radios, stereos, watches, and they made computers ubiquitous and varied. They did not eliminate the sizable, expensive computer; they made it possible for the likes of IBM to produce machines of increased speed and capability and still make handsome profits without raising prices much. At the same time, the development of chips fostered an immense and rapid growth of other kinds of computing machines. After mainframes, as the big computers were known, came the cheaper and less powerful minicomputers. Then the semiconductor firms contributed the microprocessor, the central works of a computer executed on a chip. For a while, the three classifications really did describe a company’s products and define its markets, but then mainframers and microcomputer companies started making minis and minicomputer companies added micros and things that looked like mainframes to their product lines. Meanwhile, a host of frankly imitative enterprises started making computers and gear for computers that could be plugged right into systems built around the wares of the big successful companies. These outfits went by the names of “plug compatibles” and “third-party peripheral manufacturers”; those who lost some business to them called them “knockoff companies.” Probably they helped maintain competition in prices. Many “software” houses sprang up, to write programs that would make all those computers actually do work. Many customers, such as the Department of Defense, wanted to buy complete systems, all put together and ready to run with the turn of a key; hence the rise of companies known as original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs—they’d buy gear from various companies and put it together in packages. Some firms made computer systems for hospitals; some specialized in graphics—computers that draw pictures—and others worked on making robots. It became apparent that communications and computing served each other so intimately that they might actually become the same thing; IBM bought a share in a satellite, and that other nation-state, AT&T, the phone company, started making machines that looked suspiciously like computers. Conglomerates, of which Exxon was only the largest, seemed determined to buy up every small computer firm they could. As for those who observed the activity, they constituted an industry in themselves. Trade publications flourished; they bore names such as Datamation, Electronic News, Byte, Computermania. IBM, one executive of a mainframe company once said, represented not competition but “the environment,” and on Wall Street and elsewhere some people made a business solely out of attempting to predict what the environment would do next. I once asked a press agent for a computer company what was the reason for all this enthusiasm. He held a hand before my face and rubbed his thumb across his fingers. “Money,” he whispered solemnly. “There’s so goddamn much money to be made.” Examples of spectacular success abounded. The industry saw some classic dirty deals and some notable failures, too. RCA and Xerox lost about a billion dollars apiece and GE about half a billion making computers. It was a gold rush. IBM set up two main divisions, each one representing the other’s main competition. Other companies did not have to invent competitors and did somewhat more of their contending externally. Some did sometimes use illicit tools. Currying favor, seeking big orders for chips, some salesmen of semiconductors, for instance, were known for whispering to one computer maker news about another computer maker’s latest unannounced product. Firms fought over patents, marketing practices and employees, and once in a while someone would get caught stealing blueprints or other documents, and for these and other reasons computer companies often went to court. IBM virtually resided there. Everyone sued IBM, it seemed. The biggest suit, the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of the industry, involved the Justice Department’s attempt to break up IBM. Virtually an entire large law firm was created to defend IBM in this case, which by 1980 had run ten years and had been in continuous trial for several. Data General took its place in this bellicose land of opportunity in 1968, as a “minicomputer company.” By the end of 1978 this increasingly undescriptive term could in some senses be applied to about fifty companies. Their principal but by no means their only business, the manufacture and sale of small computers, had grown spectacularly—from about $150 million worth of shipments in 1968, to about $3.5 billion worth by 1978—and it would continue to grow, most interested parties believed, at the rate of about 30 percent a year. By 1978 Data General ranked third in sales of minicomputers and stood among the powers in this segment of the industry. The leader was Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC, as it is usually called. DEC produced some of the first minicomputers, back in the early sixties. Data General was the son, emphatically the son, of DEC. A chapter of DEC’s official history, a technical work that the company published, describes the making of a computer called the PDP-8. DEC sent this machine to market in 1965. It was a hit. It made DEC’s first fortune. The PDP-8, says the official history, “established the concept of minicomputers, leading the way to a multibillion dollar industry.” But the book doesn’t say that Edson de Castro, then an engineer in his twenties, led the team that designed the PDP-8. The technical history mentions de Castro only once, briefly, and in another context. They expunged de Castro. In 1968 de Castro and two other young engineers seceded from DEC. Several completely different versions of their flight exist and have by now acquired the impenetrable quality of myth. Did they quit because, after long and heartfelt labor on a new design, they found that DEC’s management would not build