GBell's CyberMuseum for Digital Equipment Corp (DEC): Documents, Photo Albums, Talks, and Videotapes about Computing History

Minicomputer Industry Overview and Formation

Observations about the formation and evolution of the minicomputer industry was a key data-point in the formation of Bell's Law that minis typify.
Bell's Law of Computer Classes and Class formation was first described in 1972 with the emergence of a new, lower priced microcomputer class based on the microprocessor. Established market class computers are introduced at a constant price with increasing functionality (or performance). Technology advances in semiconductors, storage, interfaces and networks enable a new computer class (platform) to form about every decade to serve a new need. Each new usually lower priced class is maintained as a quasi independent industry (market). Classes include: mainframes (60's), minicomputers (70's), networked workstations and personal computers (80's), browser-web-server structure (90's), web services (2000's), palm computing (1995), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes (2004). Beginning in the 1990s, a single class of scalable computers called clusters built from a few to tens of thousands of commodity microcomputer-storage-networked bricks began to cover and replace mainframes, minis, and workstation. Bell predicts home and body area networks will form by 2010. See also the description of several laws (e.g. Moore's, Metcalfes's,  Nathan's, Bill's, Bell's) that govern the computer industry is given in Laws, a talk by Jim Gray and Gordon Bell.

With scalable computers, minis per se are nearly all being replaced by clustered, scalable computers i.e. computers formed from simple computers such as a PC that are interconnected via high speed networks. Clusters cover a range from a few to eventually over a million, independent processors in a "scaled out" configuration. The mini we knew and love c2000 built by HP, IBM, and SUN that cost $100,000 to $1 Million evolved to be a scaled out "multi" or multiple, shared memory computer as I described in Bell, C. G., "Multis: A New Class of Multiprocessor Computers", Science, Vol. 228, pp. 462-467 (April 26, 1985).

• Bell, C. G., "The Mini and Micro Industries", Computer (17) no. 10, pp. 14-30 (October 1984) provides an overview of the entire industry that was minicomputers from the beginning until 1984 when workstations and distributed computers and clusters were emerging. It showed that there were about 100 computer companies formed and died.
• Listing of Minicomputer companies 1960-1984 and super-minicomputer and mini-supercomputer companies 1984-1995.

Historical Overview of Digital aka DEC

• Digital 41 Year History CD published 30 April, 1998 with key events and timeline... with photos and facts about machines (alpha to PDP-1), modules e.g. the K-series, the mill, and people!  A great reference document...complete with quizzes.  
• Family Tree of Digital's Computers Poster created by Gordon Bell in 1980 showing the evolution of all of all computer models and times they were introduced since 1960.
• Digital 1957 to Present, a Digital Equipment Corporation publication, last edition 1978 @13MB PDF.
• Digital At Work, snapshots from the first thirty-five years, Digital Press 1992 @24.1MB PDF.
• Digital Corporate Philosophy and Organization from 1977 @2.47MB PDF.

DEC Engineering and Process Documents

• Engineer's Orientation Manual from 1980. 206 pages contained in a 14MB PDF file. Table of Contents lists ten sections: Corporate Overview, Funding, Life of a Hardware Project, Life of a Software Project, Office of Development/Engineering, Product Line Groups, Process Manufacturing, Information Services, Customer Services, and References and Resources.
• Engineer's Orientation Manual from 1982. 7MB PDF file. Table of Contents lists twelve sections: Corporate Overview, Personnel, Funding, Phase Review Process, Engineering Development Groups, Engineering Support Group, Process Technology Development, Product Line Group, Manufacturing, Information Services, Customer Services, and References and Resources.
• Engineering Handbook from 1974. 1MB PDF file.
• 1988 Corporate Phase Review Process Guide. 29MB PDF file. Seven chapters include Corporate Phase Review Process, Product Management, Marketing, Engineering, Manufacturing, Corporate Product Operations - Sales, and Customer Services.

Digital Equipment Corporation Machine and Programming Manuals 

• Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 Manual, 1960 (original version) @2MB PDF.
• Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 Manual, 1961 @5.5MB PDF
• Digital Equipment Corporation F-25 PDP-1 Manual for I/O @8.3 MB PDF, authored by Gordon Bell, describing the various ways I/O devices could be connected to PDP-1. It included interrupts we called sequence break, coming from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory; high speed memory that evolved to be called direct memory access or DMA.
• Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-4 Manual, 1962 @3.8MB PDF.
• Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-5 Manual, 1964 @7.2MB PDF.
• Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 Manual, 1969, with ISP description of the architecture @5.9MB PDF
• Digital Equipment Corporation RT-11 Introduction Manual, 1977 @13.5MB PDF.
• Digital Equipment Corporation RT-11 System User's Guide, 1977 @23.3MB PDF.
• Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Xerox Ethernet Specifications Manual, 1980 @5MB PDF.

