an application.
This
was the beginning of an era where the idea of standards was just beginning to
happen. In languages, people said
COBOL 60 will solve that problem for commercial computing and
FORTRAN will solve problems for the scientific market. But the scientific
calculator market was one based on wide words so you can’t do science unless
you have 36- or 48-bit word. Also,
those scientific machines were expensive with a memory of at least 32 K words. The PDP-1 with just a 4 K word memory was rarely used for
calculations -- it had a scope and was a machine you interacted with.
So
early in the ‘60s we said we’ve got to have a large word machine -- that’s
a REAL computer. MIT was building a
timesharing computer based on the IBM 7090 so it was natural for us to look
there. You’re not going to have a
300-500 thousand dollar machine just for one user. So how are you going to do
that? By timesharing one machine. So timesharing came out of the same era.
I
feel so fortunate to be part of that period from 60 to 70 which is when
minicomputers were born, timesharing started, integrated circuits introduced,
and COBOL and FORTRAN. On the other hand, every decade I say: “Oh my god, the
next decade is going to be much more exciting than what we’ve lived
through.” But in fact this was an exciting era.
Building
a timesharing system meant lots of users on line, no restarting, and it can’t
fail. And it was the first time we took responsibility for significant software
-- we’re providing the software. Its not coming from the university or the
users don’t sort of glue it together. So that was our first operating system
and it was introduced in 1965.
DKA: So that was really the beginning. DEC had achieved a maturity with the
“8”, and then I guess the “11” is the next big product that came out.
You might want to talk about that transition.
GB: Right. What happened after this beginning was that in 1964 IBM
introduced the System/360 and then that changed all the word lengths to be
modulo 8 bits. Computer Controls
Corporation had come out with the first 16-bit mini designed by Gardner Hendrie
who I had known at Foxboro. Then a
year or so later Honeywell bought them and promptly destroyed the company before
they could become a threat. If you
can just hang in there as a company, you’ve got a good chance of making it
because others may self-destruct. For
example, SDS was doing pretty well into the early 70s until Xerox bought them.
That was a pure play for the founders --- gee, we’re offered 900 million
dollars for our computer company that we’re having trouble with in a very
competitive market. And so XDX was created and eventually written off.
So
that era from 1965-75 was that transition to a 16-bit world using Integrated
Circuits. Almost 100 minicomputer
companies formed and eventually died with only HP surviving.
In
a way, I can look back and say maybe I was burned out when I went to Carnegie
Tech as an associate professor in what became the computer science department in
1966. I remained a consultant to the company. The PDP-6[1]
begot the PDP-10, so that was going along nicely. The “5” and the “8”
were established and growing, there were PDP-4 follow-ons, and so the company
was doing very well. I didn’t see
that I was essential to the company.
Being
a professor at Carnegie Tech that became CMU was a wonderful experience.
Students were always there to question.
Working with Allen Newell on Computer Structures that included notations
for describing the behavior and structure of computers was simply great.
But
there was this gnawing need within DEC, called the 16-bit computer and there was
a group of people building and designing the PDP-X, which was an architecture of
an 8, 16, or 32-bit machine. I wasn’t there to catalyze it and what happened
was the engineers and the management didn’t get along. The machine was posited
by Ed Decastro and Henry Burkhardt -- the guys who formed Data General. They put
together a very nice proposal and management didn’t buy it. There were a lot
of bruised egos and a whole bunch of reasons that it didn’t happen – maybe
they tried to have it rejected. I probably shouldn’t comment on the decision,
except to say I was a strong supporter of the PDP-X. I said: “Build the X.
It’s a fine machine. DEC ought to be building this.” And I think it would
have been a lot cheaper had they done it, but they didn’t.
A team left and formed Data General and built its NOVA, that had no
relationship to the PDP-X.
When
they left, a project was started to redefine the PDP-X and it went through a
long path of being defined and redefined and the guy running it had no idea how
to design a computer. One of guys on the team was Harold McFarland, a student of
mine from Carnegie who had worked at DEC in the past summer. The machine
ultimately that emerged was PDP-11. The team had put together a machine proposal
and then came to Carnegie to have it reviewed by myself and Bill Wulf, a fellow
professor who eventually became the President of the National Academy of
Engineering. We looked at it and we said: “Yuck! We don’t like it, and
Harold sort of pulled out another design from his notebook. It was basically a
design that Harold and I had worked on while he was a student. The idea was
formulated while writing the book Computer Structures with Allen Newell. The
idea was an “aha”[2] for very general registers
and how they could operate as stack pointers, index registers, accumulators, and
program counters. On the physical side it was centered around another “aha”[3]
or the idea of the Unibus, another concept that came from Computer Structures.
These two ideas were really marketed by DEC against DG when it was introduced in
1970. Andy Knowles drove the marketing.
DKA: And you actually came back then to Digital.
GB: I’d been at Carnegie and
then came back in 72 just as the next generation models were being planned. I
was planning to take on a visiting professorship in Australia, but Ken said:
“Come back and run engineering. We’ve got so much going on and nobody can
control it.”
DKA: When you left to go to
Carnegie did you think that was the end of your time with Digital?
GB: No, I consulted for
Digital and it wasn’t until 72 that I saw the necessity to return.
DKA: But did you want to spend
the rest of your career teaching and being academic?
GB: When I left DEC in 66, I
knew that I was tired of building computers and I wanted to think about them. If
you look at it historically, I sat out a dull period when small and medium scale
ICs took over for discrete circuits. The
first ICs weren’t very big -- we were about the size of DEC’s modules. But
in ‘71, Intel’s 4004 was introduced as the first microprocessor.
And those weren’t interesting to anyone who built a computer. They were
used to build calculators, scales, and traffic controllers, but they were
nowhere as powerful as a PDP-8.
The
Intel introduction was characteristic of what I posited to be a Theory of
Computer Evolution that is sort of a corollary to Moore’s Law in 1972-75.
It’s what happens when there are just enough transistors on a chip to form a
lower priced, new computer that can do something useful.
