BKDECWRK.RVW 940126 Digital Press PO Box 3027 One Burlington Woods Drive Burlington, MA 01803-9593 800-DIGITAL (800-344-4825) "Digital At Work", Pearson, 1992, 1-55558-092-0 Readers of DECUS newsletters will be well familiar with the timeline history of Digital Equipment Corporation, which gets serialized and reprinted from time to time. This book is an expansion of that timeline, with personalities, anecdotes, and trivia thrown in for good measure. As the subtitle, "Snapshots from the first thirty-five years," indicates, this is not a definitive history. This is more of an archive by anecdote, with stories and remembrances from the early pioneers of the company. I should not leave the impression that the work is in strictly chronological order, either. There are chapters covering MIT, the PDP-1, PDP and VAX, engineering, manufacturing, and sales and service. Physical snapshots do play a part, but mostly from the earlier years. Pictures from the 80s and 90s are rare, and not very interesting. Not all the facts have been researched with care: although the "Expensive Desk Calculator" and "Expensive Typewriter" programs were undoudtedly ported to the PDP-1 by the members of the TMRC, they were originally developed on the TX-0. Nobody expects an anniversary book, published in-house, to drag out the dirty laundry. On the other hand, the "We're all one big happy genius family," style does begin to pall after a while. The most interesting stories are those like the bad purchasing choice that lost the value of five percent of the total startup capital and a quarter of the stock value in a day, or the building of the PDP-11/05 which was tested for all of fifteen seconds before being displayed to the world at a conference in Las Vegas. (Fitting venue, I suppose.) Sections of the book, however, read more like product catalogues, on the order of, "Then we made the 11/730, then we made the 8600, then we made the 11/750 60 which had ..." There is frequent mention of DECUS, and it is often referred to as Digital's "secret weapon". The writing about DECUS, though, gives an odd felling of lip service only. This corresponds to the feelings of many Digital users that, of late, half of Digital has no idea what DECUS is. ("Fred, what's a 'DECUS'? I can't find it in my price list.") It is also in contrast to one reference which indicated that at one time DECUS was the primary training ground for Digital staff. Most of the "good stuff" in here comes from the sixties, late fifties, and early seventies. Whatever the intent, it gives the feeling that DEC was an exciting, dynamic, and vibrant company--twenty years ago. Nevertheless, there is good material here, and it will likely be valuable stock for historical studies in the future. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKDECWRK.RVW 940126 ====================== DECUS Canada Communications, Desktop, Education and Security group newsletters Editor and/or reviewer ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" (Oct. '94) Springer-Verlag