Conference 7.286::digital

    	Hummm...
    
    	...a legend in hardware design joins the world's leading software
    	company...less than 2 weeks after a major strategic alliance
    	is announced between this company and the world's #3 hardware 
    	company which he helped create...   nnnaaaaa...its all just a
    	coincidence...
    
    	TT.

>>    	...a legend in hardware design joins the world's leading software
>>    	company...less than 2 weeks after a major strategic alliance
>>   	is announced between this company and the world's #3 hardware 
>>    	company which he helped create...   nnnaaaaa...its all just a
>>    	coincidence...
    
    Actually, I think that is is (probably) just a coincidence.
    
    If you read Gordon's writings, he doesn't think Digital has any
    prospects at all (e.g. "They've flown the plane into the ground").
    If you've heard him spout off in person (like I have) you would conclude
    that he despises Digital in a personal (and immaturely petulant, I might
    add) way.
    
    I don't think Gordon would condition any major decisions on Digital.
    
    (I'm not condoning Gordon's attitude, by the way;  he's a unique,
     emotional guy who seems to be grinding some axes towards Digital;
     I'm just reporting his behavior relevant to this question).
    
    Microsoft, on the other hand, is energetically collecting and seems to
    be  trying to rebuild Digital's software brain trust, as well as some
    of Digital's old systems braintrust that understood software issues: 
    Lampson, Gray, Bernstein, Berenson, Heinen, Cutler (old news), as well
    as others.  And now Gordon.
    
    I expect that it's also partly because Microsoft now has enough
    critical mass to attract trophy "big names" like Gordon.

> If you've heard him spout off in person (like I have) you would conclude
> that he despises Digital in a personal (and immaturely petulant, I might
> add) way.
    
  Gee, just like Cutler! :-)

                                   Atlant

    I seem to remember that there was this tremendous rivalry in the Early
    80's between the 2 big system architects Digital employed.  The projects
    were someting like 'Jupiter' and 'Neptune' or some such trash.  One of
    these architectures was selected as the corporate flagship and the
    other unceremoniously dumped.  There was, aledgedly, no love lost
    between these 2 guys.  The 'loser' stomped away mad and resigned.  The
    'winner' had a massive stroke within a few months later and, as
    therapy, took over the 'Computer Museum' and moved it to Boston.
    
    I'd like to have front row tickets to the show at Redmond, Washington. 
    But then, perhaps we all already have them.

    I'm just curious; how old is Gorden Bell?
    
    Deb

>    I seem to remember that there was this tremendous rivalry in the Early
>    80's between the 2 big system architects Digital employed.  The projects
>    were someting like 'Jupiter' and 'Neptune' or some such trash.  One of
>    these architectures was selected as the corporate flagship and the
>    other unceremoniously dumped.  There was, aledgedly, no love lost
>    between these 2 guys.  The 'loser' stomped away mad and resigned.  The
>    'winner' had a massive stroke within a few months later and, as
>    therapy, took over the 'Computer Museum' and moved it to Boston.

     Well, sort of.  But not really.
     
     There were two "large system" projects in the early 80's:  Jupiter and
     Venus.
     
     Jupiter was the 36 bit follow-on the the KL-10.   There was no meaningful
     rivalry between Jupiter and anyone else, except perhaps the rivalry
     between a mouse and the cats who are playing with it.   At that time, it
     was clear the Digital was committed to VAX, and that the ongoing 36 bit
     engineering projects were only prolonging the agony.
     
     Jupiter was cancelled because they couldn't make it work, and the company
     finally had to cut our losses and cancel Jupiter (and the 36 bit product
     line).
     
     Meanwhile, the annointed corporate flagship (VAX) was busy
     self-destructing.  The 11/780 was an aging, slow, uniprocessor
     architecture.  The 11/785 'kicker' had not been delivered.
     Clusters did not exist in any meaninful way.  The 11/730 and the
     MicroVAX I were not very usable.  And Venus, the high-end 11/780 follow-on,
     was in deep trouble.
     