DKA: So you came back at a time
when you could make that kind of transition at Digital.
GB: Yeah. I came back exactly
to do one-chip computers or to do integrated circuit computers. Within a year,
we were on a path to build an integrated circuit computer.
I remember my first trip to Silicon Valley in the summer of 72. I met the
Intel guyDKA: my first meeting with
Bob Noyce who invented the IC. I tried to get them to take the PDP-8:
“Please won’t you build this PDP-8 on a chip computer for us and make
it a standard? We will buy chips and make systems and you can sell the chips to
others.”
It
turns out this was a constant battle I had within DEC with Ken and most of the
Operations Committee. I tried
unsuccessfully to convince them to get other chip manufacturers involved in
building chips for us. The situation occurred for all the computers, but
eventually Intersil was allowed to build the “8”, and Harris was licensed to
build a small “11”. However, we
did get Western Digital to build an “11” that we sold.
Unfortunately, they were not licensed to sell it, so while the “11”
did well, it failed to become a standard.
DKA: Now you had seen innovation at Digital in many different stages. How
would you describe the culture and the approach that Digital brought to design
the VAX computers compared to the earlier phases of innovation? Was it just
larger and more complicated? Was it a different approach? How would you
characterize the evolution of the company?
GB: While I was there, the
company didn’t change very much, especially from a cultural standpoint. DEC
was an incredibly open company during those years with free communication
throughout the company. And so when we did VAX, and it didn’t mean there
weren’t engineering camps and wars and politics, it was still open and people
kind of knew where everybody stood. It wasn’t a guarded environment or totally
political. It wasn’t protected. You knew what was happening. You might not
like a project, but you knew what the other guys were doing.
There
was a period of a year when we really stewed over the question of whether to
extend the PDP-10 architecture and use all its software or build from the
PDP-11. We actually built a small PDP-10. I let that process go on for a year.
It was a process of examining what we should do from all angles, and especially
talking to customers. At that point I ran all of engineering. There were product
lines, or marketing lines that sold computers into various markets such as
laboratories, education, industrial control, commercial banking, telephone
companies, and to OEMs.
When
I came back from CMU in June 1972 to run engineering I didn’t get this
responsibility. Ken assigned me to
run memory and power supply engineering, probably the hardest jobs in the
company. No one wanted to do it, and I knew very little about either.
I didn’t know about power supplies, I didn’t know about memory, but I
learned a lot more about circuits than I probably ever wanted to.
I
had the title of VP of Engineering, and so I got involved in all the issues at
the staff level. Throughout the company every marketing group had its own
engineering, so what was happening was all these projects were getting formed
with no coherence – especially in software that was sometimes used to
differentiate the product lines. Then finally after about a year and a half I
said, “Enough. I want all these engineers to report to me.” I proposed to
make it very simple. And that was the beginning of really pulling them together.
Our
first strategic thing was to transition from the PDP-11.
It just didn’t have the addressing power to let us go on. We had built
the 11/45 and the 11/70 and these were fine machines, but you could not program
them because of the addressing limits. So the question became “Should we
extend the 11 or should we take the PDP-10 which was already fine and use that
as the base.” We stewed over that question nearly a year in engineering. I
don’t remember what the catalyst was but at one point I said enough.
We’ve looked at all the facts in every possible way, we’re going to
extend the 11 – not base it on the 10 – because all of our customers and
our main line of business is 11-based. Just a few more than a thousand
10s were built. There’s just not a good way to do the same things we’re
doing with the “11” using the “10” and its software.
So
on April 1, 1975 I pulled a group together we called theVAX A group. VAX A was
the mailing list and there were 6 of us. We took moved together on the 3rd
floor of Building 12, almost at the same spot I had when I came to DEC in 1960.
My main office was on the first floor with Ken.
DKA: Of course the company is
now at that stage was much bigger …
GB: I think roughly quarter of
a billion of revenue.
DKA: We can just talk about now how you brought that VAX A group together
and that decision.
GB: So we determined we were
going to extend the “11” and not work on the “10”. I brought these guys
together and we started doing the architecture work. Bill Strecker was the chief
architect of VAX. He had been working on the idea, and had outlined the
alternatives -- how much of the “11” do you want and how close do you want
it to be to an “11”? We called
the resulting architecture “culturally compatible with PDP-11”.
I
named the project VAX-11[4]
or virtual address extension to the “11” to keep us on track. It was going
to be an evolution on the “11”. The way we dealt with compatibility was to
put a PDP-11 in the instruction set to run all the
RSX-11 software. This gave us a tremendous head start on software as well
as a base. VAX ran a lot of PDP software for a long time, including many
compilers. This allowed us to get
all kinds of software done in another environment and then simply moved over
rather than having to do it all from scratch.
This
story was repeated at Microsoft when Dave Cutler, a member of VAX A, went to
Microsoft to invent Microsoft’s NT. He
made that system also compatible with the PC hardware and all the apps. In that
case, it was nearly impossible because of the lack of discipline and definition
of the PC and the various interfaces because of the way the PC evolved in a
chaotic, free market. Microsoft was left to make it all these loosely compatible
components work! I claim nobody but
Dave could have done this.
DKA: So that was a strategy
that appropriate for a company with an established base of customers, an
established body of software that was an enormous investment, and yet was
beginning to take advantage of the some of the new capabilities like the ICs and
large scale integration.
GB: Yeah. Especially larger memories. Remember VAX had to be built because
the 11 ran out of address bits. RISC
hadn’t come in yet. Dave Cutler asked me a few years ago: “Why didn’t we
do RISC?” and I said: “Remember how much memory we had, how long it took for
us to have enough memory, and how long we would have had to wait before we could
build a RISC type machine because the RISC transition didn’t occur until 1985.
So we had a 10 years of “What are we going to do for revenue?” problem.
