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I'm in my late 40s and have been a software engineer in New England since graduating college. We moved to Massachusetts in 1986, my father went to work at a st

I'm in my late 40s and have been a software engineer in New England since graduating college. We moved to Massachusetts in 1986, my father went to work at a startup company that was across the street from a DEC building and was in the DEC ecosystem. The pervasiveness of DEC here is amazing even after all these years. My father in law also spent almost his entire career at DEC and retired as an HP employee. One of my mentors in my late 20s (older Gen X) started his career there. I've known many other people who worked at Digital. My only real exposure was being like 10-12 years old and getting trucked to the office during "crunch time" and I got to sit at the console on a VAX at one point and got to play early text based games on it. This was weirdly right in the machine room at the operating console as there was some rework project in the room that my father had to be present for. Later on at my first internship in the mid 1990s I had a QA job and I had to test software and I remember having to install on both Ultrix and DEC Unix and I got to use some of the Alpha machines. There are still all these buildings and artifacts all over the place from DEC all over MA. I bank with DCU. When I was in middle school my best friend and fellow computer nerd's father worked at another Massachusetts institution.. EMC. I never got pushed into software but it seemed to be pre-ordained... we always had computers and I was given free rein to play with them starting in the early-mid-80s but not really allowed to have video games and we always had business type machines and not the more fun consumer oriented stuff.

icedchai 2y ago
DEC influence was definitely all over the north east! The first multi-user system I dialed into was a VAX/VMS box. I went to a college that had almost all DEC systems - mostly DECstations (MIPS) and Alphas. I later worked at software company full of tons of ex-Digital folk, running most of their software on Alphas running VMS and Tru64 (aka Digital Unix.)
ghaff 2y ago
Beyond DEC, there were many minicomputer and related companies in Massachusetts in their heyday. They weren't all on Route 128 (including DEC) but that was the shorthand. I VERY briefly worked for EMC after they acquired Data General which was a DEC spinoff.
- lttlrck 2y ago
  The first time I saw the WWW was on an Apollo workstation running NCSA Mosaic. This was at Portsmouth Uni in the UK. Those were all replaced with HP PA-RISC workstations after HP bought Apollo. Apollo was founded in Chelmsford MA where I, coincidentally, bought my first house :-)
  - ben7799 2y ago
    I visited HP at Apollo drive in Chelmsford as an intern in college. Then I later worked in the building when Cisco took over that building/park.
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Basically all my cool college professors worked at DEC. Their impact in the Greater Boston area is huge and lingers. Don't forget Wang!
cbm-vic-20 2y ago
If you're in New England, it's definitely worth a visit to the Rhode Island Computer Museum in Warwick, RI. They have a staggering amount of DEC stuff, including rare stuff like one of the nine remaining PDP-9 systems, a PDP-12, most models of the PDP-11 series, and a PDP "Straight" 8, the best looking computer ever made. And a bunch of later VAX machines, DECSystems, etc. https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipment https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipme... The Retro-Computing Society of RI, a few miles away in Providence, also has a bunch of DEC stuff, also including a PDP-12. These might be the closest working PDP-12s in existence. https://www.rcsri.org/collection/ https://www.rcsri.org/collection/
- dmd 2y ago
  A walk-through I filmed of the warehouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL8QBvXvGjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL8QBvXvGjQ
  - acomjean 2y ago
    Its a great museum. They had the ibm displaywriter with the 10" floppies we had in our house (my mom used it for technical translations). https://sites.google.com/a/ricomputermuseum.org/ricm-learning-lab/collections-tours?authuser=0 https://sites.google.com/a/ricomputermuseum.org/ricm-learnin... The warehouse (Fraiser archives?) is fun, but off site from the museum. My partner noted that driving over there seemed like a start to a bad movie.... I remember the guy giving the tour telling us that he started by collecting cars, but computers seemed more manageable... The rent those computers our for movies.
    - kjs3 2y ago
      The rent those computers our for movies. That's unfortunate. Movie people are notorious for destroying rented props. I know several (not just 1 or 2) people who rented rare to unique computers and computer parts (because who doesn't want to see your computer in a film), had them returned destroyed (painted, parts stripped off/glued on, burned or water damaged or obviously dropped from a good height), and were told 'collect the insurance...that's what it's for'. Not a single fuck given whether or not they even could be replaced.

icedchai 2y ago

DEC influence was definitely all over the north east! The first multi-user system I dialed into was a VAX/VMS box. I went to a college that had almost all DEC systems - mostly DECstations (MIPS) and Alphas. I later worked at software company full of tons of ex-Digital folk, running most of their software on Alphas running VMS and Tru64 (aka Digital Unix.)

ghaff 2y ago

Beyond DEC, there were many minicomputer and related companies in Massachusetts in their heyday. They weren't all on Route 128 (including DEC) but that was the shorthand. I VERY briefly worked for EMC after they acquired Data General which was a DEC spinoff.

lttlrck 2y ago
The first time I saw the WWW was on an Apollo workstation running NCSA Mosaic. This was at Portsmouth Uni in the UK. Those were all replaced with HP PA-RISC workstations after HP bought Apollo. Apollo was founded in Chelmsford MA where I, coincidentally, bought my first house :-)
- ben7799 2y ago
  I visited HP at Apollo drive in Chelmsford as an intern in college. Then I later worked in the building when Cisco took over that building/park.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

Basically all my cool college professors worked at DEC. Their impact in the Greater Boston area is huge and lingers. Don't forget Wang!

cbm-vic-20 2y ago

If you're in New England, it's definitely worth a visit to the Rhode Island Computer Museum in Warwick, RI. They have a staggering amount of DEC stuff, including rare stuff like one of the nine remaining PDP-9 systems, a PDP-12, most models of the PDP-11 series, and a PDP "Straight" 8, the best looking computer ever made. And a bunch of later VAX machines, DECSystems, etc. https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipment https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipme... The Retro-Computing Society of RI, a few miles away in Providence, also has a bunch of DEC stuff, also including a PDP-12. These might be the closest working PDP-12s in existence. https://www.rcsri.org/collection/ https://www.rcsri.org/collection/

dmd 2y ago
A walk-through I filmed of the warehouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL8QBvXvGjQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL8QBvXvGjQ
- acomjean 2y ago
  Its a great museum. They had the ibm displaywriter with the 10" floppies we had in our house (my mom used it for technical translations). https://sites.google.com/a/ricomputermuseum.org/ricm-learning-lab/collections-tours?authuser=0 https://sites.google.com/a/ricomputermuseum.org/ricm-learnin... The warehouse (Fraiser archives?) is fun, but off site from the museum. My partner noted that driving over there seemed like a start to a bad movie.... I remember the guy giving the tour telling us that he started by collecting cars, but computers seemed more manageable... The rent those computers our for movies.
  - kjs3 2y ago
    The rent those computers our for movies. That's unfortunate. Movie people are notorious for destroying rented props. I know several (not just 1 or 2) people who rented rare to unique computers and computer parts (because who doesn't want to see your computer in a film), had them returned destroyed (painted, parts stripped off/glued on, burned or water damaged or obviously dropped from a good height), and were told 'collect the insurance...that's what it's for'. Not a single fuck given whether or not they even could be replaced.