     Gordon was dispatched to personally fix the Venus project.
     
     Venus got fixed, but I suppose Gordon got kind of stressed between Venus,
     reacting to Ken Olsen, and other corporate goings-on that you can read
     about in the book "The Ultimate Entrepreneur", because he soon had a
     massive heart attack skiing in the Rockies.
     
     Eventually, Clusters and the MicroVAX II and Nautilus came along to save
     Digital's bacon, but by that time Gordon had left for a more serene life.
     His 'therapy' was to get involved in a computer system start-up in
     Framingham, the name of which I can't even remember.
    
     It was Gordon's wife, Gwendolyn, who was involved in the Computer Museum
     in Boston, not Gordon.
     
     It was Ed DeCastro who stomped away mad when the PDP-11 was selected as
     the corporate flagship instead of his project (which eventually became
     the Data General 'Nova').  His therapy was to found Data General.
    
     Cutler also stomped away mad when his system architecture, PRISM, was
     cancelled.  His therapy was to develop NT.

     The big "rivalry" in the 1980's was between 'Argonaut' and 'Aquarius'.
     That was definately a tremendous rivalry between big system architects,
     with no love lost between the groups.  Argonaut was unceremoniously
     dumped.  Aquarius was selected as the corporate flagship, and went on
     to successfully become the biggest financial fiasco in the entire
     history of Digital Equipment Corporation.
                                            

    Gordon Bell is 61
    
    Alan

    Then there was GB's famous "nastygram" of 1982 in which he proposed
    to create a NOD (No Output Division).

  "Encore" was Gordon's next effort, started along with Ken
  whats-his-name, the ex-CEO from Pr1me and one other person.

                                   Atlant

    
    A classic GB flamer!
    
    We had a site picked out for NOD -- Stow (OGO), which at the time also
    housed the Managers Burial Ground.
    

Re .12:

>    We had a site picked out for NOD -- Stow (OGO), which at the time also
>    housed the Managers Burial Ground.

Also known as Stowage.
				/AHM

>     "Encore" was Gordon's next effort, started along with Ken
>      whats-his-name, the ex-CEO from Pr1me and one other person.
    
    Fisher.
     

    That 'flame' must've been quite the classic to still be kicking around
    someone's office, some 10 years after the fact...
    
    D

    Wasn't the third ...Poduska, the founder of ????, which was later
    acquired by Computergraphics. I believe he also founded Stargent.
    

    Interesting.  Almost looks like Microsoft has made the transition from
    a rising star to a bloated, full-of-itself corporate giant, and they're
    scooping up Corporate Pioneers, just before The Fall.  Sounds a lot
    like Digital in the late 80's, when we were riding the network windfall
    and grabbing Grace Hopper, Brian Reid, Leslie Lamport, and other people
    who made a name for themselves doing things we didn't do (and still
    don't all that well).
    
    Or so it looks through my viewscreen.
    
    -Mark

>    That 'flame' must've been quite the classic to still be kicking around
>    someone's office, some 10 years after the fact...
    
    Classic, indeed!  I've recounted this story many times in many places,
    but didn't have the original text.  (I still remember seeing the ZK1 copy
    stuck on an aisle wall.)  Thanks for the good fellow who shared it with
    us.
    
    -Mark

    
    I agree that Microsoft is maturing, but I don't think they're anywhere
    near Digital in the late 80's, or near being a bloated full-of-itself
    corporate giant.
    
    Having studied them a fair bit, I think they are closer to Digital in
    the very early 1980's, when we were scooping of computer pioneers like
    Butler Lampson, Bob Taylor, and Forrest Baskett;  when we were busy
    feeding the dominant engine of growth created by the last big
    breakthrough;  when it was becoming clear that we were no longer a mom
    and pop corporation;  when people were starting to wistfully remember
    the "cowboy days" that no longer existed;  when when we were trying to
    figure out how to knit into a pleasing whole the collection of good
    technical capabilities that had been engineered piecemeal; and we were
    preparing to try to knock off the big players and move into the
    Enterprise in a serious way.
    