During this time, and RISC is really not an architecture kind of question
of “Oh god, you are stupid not to build this way!” but it’s a question of
what you can do in the compiler and the cost and availability of a memory
hierarchy. So it’s not a religious or intellectual debate, as much of the RISC
advocates phrased it. It’s a plain old engineering question of memory cost and
having large, fast memories for caches. To fundamentally make RISC work you need
to have big caches because you are fundamentally running microcode in an open
fashion. It used more bits per program. In fact,
RISC versus CISC, ignores the fact it took about twice as much memory to
say the same thing. And so I’ll say VAX was the ultimate CISC machine.
I
maintained the goals and constraints of VAX and how it was going to be put
together in a document called the VAX Blue Book, and it contains this whole
question of micro programming – basically the idea was that we would put
everything we possibly could into microcode to run faster and take less bits
that the equivalent procedure calls. So
VAX had instructions to queue for the operating system, an elaborate memory
management system, and, of course, all the floating point routines. VAX also had
decimal arithmetic that COBOL needed. It
was probably the best COBOL machine every built, but the initial apps used it as
a FORTRAN machine. A decade later, you would not do it that way. You would do
these as subroutines that are called by ordinary programs.
DKA: So you really had a
different kind of team to do the VAX in terms of your integration of all the
engineers from the application areas and from a migration strategy. Let me ask
you to put on your hat as an entrepreneur again - how would you characterize the
working of that team in putting that machine together?
GB: It’s the way I recommend engineering projects be done in an
entrepreneurial setting --there were only 6 people in that group. We didn’t
want any more people. You can’t deal with any more at the beginning of a
project. Every time that you are doing something new and different, where you
haven’t defined it yet, the worst thing you can have in a project is too many
people at that critical startup phase. You have to manage that very slowly.
That’s why we were limited to only half a dozen people. We had NO marketing
people. Every two weeks we had a
group called VAX B that was a room full of about 25 people. The six of us
communicated with a lot of other people, of course. But basically we worked
together to define what it was going to be, and then the 25 would comment and
sort of oversee us. It had only a couple of marketing people, and we used them
to find out whether people needed this or that. The only customer we talked to
was Ken Thompson of Bell Labs. He was hardly a customer, but rather a developer
who was helpful in what we needed in order to run UNIX.
VAX
was in the same architectural style as the PDP-11 and distinct from the IBM
architectures. And a lot of that comes from how IO is done, and how to deal with
multiple processors. A
program could reach out and do something directly with the periphery was
what made it powerful. And the 360 was the one where IO channels were always
working, lots of protocol, lots of overhead designed for throughput at the
expense of response time. My
philosophy of IO was totally different than IBM’s.
Ironically IBM is finally coming out of all of this with the philosophy
that DEC has always used, which is not having specialized weird computers doing
IO. Just one kind that does it all. And then if you need more of those you put
more of them in. It’s much easier to do. But the mainframe kind of mentality
of cascading many weird computers with their own instruction sets and software
support is a pain in the ass. It’s just not the way to do it.
I
was consulting with Siemens three years ago about their minicomputer
architecture. I asked about an elaborate communications option: “Well this is
a board to do all the communications and protocols.” I asked how much the
board cost: “Well it cost 3000 dollars.” It had two or three computers,
following the old mainframe mentality of “we’re offloading the main
microprocessor.” I said: “You realize that microprocessor is much more
powerful than any one of these and cost less. That, in fact, what its doing is
delaying doing the communication work. You’ve got plenty of cycles in the main
processors, and you’re creating an enormous number of bottlenecks and
expenses, and the guys running the operating system are just tearing their hair
out because they can’t get at the I/O.” I think that war has been won for
simple, direct I/O, and using multiple micros. On
the other hand, we are going around the loop again as each device becomes an
independent computer and the entire system is now a network.
DKA: Now the VAX was an enormously successful product for Digital. How would
you look at that phase in the history of computing and why that product reached
out and was so enormously successful.
GB: Okay, I’m going to tell you one other story about the VAX. We started
April of ‘75, and first betas were introduced late ‘77 early ‘78. One or
two of the first ones went to John Pople[5]
at Carnegie Mellon University – for his work in computational chemistry to
replace the Univac 1108 batch system that he was being limited by. I insisted
that CMU get the first ones as scientific users. Other early machines went to Lawrence Laboratories, and the
NY Institute of Technology who had the leading graphics group. VAX was almost
the first virtual memory machine. Bill Poduska, who founded Prime, had extended
the old DDP-16 architecture from 3Cs and Honeywell to have a 32-bit virtual
memory, but ours was a totally new architecture. And we found that all these
users were just floored by the machine. There were a couple of other 32-bit
machines, but the VAX really captured mind share of the technical community
including computer science departments. With
paging came the ability to run large programs, and it out performed every other
machine except the large IBM 360s and Cray 7600 on floating point. “Give us
more” was the reaction.
I
made my first trip to Japan in the summer of 78 and talked about it. After that
trip, our family spent three weeks scuba diving in Tahiti. During that time I
conceived the VAX Strategy given in Figure 2, another “aha”
[6]
as a way to focus all of our engineering effort on VAX and to reduce the
plethora of computer models. We had
plans to build new 11s and 10s upward and downward to compete with VAX, and the
“8” was still being sold. I went back and said: “Folks, I propose the VAX
Strategy to replace all of these efforts so that we end up with a single
architecture. We will continue some
of the machines for which there’s a commitment.”
“We’re going to make only VAXs. We’re going to extend a couple of
11s that are in process, but we’re not going to do any more. We’ll extend he
one chip “11” downward we were doing – and use that as a controller.
Let’s get rid of the PDP-11 that are aimed at competing with the VAX-11/780,
let’s get one or more semiconductor company to take it over and make it a chip
that anyone can use.” The reaction waDKA:
“We can’t do that, the PDP-11 and architecture is the corporate jewel!” I
said: “We’ve got to get somebody else to invest. We can’t afford
everything. People still hadn’t come to grips with the notion of standards and
the fact that the architecture needed to be a standard to survive against the
Intel and Motorola chips.”
In
December ‘78 I went to the board with one slide describing how I envision this
computing environment. I described how we can attack IBM and offer different
styles and range of computers. Ironically, in 1975 I had written another article
on the Theory of the Evolution of Computers that I just mentioned. Machines form
in price bands and personal computers are now forming.
