Digital Equipment Corporation

When you see the thousands upon thousands of units going into all these data centers, you keep asking yourself, why? why do you need so many data centers the cloud has been around for a long time uh execution in the cloud you know i mean we have people that are members here that have been running their apps in the cloud for a long time and this geometric expansion or rather not geometric but exponential expansion that we are seeing in data centers why You know, if you write, let me tell you another thing about software programming, right? And I remember this from the old days.

I wrote software at once for the PDP-11, the DEC PDP-11.

The DEC is the Digital Equipment Corporation.

They were one of the big mini computer makers, mini and mainframe computer makers that a lot of oil companies use in their trucks and all that kind of stuff.

for oil login.

right?Yeah.

Well, i- in my hobby life, one of the things I deal with, this whole idea of retro computing, and I grew up with computers from Digital Equipment Corporation.

They got bought out by HP.

Here's a t- here's a test for you.

I'd love to hear more about, I guess, your career and how you got into programming and

I started programming when I was really little because my father worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, which is actually a very important company in that era, no longer exists, right? They would be sort of like almost like a case study in how not adapting to a change in technology leads to your demise.

They were one of the most important companies in the world for computing.

If you've ever heard of a PDP-11 or a VAX in computing history, that's them, right? They made these things that were foundational computers in computing history gone today, right? Part of them got absorbed by Intel, part of them got absorbed by Compaq, but they don't exist.

Kinda Warren Buffett-like.

In 1957, ARDC put about $70,000 into a company called Digital Equipment Corporation for roughly 70% of it.

By the time Digital Equipment Corporation went public in the late '60s, that stake was worth in the neighborhood of a, mm, small, measly $335 million.

Wow.

Yeah.

I had a couple decades quiet, an active period, a stepping back period, and then dating back to 2014, a very, very immersive period.

I also got a graduate degree from the Sloan School at MIT in organizational development, and I did work at Digital Equipment Corporation.

And I continued to pursue working at digital while I was at Sloan.

And when I graduated from Sloan, I continued in an internal consulting group of one kind, went into a business unit for a little while.

But let's take this concept of fundamentally misunderstanding human desire and rewind even further to like the dawn of the computing era.

1977, Ken Olson, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC.

DEC, yeah.

They built many computers, which back then were the size of a large refrigerator.

It's starting at a customer of customers.

companies like ours at Digital Equipment Corporation that does no longer exist, but hopefully some of the folks remember that little entity.

And then working for some manufacturers on the semiconductor side before finding my way into distribution with some faces from Arrow Electronics.

It's great to see here.

Look back now on how history reflects and looks at those individuals.

And then conversely, look at others.

Ken Olsen, my first company, a digital equipment corporation.

They said Ken missed the boat on personal computers.