    The attitudes of everyone inside MS from the top to the bottom, and the
    reward systems, are still very far from Digital in the late 1980's.
    
    Microsoft will eventually hit their wall, but due to their high level
    of paranoia, I'd guess they are good into the next century.
    
    

    
>   Wasn't the third ...Poduska, the founder of ????, which was later
>   acquired by Computergraphics. I believe he also founded Stargent.
    
    Lemme see if I can retrieve this all correctly:
    
    Poduska was one of the founders of Prime, and later Apollo.  Prime
    acquired ComputerGraphics, which proceeded to gobble it up.  Poduska
    left Apollo when it was acquired by HP, to form Stellar, which later
    merged with Ardent (getting fuzzy here) to form Stardent.
    
    Or something like that.
    
    len.
    

    Henry Burkhardt(sp) was the third member of the Triumverate at Encore.
    I have a Ribbon that I earned for 13 months on that campaign. Months of
    dealing with some of the brightest and best in the industry that made
    decisions as if they never left Digital. Some were a bunch of
    insufferable egotists. At one time, every third employee was either a
    President of a Division or a VP of some function that might provide
    value-added once the Company grew 100 fold.
    
    Individually, I would follow any one of these individuals over the wall
    but collectively they couldn't decide on the Company colors or the
    Company acronym. Someone took one million out of the Start-up
    funding of 60M to buy furniture so that it would all be consistent and
    represent a good image for the Corp. I worked at a couple of other
    start-ups and they didn't spend a nickle until they absolutely had to.
    
    I will stop the digression . . . 
    
    Henry B. worked for Gordon Bell at one time at Digital.
    Gordon bell had a heart attack at the Corp. condo in Colorado and Bob
    Puffer saved his life. I worked for Bob Puffer at Encore where I met
    Gordon and heard many tales about his "wildman antics". Prior to that
    I worked for Bill Lowe.  Bill recruited me to Encore,  and working with him
    at Encore made the pain and suffering worthwhile. I very much enjoyed
    working for him and I respected his business phoilosophy.     He was
    with Storage and I assume that he has left the Company now. 
    
    Legend has it that at least on one occasion Gordon jumped up on a table
    out of anger at the way a meeting was going and jumped around until he
    had kicked everything off of the table, coffee cups notebooks and etc.
    That is one of the great stories in the industry and worth repeating. I
    hope that I have not embellished it in the 10 years that I have been
    responsible for it.
    
    I really will stop digressing now and mercifully end my rambling thru
    the nostalgic and painful past. Maybe not all that painful it all adds
    up to business and life experience. 
    
    Regards,
    Floyd J.
    "Outsourcing my life away"
    
    
     

    
    	Encore, I'd nearly forgotten about them. Was involved with Trilogy
    many, many moons ago. The "first" Seymour Cray start-up after Cray
    Computer; got some incredible stories there. They went thru $200
    million before doing the old fold'O. And never did get a product out
    the door. Unbeleviable. 
    
    		the Greyhawk

>    Lemme see if I can retrieve this all correctly:
>   
>    Poduska was one of the founders of Prime, and later Apollo.  Prime
>    acquired ComputerGraphics, which proceeded to gobble it up.  Poduska
>    left Apollo when it was acquired by HP, to form Stellar, which later
>    merged with Ardent (getting fuzzy here) to form Stardent.
>    
>    Or something like that.
>    
>    len.

ComputerGraphics above should read ComputerVision.

The Stellar->Stardent story has one more chapter.  Stardent transformed
itself into Kubota Pacific which made high-end graphics systems for our
very own Turbochannel Alpha workstations, before getting out of the UNIX
market last year.

Ram
(len, been a while since we interacted back in the EMA days!)

    Also, Poduska started Stellar, long before HP bough Apollo (3-4 years I
    think).
    
    Stellar was doing their own processor, Ardent was doing a
    multiprocessor design (I think it was MIPS based).
    