It was a three-tier model: the corporate centralized mainframe we called
glasshouse computing; the departmental mini -- its put around in the various
departments serving a department or single function -- and then all the
computers for the desktop that we now call personal computers or PCs. And all of
those levels are connected together by some magical interconnect -- which at
that point wasn’t Ethernet because we hadn’t put the Ethernet deal together,
but I knew we needed Ethernet and we had two or three alternatives internally.
Figure
1. VAX Strategy created in fall 1978.
We
were also starting projects in cluster interconnect for connecting machines
together using a new interconnection bus, CI (Computer Interconnect) in order to
get more power similar to what Tandem introduced in 1975.
Today, IBM has introduced its Sysplex and the UNIX variant companies are
trying to build clustered machines. Again, 10 years after we had a good system!
HP is still trying to introduce it and Sun is talking about it. How
do you connect multiple independent computers? Well, DEC introduced that in
‘80. I’d say it was really solid in the 84/85 timeframe. So here these guys
are introduced them a year or so ago, and it’ll take them a good three or four
years to get those products working. It’s nontrivial connecting a bunch of
computers to behave as a single computer.
So
the big thing about VAX was really two thingDKA: One, was architecture. It was to be compatible up and down the
line. Nothing different. The 360 did the same thing with a range of different powered models. The big difference
was that VAX was aimed at different styles of use. The 360s were aimed at all
the glasshouseDKA: little
glasshouses, big glasshouses, and huge glasshouses. But it was still the same
kind of batch and remote job entry computing and with different operating
systems. In the case of VAX, it was
big glasshouses, closets, and desktops, and we wanted to be able to run the same
programimage. There’s got to be one operating system. The 360 had different
operating systems. We said no, the value is in the software. Its going to be
one, we’re going to run that image across that range so basically anyone can
compute anywhere depending on do I want response time, do I want throughput, or
do I want cross performance. And so that was the basic idea behind the VAX
Strategy, which is more of this is all going to be tied together, this is all
going to be a single unified architecture.
That
whole thing lasted at DEC until the open system. In fact the day I left DEC in
1973, I said: “Look we’ve got VAX now, we’ve got exactly what I
envisioned, the clusters work, we’ve got the one chip processors coming down
the pike. They’re not here yet, but we know what they’ll do.
Now you’ve got to get rid of it because of the whole business of open
architecture.” UNIX was there and that is a different story. I don’t believe
UNIX is open! UNIX is just another name for propriety operating system. But at
least the threat was present, and DEC did it all very well until the UNIX open
myth was established by SUN -- I think that was probably 89 or so. DEC was
riding high in 88-89, and then it got into trouble and this other factors set
in. But it was simply that strategy. That’s what made it all work and
basically there wasn’t anything to do. The lovely thing about the strategy was
it was just one page with two or three pages of implications such as what we
need to develop or stop, the work on networking, and a few pages on why it beats
IBM and how it addresses the market issues. And that was the basic model for it.
And there were events that happened after the first version in 1978 that had to
be attended to -- the PC hit.
The
Beginning of the End of Digital: PCs and other fiascos
DKA: That was the next question. People have said Digital misunderstood what
was happening with the PC … it missed the boat. Do you think that’s
legitimate?
GB: Oh I think that’s
totally legitimate. I think DEC totally missed the boat on the PC.
DKA: Why was that?
GB: Well, one reason was we
were focused on VAX. During this period when we were doing VAX, Small Systems
Engineering was working on personal computers. They weren’t working on VAX,
they were working on the PDP-11 extension, they were working on the Rainbow that
was X86 CPM-based, and a PDP-8 for word processing. So we had three personal
computer projects. But a strategy to have done a better job was exactly the same
work that was needed to make VAX so coherent. I did that work and winnowed it
down and was working on the VAX side. I ran the others and so you can blame me
for the whole thing. But I had a little bit of help.
Ken
was really running Small Systems Engineering. And Ken’s big problem was that
he really didn’t understanding computing at a visceral level, at an economic
level, and he also didn’t understand the industry and what was happening. The
industry was moving fast. I’d say if I’d been more involved, I probably
would have sensed what was happening and you can bet we would have had an IBM
compatible PC the day IBM had it running Microsoft MS DOS. Exactly the same
thing. So I’ll say, sure, that’s what happened. But after a year, after two
years, after three years the whole story was clear. I went back to DEC a year or
so after I left in 1983 and talked with the Operations Committee, the half dozen
people who ran the company and said: “Look, the war is over.
You’ve got to be the strongest one in there. Get rid of all this shit.
You can’t support them. Be the best PC company out there.” And that was
totally compatible with VAX. The VAX had nothing to do with it. DEC was a big
company, they could run and have a whole division. That is a great story of --
how do you allow entrepreneurial stuff to exist in a large company? How do you
support it? But they were still fooling around with the Rainbow. I mean that
should have been killed. A year after the PC hit, it was so clear the game was
over. And DEC never got it. They
just didn’t get it. And I hate to say it, but anyone should have gotten it.
Running
the VAX and going to 10-12 billion dollars from where we were when I left at 2
or 3 billion took zero thought. There was no innovation at all in that evolution
because it was all programmed, it was all determined, it was all set down in
this one-page memo -- this is what we’re doing. And personally the big reason
that I left was because of the same reason I left to go to Carnegie Tech, I was
tired. It really was a joy running these 6000 engineers and I loved working with
them, but it really was a conflict between Ken and myself. And I thought my body
was stronger but then I had a heart attack in 83, and that’s what made me say
this is too much. It’s too hard for me to do things. Changing engineering and
directing engineers wasn’t hard, but fighting someone about this is the way
its going to be wasn’t worth dying for.
DKA: Too much stress.
GB: It was too much stress.
And it shouldn’t have been stressful at all. Who knows, Ken is an engineer
too. He’s just not a COMPUTER engineer. He’s a power supply engineer. He’s
a wonderful packaging engineer. But he shouldn’t have anything to do with
computers.
