EMC/Dell deal respectfully caps the minicomputer age Over the years I've followed EMC, executives have told me that cloudfather Joe Tucci would sometimes gaze out of his office window at the company's Hopkinton headquarters and ponder the company's place as the last surviving Massachusetts technology giant. The story goes that from Tucci's office he could see buildings once …
Governor Moonbeam and the PC police will be along, shortly.
Don't forget, the original Silicon Valley was started by folks such as Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, neither of whom were sociopathic or megalomaniacal. There is quite a long list of folks in the early days who were very socially conscious, technically brilliant, and, for the most part, self-effacing, or at least humble.
The change in the valley happened when the "suits" from the East Coast flew in and started bureaucratizing everything. I lived through that, and it was long before Carly's time, though she exacerbated it.
Read "Soul of a New Machine" (and "House") by Stacy Kidder to get a taste of the good old days (and of excellent writing).
There is a bit of tech historic romanticism in the article. I lived in the area when Wang built their twin towers, DEC was spreading like a weed, Apollo was hot and the Boston Globe Help Wanted section was huge and bigger than the rest of the paper on Sundays. Those days are most definitely gone. This whole Dell deal will be interesting to watch. It may go well, or ... not.
Re: AS/400 "still kicking". I've always liked the AS/400, as well as the HP 3000.
Although not being made any more, the HP 3000 (er, "HP e3000") is still running in thousands of sites. Stromasys has an emulator for it, so it might outlast the original PA-RISC hardware :)
We have one customer who has over 2,000 sessions logged into their HP 3000 every day ...
not bad for 16 year old hardware!
Yep, and it's one of the very few systems that can survive a power fail intact. I had a colleague who worked Friday nights at a company in North San Jose with a Truck Stop nearby with, erm, rough parties resulting in inebriated truckers. Unfortunately, the transformers for the industrial park (at that time) were on a platform on a triple pole monstrosity, such that said truckers would occasionally back into them, the resulting power fail taking down the business park.
My colleague earned the name "Powerfail". The HP3000s (two series 68s) would come back just fine. After the third iteration of this, PG&E finally bit the bullet and put in an underground substation.
The 3K was a really good box; ironically, the AS/400 was IBM's answer to it. Good to see that folks are still homesteading it. Still I worry about 2027 (of course the ux folks get the same issue in 2029?).....
Indeed Joe T headed up Wang out of Chapter 11 and transformed it with the skillful acquisition of Olivetti's international systems business to form Wang Global. Then surreptitiously sold to Getronics and there's another story. He did well from the venture as you would expect of of Joe T. And then onto EMC ....
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