    Friends at Stardent, felt the name was better suited to a toothpaste.
    
    Steveg

RE: .20
    
>     Poduska was one of the founders of Prime, and later Apollo.  Prime
>     acquired ComputerGraphics, which proceeded to gobble it up.  Poduska
>     left Apollo when it was acquired by HP, to form Stellar, which later
>     merged with Ardent (getting fuzzy here) to form Stardent.

   Prime bought out Computervision, which later gobbled it up.
                            ^^^^^^

    Footnote to a correction to a foo...
    
    Pr1me got too big for its britches and did a kinda botched hostile
    takeover of ComputerVision.  The two cultures and product lines meshed
    poorly, to say the least.  While management had their eye off the ball
    trying to swallow their unwilling prey and simultaneously trying to
    service the huge debt their stupid sally had saddled them with, a
    Wall-Street bottom-fisher (mercifully forget his name) made a hostile
    takeover bid of Pr1me itself.  In the ensuing divestiture fray,
    ComputerVision managed to extricate itself and may for all I know still
    survive.  Pr1me emerged far weaker from the battle (dunno owned by
    whom, I was long gone & working here by then) and eventuall faded from
    sight as its last installed base evaporated.
    
          S1C TRANS1T GLOR1A MVND1 or something V1RTUALLY like that....
    

RE: .26

   Computervision is all that's left of Prime, and still exists but much
   smaller.  I *think* it's currently in the black although I remember
   that they had alternating periods of profit and loss for a while. 
   They did have substantial (around 50%) layoffs a year or so ago.

    From a read-mostly noter..
    
    
    
    I still carry scars from Encore as well (I forget exactly now, but it's
    around 2 years worth..)  Floyd, good to hear from you! I had to read
    your note to re-ignite the brain cells..
    
    Having seen Gordon in action both at DEC (well, it *was* "DEC" then)
    and at Encore, and having a very close friend who got to do the same at
    Stardent->Kubota, it's clear to me that Gordon needs a good amount of
    filtering to do useful work.. more so as time goes on.
    
    For example, my (admittedly limited) view of Dave Cutler is that he
    comes up with a great idea and makes it happen, perhaps in parallel
    with other great ideas; part of the making it happen is convincing
    others of the greatness of the idea, and maybe (just occasionally)
    adjusting the idea as time goes along.
    
    Gordon, on the other hand, comes up with a great idea, then another
    great idea, then a GREAT idea, then a REALLY GREAT idea, etc. Most of
    these ideas turn out to be not so great on close inspection (though
    some actually ARE great), but non-technical types assume they are all
    great because, well, he's Gordon Bell while technical types try to
    figure out how they're gonna deal with another Bell-ism handed down by
    fiat.
    
    At Encore, Ken Fisher and his growing entourage of golfing buddies
    would listen to Gordon; Henry Burkhardt was, for various reasons, not a
    good counterbalance/filter. Neither Gordon nor Henry had any idea how
    to manage a modern systems development project, with the result that
    the Multimax (with, IMHO, a fundamental architecture flaw in the
    shared-cache scheme) ended up in a death spiral of continuous ECOs and
    the death of a thousand wires - taking the rest of the company with it.
    (as we watched the other parts of the company get dissolved to feed
    the vortex, there was lots of corporate toner used for
    resume-printing..)
    
    The good news is that I don't think Gordon can single-handedly take
    Microsoft down the tubes; there are too many strong personalities and
    too many business-savvy people. I predict Gordon lasts less than a year
    in any active role there, unless he has another heart attack and it
    calms him down.
    
    ...tom

    
     re: .6 "History"
    (from a mostly-read-only who was there at the time)
    
    > Well, sort of.  But not really.
    > 
    > There were two "large system" projects in the early 80's:  Jupiter and
    > Venus.
    > 
    > Jupiter was the 36 bit follow-on the the KL-10.   There was no meaningful
    > rivalry between Jupiter and anyone else, except perhaps the rivalry
    > between a mouse and the cats who are playing with it.   At that time, it
    > was clear the Digital was committed to VAX, and that the ongoing 36 bit
    > engineering projects were only prolonging the agony.
    