DKA: Because of the detail …
GB: Because there’s this stuff called software. There’s this thing
called the industry - how does the industry react, the understanding of the
dynamics of it. He loves to package things and he’s great at packaging
physical design. He’s done some very beautiful things, and he was successful
before he personally got involved in driving the PC. After he got involved in
it, we went through five vice presidents of the Small Systems Group designing
the PC. At one point Ken said: “You’ve got to run this and have these people
report to you.” And I said: “Ken, I really want to get VAX stuff done. I
can’t really have six more people reporting to me.” At the time I had at
least 6 or 7 reports running the different sized groups and we were doing very
complicated stuff. We were doing VSLI, we were trying to put a VAX on a chip, we
were doing real hard engineering not just plugging a goddamn 8086 on a board.
And the marketing and PC marketing stuff was in utter disaster during that time.
It was legend. In fact, I can look back and say maybe the best thing was that
they were all preoccupied with fooling around with the PC. The marketing guys
that sat in the Operations Committee were all arguing about who’s going to be
able to sell this or that, who gets credit, and on and on. Meanwhile with Ken
driving everything, they were all looking for credit, for pricing, and DEC was
opening stores and all kinds of bullshit like that.
One
of the things I remember was the Ethernet story and going to the Operations
Committee for approving the announcement. I had let Ethernet go through and we
were making the deal with Intel and Xerox. We went in and said: “Well, we’re
going to agree on a standard.” It was no big deal, because I didn’t want it
to be a big deal. It was a big announcement.
Bob Noyce, I and Dave Lidde from Xerox introduced it in New York,
Amsterdam, and London.
GB: By the way, on these
interviews --how much personality should come in?
DKA: Well I think this issue is important and it’s an issue that does tie
to personality. I think when it becomes significant in shaping… to a certain
extent people want to know about the people.
But my goal is to try to look at how personal preferences, personal
decisions, strategic decisions affect the flow of the history of the industry.
And I think the issue that you’re talking about is clearly one where you had a
company that took a certain strategy toward the small systems that ultimately
was shown to be a failure, and its important to try to understand why that
happened and how that happened. At a certain point I think that what you say is
right when the strategy ... there was a while when it wasn’t clear how much a
company like Digital could control the market and could have its proprietary
system, but as you say …
GB: Ken was a fantastic CEO at one point but he changed, and I almost know
the day he changed. I can almost contribute it to a woman -- Julie Pita, a
Business Week reporter, who challenged him with, “Well, do you think CEOs are
real leaders or are just sitting there?” And god damn it, he absolutely
changed. He got a closeness and involvement to the personal computing and small
systems that was his downfall. Prior to this time he really was effective, he
managed the company. He tried to manage engineering more than I ever wanted him
to, but he was never in any of my space. He didn’t know anything about ICs or
their design, or computer design. He always focused on the physical stuff and he
always focused on terminals and things that you could see or touch. He never got
near questions like what does a program do, or what does a network do, or how to
build them? But when it came to the
package or the appearance he had strong feelings and there was a constant pain
in terms of dealing with him. So
trying to manage in this environment was a constant string of brush fires.
I was loath to tell him what he wanted to hear and then do the opposite
as the other VPs did. I was the only one who told him “no”.
DKA: So that could work when you had somebody that could make the right
decisions down in the organization, but when you had people that weren’t
strong enough to stand up to him and he didn’t trust them, bad decisions could result?
GB: When I left he was involved in all decisions and there were plenty of
people to deal with. People were constantly gaming Ken in terms of how you deal
with this man. And after I left there was sort of a triumvirate running DEC -
the head of engineering/manufacturing, Jack Smith, and Jack Shields running all
the marketing, sales, and service organizations. Ken had by all of his cunning
ended up having these two guys, both of whom were disasters, in their own ways,
being the team to lead DEC into a significant battle.
DKA: DEC’s relationship to
the PC. You talked some about the fact that yes they had …
GB: DEC had the three programs
going - using the PDP-8 for word processing, building a PDP-11 that would be a
standard or be its architecture, and then using the Intel architecture.
The later was the favored one because you could make the lowest cost
machines. And in fact that was an era right after we had been using the Z80 to
make PCs running CPM. And then there was a follow-on to it. Somebody favored
using the Z80 or Z80 follow-on that was the 8088 -- and that was the Rainbow --
and we had the PDP-11 that was the main line.
The
PC was different than other machines because it was the first time a standard
got established outside of the company, and you did have a single architecture
as opposed to the traditional past of a vertically integrated industry. You have
the software, the hardware, the chips, and you have the whole line and then you
dominate the industry. The PC wouldn’t have taken off without the
standardization and stratification of horizontal levels of integration. If there
had been IBM and then if DEC had been successful with either MicroVAX or PDP-11
and that had all been stable, the PC industry would be nothing today. Because
you wouldn’t have had the volume that you have and the single standard that
you have that Microsoft defined for software. Microsoft and Intel. Forget IBM in
the whole thing, they were just the catalyst. In fact everything that IBM did
since the first PC has been rejected - the micro-channel and OS2 is no
competitor.
Just
looking at the variants of UNIX tells us that proprietariness doesn't work …
one of the things Ken got right in the mid 80s was to declare “UNIX is Snake
Oil”. With unique variants the
manufacturers keep high prices, but they get no applications market, and
customers have to do their own thing on variants. Unfortunately, people bought snake oil.
DKA: But DEC had been successful by as you say having a vertical domination,
and the notion initially to maybe extend this to the PC market wasn’t crazy
… but never realizing when the game was over …
GB: The game was over a year after IBM announced and everybody started
making IBM compatible PCs. There was a compatible industry, the whole market
went sort of straight up, and software was forming around it. The game was over
and anybody could see that. But these guys didn’t see it. In fact they still
had the ego to say; “Oh, we can come back in there.” And everything they
said was always wrong. I told them we might have a chance if we got a better
bus, we got a better interconnect, make that all standard and make that all
available. Their attitude waDKA:
“Nope, that’s ours. How do we charge for that?” And the irony is that we
taught IBM how to do all of this with the Unibus. It was a standard, others
connected peripherals to it and we had no compulsion at all to inhibit them
because the market grew accordingly. But yet with the PC or the PRO, we didn't
said: “Hey lets make that standard and let anybody who wants to make
peripherals.” But rather: “No, that’s ours!” It was a control issue, a
proprietary issue.