Papers and Memos

• VAX Strategy 15 page (PDF 0.5 MB) document, written in October 1978 by Gordon Bell, January 1979 update . 
• PDP11 Architectural Enhancement Strategy, 1975 @3.31MB PDF.

Articles and Product Announcements

• A Computer That Grows With You.  Business Week article (PDF 0.5 MB), March 1964, on the introduction of PDP-6 with photo of Gordon Bell and Dick Best.
• Using a PDP-1 Computer as a Pulse Height Analyzer.  A paper by John Leng and Gordon Bell and others while John worked for the Atomic Energy of Canada.  Note that this "first" was a prototype for Digital's subsequent entry into the Laboratory Market!
• Bell, C. G., R. Cady, H. McFarland, B. Delagi, J. O'Laughlin, R. Noonan and W. Wulf, "A New Architecture for Mini-Computers -- The DEC PDP-11, Sprint Joint Computer Conference, pp. 657-675 (1970).
• Bell, C. G., A. Kotok, T. N. Hastings, and R. Hill, “The Evolution of the DECsystem 10,”  Communications of the ACM, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 1978, pp 44-62
• The complete Ethernet Announcement by Bell (Digital), Noyce (Intel), and Liddle (Xerox) slides and script (PDF 7MB) was made in New York City on February 10, 1982 by the DIX group, followed by announcements in Amsterdam, and London. Note Gordon's  presentation states: "the network becomes the system"... Can you recall a similar mantra that SUN Microsystems later appropriated?
• Ethernet Announcement.  Gordon's Ethernet announcement with slides and talk text.  
• Retrospective on the PDP-11 Paper (unpublished) written by me in 1995 to be published with the original PDP-11 paper.
• Retrospective on the PDP-11 written by Bill Strecker with a retrospective about VAX and Alpha and published in 1995.
• What we learned from the PDP-11, published by myself and Bill Strecker in 1975.
• The Bell Appendix for Edgar H. Schein's book “DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC” Berett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 2003. The appendix describes Bell's view of What Happened such that Digital was first sold to Compaq in 1998 and then  to HP in 2002. Digital aka DEC was only 41 years old at the time.

PowerPoint Albums and Talks of Computing History from a Digital viewpoint

• Gordon's Personal View of the Origins of Personal Computing from a Digital Equipment Corporation perspective. PowerPoint presentation (4 MB, sans video and audio clips) given at the Vintage Computer Fair, Santa Clara, CA, 9 September 1998.
• Gordon's Personal View of Digital's Early Computers, a PowerPoint presentation for the DECWorld Celebration at the Computer History Museum on 16 June 2001.
• Gordon Bell 3 hour class lecture on the Formation of the Minicomputer Industry from a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) Viewpoint, including Bell's Law of Computer Classes. The  talk was given to the History of Computers Seminar at UC Berkele and included UC San Diego, U of Washington, and Microsoft on October 11.

Netshow Videos and Videotapes

• On the Future of Computers. Netshow Video @28.8 Kbps. This 1972 videotaped lecture was given at M.I.T. and describes a model for future computers, including computer classes and the prediction of new types of computers. This is a good example of near term, conservative forecasting

Biographical Material including Interviews, etc.

• Gordon Bell Interview by David Allison, head of the Computing Collection at the Smithsonian, in the Summer of 1995, with updates and corrections in June 2000.
• Ken Olsen Interview by David Allison, head of the Computing Collection at the Smithsonian, 1998 September 28,29.  This interview comes via a URL from the Smithsonian and is NOT available from this site.

Books

The following books were encoded at Carnegie-Mellon University and hosted at their Universal Library http://www.ulib.org/.

• Bell, Grason, Newell, DESIGNING COMPUTERS AND DIGITAL SYSTEMS USING PDP-16 REGISTER TRANSFER MODULES, Digital Press, September 1972.  At this site.
• Bell, C. G., C. Mudge, J. McNamara, COMPUTER ENGINEERING, Digital Press 1978.  At this site.

Other books to come...