    Untrue.  As a corporation, we were in competition with ourselves, when
    we needed to be competing with other vendors.  I was tech support for
    LCG marketing at the time, doing lots of benchmarking and performance
    evaluation.  We were NOT benchmarking and marketing ourselves against
    IBM, or any other mainframe vendor.  We were benchmarking against the
    *VAX* and the VAX folks were benchmarking against us.  The competition
    between the groups was *intense*, and the Jupiter was going to be the
    machine to finally blow the socks off of "those 32-bit guys".
    
    > Jupiter was cancelled because they couldn't make it work, and the company
     finally had to cut our losses and cancel Jupiter (and the 36 bit product
     line).
     
    Essentially true - and it is important to learn from our mistakes.
    There were several overall problems with the architecture.  
    
    1.  We had been giving nondisclosures to everyone in sight, claiming
    that the marvelous new pipelined architecture (air cooled) would
    produce a box that would oustrip the KL's performance by a factor of
    10.  Lesson 1: Do not promise something that you do not KNOW you can
    deliver.
    
    2. The hardware designers, in fact produced an architecture where 80%
    of the instruction set was 10x faster than the KL10.  However, they had
    not communicated well with the operating system development group; 80%
    of the instructions the operating system used were the 20% that ran
    merely as fast as, or in some cases, slower than, the same KL
    instructions.  I did the performance evaluation, and Dick Wagman and I
    did the statistical evaluation.  Opcode histograms both in the software
    and in the microcode; and every statistical trick in the book.  The
    absolute best-case we could make under any circumstance was 2x the KL,
    and at a price that no sane person would pay for such a small increase
    in performance.
    Lesson 2: Development cannot happen in a vacuum; EVERYONE MUST
    COMMUNICATE *FIRST*.
    
    3.  The technologies promised were not in place.  The off-the-shelf
    high speed chips used in the design were not available in the timeframe
    necessary to manufacture the machine.  And when the breadboard was
    brought up to clock speed, it *melted* - the air-cooled design simply
    didn't work.
    Lesson 3:  We need to be careful about relying on unproven
    technologies, no matter how seductive they may be.
    
    4.  At the time that the Jupiter project was launched, another project
    was also launched - the Minnow.  The Minnow - a 36bit processor running
    TOPS20 in a desktop box - was canned in favour of putting all resources
    on the Jupiter.  There was a working prototype of this system!  It was
    far superior to any desktop product - IBM 80xx with DOS or CPM - on the
    market.  I strongly suspect that with the right funding and marketing
    we could have cornered the desktop market with this little guy, but, as
    a corporation (ref: Ken Olsen and Gorden Bell's opinions on "toy
    computers" during that era) we were not prepared to enter the desktop
    arena.
    Lesson 4:  When you have a good, *working* idea, RUN WITH IT!
    
    Regards,
    Rita Tillson Vasak
    (now doing LAN design and PC integration in the wide-open country of
    Texas)
    
    
    

    
    	Fabulous note, Rita.
    
    	And I concur with tom, Gordon Bell won't last one year at
    Microsoft; however Butler Lamson is going to end up even more
    famous than he is now. This is going to get real interesting
    in Redmond. I'd love to write the book on this one...
    
    		the Greyhawk

    Excellent lessons, well communicated.  They bear repeating.  Thanks!
    

    
    Shame on you, Rita! If you keep doing that, we'll never successfully
    purge Corporate Memory.
    

    Re: .28 and later
    
    Having witnessed interactions between Gordon Bell and Ken Olsen I
    believe that one of the reasons for Digital's sucess in those days was
    Ken's ability to keep Gordon focussed more or less in one direction. As
    .28 points out Gordon was a fountain of great ideas, the latest of
    which he would expound to Ken who then pointed him off in a
    constructive direction.
    