When
we were just about to announce Ethernet the Operations Committee looked at the
announcement and said: “Wait! Why are we giving this to the world?” And I
said first off we weren’t giving it to the world. We got it from Xerox, we
participated in the evolution of it, Xerox owns the Ethernet patent, and we
evolved the standard beyond that. We were just part of it, it was not our
ownership, and second is we wanted this to be a standard. If everyone is out
there is connecting using different kind of wires, how are they things ever
going to play together or get others to spend money to install the wiring in the
first place? They said: “Well, we want only our computers on it.” I said:
No, you don’t want only your computers on it because everyone’s got their
own telephone system. They are all different.
Is was this whole paradox of standards being a double-edged sword.
You’ve got to have them and yet you want control. You can’t have it both
ways. Unless its de facto ala IBM
mainframe software and Microsoft. Microsoft does it totally by market dominance.
And that’s the ideal. Because from a standards standpoint the worst thing
going is having a standard that’s just a “government standard” that really
isn’t good. It gets there by a big committee process. It doesn’t hold at all
and its very hard to maintain the standards. But de facto with a single vendor
driving the standard is ideal, because than you can drive it as fast as you can
and that vendor determines it together with the market placing their demands to
improve things. I personally think the Microsoft standard is the best way to
evolve computing. The PC wouldn’t have happened without that interface layer -
every application guy puts his software to that standard. And then similarly
that’s why we have a thousand or so PC vendors.
DKA: You had had - you Digital - had not quite the same clout, but a
significant clout with your minicomputer line …
GB: We had a de facto standard. Yes, VAX was a standard. A whole software
industry had strung up around the VAX, the AS400, IBM’s MVS. That was the day
a single hardware company could set a standard and that would become the de
facto standard for an industry. But in the case of VAX there were no
competitors, no alternative suppliers. In the case of IBM mainframes, there were
Amdahl, Futjisu, and Hitachi, - they were all alternative suppliers for
platforms. They all had to use IBM operating system software, of course. Because
that’s the interface layer, just like Microsoft sets the interface layer for
the PC. But what has made the computer evolve so fast is when you can establish
these interface layers.
DKA: So again asking you to put
on your hat as somebody who looks at entrepreneurialship. This critical time
when Digital should have been going through a change in approach to the market
and yet failed to maybe see the opportunities that it should have seen. How does
that look as you look back on it? What were the critical errors and mistakes
that were made, when seeds were laid for the kind of trouble the company got
into years later?
GB: Okay, there was the whole PC question. That’s one that should have
been very, very clear because you had Compaq forming, you had the system guys
like HP out there, and the standards were absolutely established. The industry
was set and DEC should have been the dominant PC supplier.
That’s what I can never come to grips with it – why that didn’t
happen? And DEC is now getting to be strong in PCs. I mean they’ve gone up and
down with it. When I was at NSF, Ken sent me a particular PC and I said this
doesn’t look like a PC. Well you’ve got to do this and that. And I said wait
a second, I gotta do nothing. I get software from these floppies and you’re
either a standard, you’re compatible or you’re not . If you have to tell me
about you CAN do this, forget it, I don’t want it. I’m not going to do
anything except turn it on. You’ve got to enter into a market where it’s all
the same.
DKA: So that was one error, but
there were others things …
GB: That was one error, but
the big error, the big thing that happened to DEC subsequently was failing to
deal with UNIX. We had a very strong UNIX group, but allowing UNIX to compete
across the board with VAX/VMS, wasn’t allowed.
There wasn’t a way to do that. UNIX was sold as a last resort.
And that could have been a reasonable strategy. But DEC was always very
paranoid about that. About whether they wanted those things out there or not.
Next,
I think what really got DEC into the most significant trouble was the way it
dealt with the transition from to RISC and to a 64-bit address. Dave Cutler had
an architecture called Prism that he had designed at the Seattle lab. That was
all done, the manuals were done, people were working on chips, and the program
was going along well. Meanwhile, MIPS came to DEC and said: “Gee, you’re not
there with RISC or your one chip VAXen, you need a RISC machine for your
workstations. Why don’t you build a workstation on RISC?” And DEC did,
introduced it, and said: “Oh well, we’ll stay with MIPS.” Then they killed
the Prism project and Mr. Cutler left. They killed it, but Ken didn’t know
that it wasn’t dead. It was still alive in the semiconductor group and it
sprung up as Alpha. And so that came back several years later. Meanwhile other
people within the company were looking at building a fast MIPS architecture
machine including a group in Palo Alto which built something called BIPS – a
billion instructions per second processor. In fact they have one. They had one
about three years ago. So all of those projects never came to market.
And
that’s why I said when I left the company that you’ve got to get rid of VAX,
you’ve got to go open. The companies that I then started and worked with were
open systems companies. They were all UNIX. But it was deciding to go to Alpha
or deciding to do Prism, then killing Prism and going to MIPS, and then coming
back to Alpha and killing MIPS again. DEC could have survived any of those
decisions. It could have stayed with Prism, got it out there a year earlier, and
been significant in the marketplace. It could have switched to MIPS, and I think
that would have probably been the best strategy. But coming in late, having to
build these very fancy FAB facilities to get the performance was really costly.
And
today, there is no way I see that DEC can afford to be a semiconductor supplier
or microprocessor supplier when they have to build their own, use their own, FAB
facilities. So that was a significant error in judgment and decision making.
On the other hand, the world is better off because Dave Cutler went to
Microsoft and built NT for a much larger market.
Another
error in judgment was building the last ECL-based machine - the 9000 - that was
introduced. The machine was really late, and the transition from ECL and CMOS
had already taken place. The 9000 should never had been started, even though I
have to admit being responsible for signing the original development agreement
with Trilogy, Gene Amdahl's follow-on company. It was a big, hot, package
mega-engineering project that was really going after the IBM kind of SLT
technology, a very difficult technology that came out of Gene Amdahl’s
project. But again that was one that should have been stopped because the
company burned a lot of money and a lot of resources that didn’t get them
anywhere. And it also got them thinking of big mainframe like structures as
opposed to moving into multiprocessors. Cray Research and Cray Computer also
failed to make the CMOS transition and it cost them their lives as the premier
supercomputer company. In 2000,
three Japanese vendors supply vector supercomputers to the world.
But
multiprocessors were my favorites, too-- since the first PDP-6. When I left, we
had an advanced development project to put 64 Microvax chips in a single,
multiprocessor computer. It then
went from an "AD" to being a development project and then back again.
If I’d stayed[7]
...
DKA: You would have pushed that
one.
GB: Yeah. That would have been the way to go because if you want to be in
the mainframe business then that’s the way to go mainframe because that’s
the model we have today. In the company
that I left DEC to start – Encore – we introduced one of the first
"multi". That is a 20-processor VAX-like architecture machine that ran
UNIX. And it ran circles around any
of the UNIX boxes or nearly every other computer. Today what you see is the
downsizing market -- Sequent uses 20 processors, DEC has a 6 or 8 processor
Alpha, Sun with 20 processors and HP with 12. You hear IBM saying they’re
going to introduce one. We did that. Our first product at Encore came out ten
years ago – we made our first delivery in 1985. I wrote an article in Science
in 1985 and declared that multiple microprocessor, shared memory computers is
the only way to build a computer. This was completely prophetic. But the irony
is that we had that project going before I left DEC and it never saw the light
of day. It wasn’t pushed. People didn’t understand the commercial
marketplace as opposed to the uniprocessor. Because transaction processing and
databases all work fine with that multiprocessor structure.
DKA: Tell me about that …
GB:
So there was another missed opportunity that would have solved all their
problems. It would have cost peanuts compared to the 9000 and it would have
gotten DEC as the dominant downsizing supplier instead of SUN and HP.
DKA: Well tell me about this
transition. You left. You had had a physical problem with your heart attack. You
had been under stress and you were ready to try something new. You wanted to go
back to doing something entrepreneurial? Is that what you expected when you left
or you didn’t know?
GB: I didn’t know. Ken
Fisher said come and join Encore. Henry Burkhardt the founder of DG said:
“Yeah, lets do something fun - we’ll get some money and we’ll go start
companies. Or people will come to us and we’ll start companies.” I asked
what my responsibilities were and Ken said: “You have no responsibilities. I
don’t care if I ever see you.” That sounded fine by me. There was a plan,
however, for what Encore was going to be, and Ken wanted me to look over the
technical part of that plan. Aside from that I wasn’t doing a line engineering
job. Anyway, that plan didn’t work. The next two or three plans didn’t work.
But what finally worked was we acquired a group – from DEC – building a 20
processor system called the Multimax and that was introduced in ‘85. It was a
smaller version of the 64 processor. It wasn’t from the AD group doing the 64
processor so it didn’t take anything intellectually from DEC, but being in the
DEC engineering environment the guys probably knew about it. This group designed
the Multimax. We founded several other companies as part of Encore.
DKA: And what happened to that machine? I don’t know the history.
GB: Encore is still selling it, ten years later. And Encore still exists.[8]
They’re not a large company, and they go in and out of profitability. The
irony is that we built a complete entire computer company at Encore. We had
Multimax as the server, and it was scalable from 1 to 20 so it covered all of
DEC’s lines, except the low end, and then we built a concentrator for bringing
terminals into the environment, and we also built a CRT terminal that allowed
you to have multiple windows - it was a 21-inch terminal, like today’s modern
X terminals. We built X terminals three to five years before X terminals, before
there was an X protocol in fact. From
Multimax, we[9] proposed Ultramax, a 1,000
processor shared memory multiprocessor consisting of an interconnected hierarchy
of Multimaxes as part of DARPA’s Strategic Computing Initiative.
I don’t know whether Ultramax ever worked.
But
the tragedy was that the marketing people within Encore didn’t know how to
deal with any of the products. The first thing I said was this terminal has got
to be an OEM terminal, we’ve got to get it out in volume. We had established a
small entrepreneurial group, a few guys designed and set up
a production line for the terminal. It was a beautiful terminal, probably
the best terminal that’s ever been built.
It never got anywhere because the guys that we had in sales from Encore
had come out of a Prime field sales force and they only knew how to sell big
boxes.
So
this began my era of serious questioning of anybody who has the title of
marketing or sales. And that’s why I wrote so much about them in my book and
the seriousness of marketing and selling. These people didn’t have a clue
about how to market or sell products. That was one problem, but there’s a more
difficult one of people in organizations. There are people who can deal with the
whole birthing process of starting something new, but the vastness of large
organizations is the creation of a steady state. Someone once mis-quoted that
programmers were like light bulbs – you unscrew one and put another one in.
As
far as I’m concerned, modern corporations, are just filled mostly with light
bulbs. You know -- I need a bigger one, I need a new manager, do I have a 100
watt manager? I unscrew one over here and put a new one in, and this one burns
out and you throw it away, or you get rid of them or you move them into the dead
light bulb box. Because the company is in steady state. We’ve got to change
the process a little bit it because it isn’t working very well, and mostly in
engineering its “I’ve got to get rid of some cost.” We do something and
sure enough the processes are all broken, usually based on what you can do with
computers. You find out there’s a better way of doing the process. But the
vast part of the organization is steady state. It’s there forever. You can
take away the input or output and it’ll still be there. These people will
still come in and be in the offices.
Being
an entrepreneur, starting something from scratch, is totally different. And
people just can’t, just don’t like to do that. And when we started Encore we
brought these very expensive, light bulbs in and they wanted to sell stuff to
the people they already knew in big companies. Basically, you hire a salesperson
and their address book or contacts. Well we didn’t have anything to sell the
big companies. Or what we had to sell, they hadn’t seen before. That’s just
as bad. “Gee, I’ve got to have something that competes with this.” Well we
don’t have anything, this is better, this is different. “Well it’s not a
competitive.”