    Putting Gordon in front of a customer was an interesting exercise
    because we never knew what bright idea would come tumbling out. No
    matter how carefully he was briefed nor how detailed an agenda had been
    prepared the discussion always reverted to the latest bright idea.  

> USHS05::VASAK "Sugar Magnolia"                       78 lines  16-AUG-1995 10:20
>                  -< some extra history - let's not repeat it! >-

I must add to the previous comments, yes this was a great accounting. It added
a lot of wise detail to my brief account. 

The plot was even thicker than that, though.......
    
>>    > At that time, it
>>    > was clear the Digital was committed to VAX, and that the ongoing 36 bit
>>    > engineering projects were only prolonging the agony.
    
>    Untrue.  As a corporation, we were in competition with ourselves, when
>    we needed to be competing with other vendors.  I was tech support for
>    LCG marketing at the time, doing lots of benchmarking and performance
>    evaluation.  We were NOT benchmarking and marketing ourselves against
>    IBM, or any other mainframe vendor.  We were benchmarking against the
>    *VAX* and the VAX folks were benchmarking against us.  The competition
>    between the groups was *intense*, and the Jupiter was going to be the
>    machine to finally blow the socks off of "those 32-bit guys".
    
That's true (I myself was in LCG Software in Marlboro until late 1979).
And, when I joined the Technical Languages Group, I spent the first couple of
years working on a new APL language system for TOPS-20.

However, it's clear now that although we engineers were competing with each
other, Ken Olsen and Gordon Bell had made up their mind, and it was VAX.

I'm not really sure why they didn't act more decisively on this, although it
was probably because they thought getting Jupiter to work would be a win-win
by making some good money by giving the 36-bit base one last machine.

However, when Jupiter got into deep trouble, they axed it.  As opposed to
sending the V.P.of all engineering to personally fix it, along with lots of
talent and $$$'s, like they did with Venus.

>    4.  At the time that the Jupiter project was launched, another project
>    was also launched - the Minnow.  The Minnow - a 36bit processor running
>    TOPS20 in a desktop box - was canned in favour of putting all resources
>    on the Jupiter.  There was a working prototype of this system!  It was
>    far superior to any desktop product - IBM 80xx with DOS or CPM - on the
>    market.  I strongly suspect that with the right funding and marketing
>    we could have cornered the desktop market with this little guy, but, as
>    a corporation (ref: Ken Olsen and Gorden Bell's opinions on "toy
>    computers" during that era) we were not prepared to enter the desktop
>    arena.

I was there when Minnow was cancelled (as when Dolphin, the Jupiter
predecessor, was cancelled;  I still remember the signs on Ed Fortmueller's
office wall announcing the cancellations). 

The conventional wisdom at that time was that Gordon Bell made sure Minnow got
cancelled because it was too good;  it would provide a very competitive
alternative to 11/730, and Gordon wanted to clear the playing field so that the
VAX machine wouldn't be troubled by a 36 bit machine. 

    To lthe antics of Gordon Bell...
    
    I once had a very senior customer executive, while riding back to the
    airport in the limo after an all-day customer visit, part of which
    included an hour with Gordon Bell, turn to me and state:
    
    "Boy, that gordon Bell is one very smart guy. But......
    
    you don't let him make business decisions, do you?"
    
    this from an exec who was very used to being around the 'fringe' as he
    was from Bell Labs.

    Encore now are owned by a Japanese corporation -  essentially after trying
    to buy Gould Computer Systems division. Highly leveraged with the net
    effect of the Japanese bank taking over ownership of Encore.
     They are
    no longer pushing Multimax - although an 88k version did hit the
    streets briefly - focussing on Storage systems (fancy RAID for IBM
    environments) and Real Time ( the Gould/SEL business) which uses Alpha
    and they're an accredited Technical OEM.
    
    Marlborough closed - with those who wanted to moving to Fort
    Lauderdale. 
    
    Ken Fisher is still Chairman, but not, I think, CEO.
    
    Jim 
    (ex-Encore in the UK)
             

    Encore ownership by a Japanese corporation...
    
    isn't Encore Computer (ENCC[W]) public?  The stock seems to be
    hanging on by the fingernails; down from 5 last year to 1ish
    

Re: .27

I interviewed at Computervision (before coming to Digital) in their base
systems group, whatever it was called.  I discovered that they designed and
built their own unique architecture and systems, and therefore had to
design and build all their own compilers.  Whereupon I asked why, and
thought aloud that perhaps they'd be better off buying their computers and
letting someone else worry about the hardware and the compilers.  Was this
foolish?

> Computervision is all that's left of Prime, and still exists but much
> smaller.

Perhaps not.  Later, in Digital, I had to work with Computervision -- some
of the same people, in fact -- and one of their big issues was whether we'd
build their compiler oddities into our own compilers.  We declined.

___Pete

Re tiny PDP-10s: in the early 1980s, BBN had a PDP10-on-a-board, from which
they built workstations.  So at least we can have the comfort that another
marketing-inept company also failed to make anything of that business.

___Pete

Re the Jupiter experience...

To me, one of the great frustrations of that time was that, after telling
hundreds of customers that Jupiter was coming, we never explained why we
cancelled it.  To this day, people outside of Digital believe we simply
chose to abandon a large group of loyal customers, simply because VAX won
the internal politics.  I understand it would have hurt Digital's technical
pride to explain that we couldn't make Jupiter work (or that they wouldn't
want to buy what we *could* deliver), but I think we hurt ourselves worse
by appearing to make an arrogant decision that ignored customers needs.

This came back to haunt us during the MIPS/OSF1 flipflop...

    I was a customer at the Spring '83 DECUS symposium and remember the
    black armbands and upside-down sailboats. There was no doubt in my mind
    at the time than Jupiter had been cancelled because it missed
    performance targets by a mile.
    
    \dave

    
    
    *****************
    * d i g i t a l *
    *****************
    
    TO: ENG STAFF:			    DATE: MON 15 FEB 1982 6:55 AM 
    EST
        JACK SMITH			    FROM: GORDON BELL
    				    DEPT: ENG STAFF
    				    EXT:  223-2236
    				    LOC/MAIL STOP: ML12-1/A51
    
    SUBJECT: TASK FORCES, COMMITTEES; NOD; C-I T/F; PRODUCTIVITY REV.
    
    I just read the minutes of two meetings of a task force called
    Customer Installability.  It is not a task force it is a sewing
    circle consisting of 21 people!  If there weren't 3 people there
    who I know have real work to do and have done good work, I would
    ask that we simply dismiss the whole group.
    
    The minutes contain no real information on the subject.  We already
    have a spec on what CI is, and we have to do some work on
    products to get it.  This is not the work of a committee.
    
    My point, I would like you to come forward with a list of the
    various committees and task forces, etc that are working within
    your group during the productivity review.  I don't want to 
    look at them, but I expect you to have, and I want to know that
    you understand what's going on in your area.
    
    I believe 1/2 of these people could be let go from DEC today
    and our productivity would take a sharp rise.  If this is
    the case, I would like to have their names and since we have the
    reputation for never firing anyone we can put them in a new group
    I propose we start called NOD (No Output Division) where they
    won't take time from people who have real work to do.
    
    PS
    
    I'm quite serious about NOD.  Since it is so difficult to get
    rid of people, I want to make us at least not have them mixed
    in with the workers and suck up good people's time.
    
    15-FEB-82  06:55:06  S 31987  BURT
    


 

    Some things haven't changed a whole lot since 1982, eh? We still have
    lots of folks that I firmly believe are part of a Top Secret "Profit
    Prevention Team" within Digital... :-(
    
    Harry
    

    .26 (and various earlier replies):
    
    The guy who tried to take over Pr1me was in charge of Basic-Four (I've
    a hazy memory of MAF-Basic Four, or some such prefixing acronym;
    perhaps it was the progeny of a previous merger).  Can't recall his
    name.
    