This
problem is addressed in my book, High Tech Ventures. Most of these products are
new, you’ve never seen this product before. What do you do? How do you do
something when it’s never existed. How do you build an organization that’s
never existed? How do you build a product that’s never existed? How do you get
this all to happen? And it’s very, very tricky. I know how to do it outside of
large companies. Doing it inside an existing company is very hard and a problem
that I have given up on.
DKA: Can it be done inside one’s company? Well, we’ve got to… let’s
answer that question on the next one.
GB: 3M is the only one that
seems to be able to create totally new products and divisions.
However, we should look about whether they create new products that sell
to new customers or new markets.
GB: We were talking about
entrepreneuring at Siemens, and how you do it. They’ve got a new CEO and
he’s gone through and tried to change things. And they’ve got 50 or so
divisions or business unit’s that have started, and these guys are director
level - one level down - and are supposed to be the change agents that try to do
it. But it’s unclear to me that a company
vastly more bureaucratic than any U.S. company, can change.
This
was at a time when Jim Gray and I were talking about scalable computers that can
be made from PCDKA: “Look,
computing is going to be vastly different and you’re not going to maintain the
margins that you have today.” After our meeting they are deciding to write a
manifesto to the president and say this is not going to make it, there’s too
much change, we’ve been steadily unprofitable and we are not going to be able
to get out of that. I told them: “Look, two more ratchets on Moore’s Law or
six years and you’re out of it, you’ll be so far out of it that it’s not
going to do you any good. You
can’t compete. Here’s the way the world is now. You just don’t get it.
It’s not the old style of business where you can control everything from the
government, technology, to your customers. Why do you need a 1000 people working
on UNIX? Why? They’re not adding value, they are just adding cost, and down
stream it’s costing your customers an enormous amount.”
DKA: So really, taking and dealing with those evolutionary changes in your
product lines particularly in this field becomes enormously difficult.
GB:.
Yes. The best news would be if the person running the company understands the
whole thing. He understands, I
suspect, viscerally that something is happening. I don’t know what the guys
beneath him know, how old they are, what they think. There’s tremendous
denial. Every time I look at what’s going to happen in the future, I can’t
believe it’s going to be this way. What’s the implication? The implications
are vast. And the cost structure has changed so much. And that’s what cost DEC
so much because they evolved to have a very big cost structure. Their numbers or
rather ratios had totally gotten out of control.
Anybody should have been able to see them because they had the lowest
productivity in the industry. Every part of the company got bloated when VAX was
going well and now there was just no way to off load the costs.
The
irony is I was just talking with another DEC alumnus at InternetWorld, and the
president and founder of the company and said: “I have stock in your company,
Ascend, from a venture fund investment.” He said, “You know, I used to work
for you.” And I said that’s
wonderful. I am so proud of the people who came out of engineering that have
started companies. The number
of people who came from DEC marketing and started companies I think is nil.
Especially the one’s that have been successful. I can’t think of a soul,
because I think the difference was the way the DEC marketing organization had to
operate as integrators across the company. Really what it trained was
politicians. Those poor guys had to go around and lobby with me to get their
product, they had to lobby with manufacturing to get resources or the right
people, and they had to lobby with sales to get sales time. So what have you
got? You don’t have entrepreneurs, you’ve got politicians.
Lobbyists. And that’s why they’ve done so poorly after they left DEC.
DKA: Now you went from Encore to a very different kind of position going to
Washington. And I guess that was looking at entrepreneurship or looking at new
ideas and trying to drive it. Tell us what you were trying to do at that
position.
GB: I look at it as another startup. Eric Bloch was the director of NSF and
had come from IBM. He had been
responsible for manufacturing the IBM 360.
I had met him when he was the catalyst from IBM, with Bob Noyce, to
establish the SRC (Semiconductor Research Consortium). His charter to me:
“Pull all of these various parts of NSF that do computing researc together and
create the directorate for computing – we’ll call it CISE for Computer and
Information Science and Engineering.” That was a tremendously exciting thing
to do. I loved it. It was a nice size group – about 50. Our budget was $120 -
130 million. I don’t know what the budget is today, probably $2 or $3 hundred
million. That was just a great time, -- to get the various divisions in place
and to establish their direction and priorities.
DKA: But the culture was a very different culture. You worked in private
industry and now you were working in government…
GB: I don’t know what it’s like now. And I don’t think I could have
dealt with NSF under anybody but Bloch. He had already been there for two or
three years and changed NSF already. He really had influenced that organization
enormously, in delegating responsibilities, cutting through bureaucracy,
everything. NSF doesn’t have a departmental boss, it isn’t under the
Department of Commerce, so we didn’t have a lot of hierarchy. There was no
hierarchy above us. It had a board of directors, the National Science Board. So
in a sense, it was only a thousand person organization. So it was really quite
small. And I’d say entrepreneurial, too, at that time, even though every
congressman and senator tried to influence the outcome for their constituents.
DKA: But your goal was to define an area but also to define a strategy or
help come up with a strategy. Why don’t you talk about what that was and why
you thought that was an appropriate strategy for computing at this time.
GB: Right. In fact I had a lot of push back on it. The first thing was just get the organization in place. The supercomputing centers were part of that, thank goodness, and one of the goals was to integrate supercomputing into computer science, which to a certain extent I totally failed at along with every successor running CISE. But I did influence supercomputing and spent a lot of time just working on the program, pulling it together, and building a strategy: “Folks, we’re all going to run UNIX. We need standardization because it is a question of programs. To use supercomputers you’ve got to have a vast array of applications. I want to integrate that into the computer science community where the folks all speak some dialect of UNIX” They had been running a homegrown DOE operating system at the San Diego and Illinois centers. First off, we are not spending any money evolving and maintaining a piece of code that the Department of Energy maintains. It’s stupid. Get rid of it. There was a lot of resistance. I said I want compatibility up and down the line so I can take a