    They managed to find a "white knight" to take them over, instead of the
    Basic-Four bid.  The debt incurred was crushing, and they went private.
    
    Then they started to work on the debt problem, and from what I read and
    heard from a collegue whose spouse started looking, but not in time to
    avoid the axe, they pretty much gutted the old Prime portions of the
    company.  Perhaps other readers have better info here to add or correct
    the impression I got, which was that they stopped building hardware,
    and divested themselves of hardware support;  can't recall about
    software support, but that was almost as likely a casualty as
    development.  I thought I heard a minor player (perhaps Perkins-Elmer)
    mentioned as picking up their user base.
    
    Sometime before the white knight entered I read an article about the
    long takeover battle, and wondered whether the CV folks at Prime were
    feeling any better about their devourer's travails.  That things would
    transpire as they did, though, seemed too ironic to come true.
    
    Because after they'd done all their restructuring and right-sizing (or
    whatever *their* euphamisms were for it all), they brought out a new
    stock offering -- and it was either just before or just after (probably
    before) that they changed the corporate name from Pr1me to
    ComputerVision.
    
    I think Prime hired Dave Granger as CEO, and it was CV that he left.
    
    So, you could say that CV extricated itself, and Prime faded away.  It
    looked to me as if Prime's white knight owners decided that CV could
    make a go of things, and Prime couldn't, and performed radical surgery
    on the moribund beastie to extricate the live one.
    
    FWIW, I had the displeasure of helping a friend get through a course at
    an unnamed "institution of higher learning", and it was quite the
    experience.  I think it was in the last hour of a four-hour evening's
    programming session, after discovering one more useful feature missing
    from their whizbang software, that an anguished voice was heard to
    offer the penetrating critique 
    
    	"They SELL this ****?!  People BUY this ****??!!?!"
    
    Dick

    The name "LeBow" rises briefly from the Mental Murk... and then
    disappears with no trace...
    

I'm an Ex-Prime/CV guy, having joined what was then Prime Computer just
after Prime had acquired CV.  At this time CV was still being given
its own identity, though it was being made clear that CV was a part
of Prime. (I remember the name changes -- Computervision, A Prime Computer
Company; Computervision, A Division of Prime Computer; etc.)  Somewhat
later Prime attempted to completely bury the CV name in a move which
most analysts called a waste of the well known CV product name.

If I remember correctly, the MAI take over attempt started not too long
after I did.  Prime's CEO (Joe Henson?) was retiring and was being replaced
by a guy named Tony Craig (Digital's Tony? I think so.)  Reported MAI wanted
to be acquired _by_ Prime, but when that was rebuffed they (he) decided to
turn tables and acquire Prime instead.

What followed was a typical late-1980's corporate take over attempt, with
its offers and counter offers; poison pills; etc.  During this period Prime
merged the two main divisions (old Prime and CV) into a single unit, in a 
further attempt to dissuade MAI that there was no point in the attempt.
Eventually Prime found a "white knight" in J. H. Whitney, a Wall Street
capital firm, and was taken private at enormous cost and debt. [An interesting
side note is that, after fighting for nearly a year, Prime eventually was
purchased for the same price per share that MAI offered in the beginning.]

Over the ensuing months Prime found that the debt load forced upon it
were combining with a minicomputer business which was failing faster than
anyone had predicted dictated a reevaluation of corporate direction, with
the result being the virtual abandonment of the minicomputer business 
and an investment in the CAD/CAM business, that is, in the assets it had
acquired from CV along with its own CAD/CAM assets.  Sometime during this
period, a new CEO, Jack Shields (formerly of Digital -- small world!)
was named.

Ultimately, Prime changed its name (back) to Computervision, went public
and pretended that it had _always_ been a CAD company.  Eventually CV
even stopped reselling hardware and became a software-only company.

----
There are several ex-CV'ers in my current group and I know of several more
in other groups.  Seems like Digital and CV are somehow linked. :)