their new machine? DEC’s management did turn down a new design of de Castro’s, and afterward, along with a man from another company named Herb Richman, de Castro and the two other engineers from Digital incorporated Data General and started building their own minicomputer. But did they design this new machine after they seceded, or had they done that job in secret, using DEC’s facilities, while still on DEC’s payroll? One version of the story suggested the latter. More than ten years later, DEC’s founder and president would tell reporters from Fortune, “What they did was so bad we’re still upset about it.” But DEC never sued Data General’s founders, and clearly there were other reasons why Digital might have become upset. For within a year, de Castro and company had set up shop in DEC’s own territory and had started raking in the loot. They rented space in what had been a beauty parlor, in the former mill town of Hudson, Massachusetts. Practically all that remains of that time is a black-and-white photograph of this first headquarters. In the foreground stand four young men with short hair, wearing white shirts and skinny ties and the sort of plain black shoes that J. Edgar Hoover’s men favored. They are engaged in what is obviously meant to look like routine conversation. The linoleum floor, the metal furniture, evoke motor vehicle departments, and the youths in the picture could be members of some junior chamber of commerce, playing capitalists for a day. Not shown in this bemusing picture is the shrewd and somewhat older lawyer from a large New York firm who helped Data General’s founders raise their capital and who became a crucial member of their team. What also doesn’t show is the fact that some of these young men were already computer engineers of no mean repute—their age in this case was no impediment, for computer engineers like athletes often blossom early. They started Data General at an auspicious time. In the late 1960s, the period memorialized in John Brooks’s The Go-Go Years, venture capital (among other things) abounded, and although they started out with only $800,000, more lay in reserve. They also entered a good territory for fledglings. They could not have dreamed of moving in on IBM’s markets without truly vast amounts of capital. But the people who bought minicomputers—engineers, scientists, and, mainly, purchasing agents of OEMs—understood the machines. A new manufacturer could reach them through relatively inexpensive ads in the trade journals, and didn’t need to build a service organization right away, since these customers could take care of themselves. These were also the sorts of customers who could be expected to embrace a newcomer, if the price was right; they’d prefer a bargain to a brand name. But around the time when Data General established itself in the beauty parlor, other entrepreneurs were starting up minicomputer companies at the rate of about one every three days. Only a few of those other new outfits survived the decade, whereas Data General, before it had exhausted its first and fairly modest dose of capital, achieved and never fell from that state of grace, a positive cash flow. — 11: 154-218
also remembered that before they entered into negotiations over their second public offering of stock, after the company had been making money for a while and the stock they’d already issued had done very well indeed, their lawyer insisted that each of the founders sell some of their holdings in the company and each “take down a million bucks.” This so that they could negotiate without the dread of losing everything (“Having to go back to your father’s gas station,” Richman called that nightmare). As for the name of the theory behind selling enough stock to become millionaires, Richman told me, “I don’t know how you put it in the vernacular. We called it the Fuck You Theory.” In the computer business, your market can be your fate. Although by the late 1970s it was hard to define a company’s place in the industry by the sorts of machines that it made, certain broad historic distinctions in ways of doing business still divided a large part of the industry into three segments. The differences showed up in the nature of a company’s expenditures. IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive. Minicomputer companies — 16: 234-245
In the conversation around there you heard words and phrases such as these: A canard was anything false, usually a wrongheaded notion entertained by some other group or company; things could be done in ways that created no muss, no fuss, that were quick and dirty, that were clean. Fundamentals were the source of all right thinking, and weighty sentences often began with the adverb fundamentally, while realistically prefaced many flights of fancy. There was talk of wars, shootouts, hired guns and people who shot from the hip. The win was the object of all this sport and the big win was something that could be achieved by maximizing the smaller one. From the vocabulary alone, you could have guessed that West had been there, and that these engineers were up to something. — 43: 648-654
They lived in a land of mists and mirrors. Mushroom management seemed to be practiced at all levels in their team. Or perhaps it was a version of Steve Wallach’s ring protection system made flesh: West feeling uncertain about the team’s real status upstairs; West’s own managers were never completely aware of all that their boss was up to; and the brand-new engineers kept almost completely ignorant of the real stakes, the politics, the intentions that lay behind what they were doing. But they proceeded headlong. — 106: 1633-1636
Not Everything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Well. Asked for a translation, he smiled and said, “If you can do a quick-and-dirty job and it works, do it.” Worry, in other words, about how Eagle will look to a prospective buyer; make it an inexpensive but powerful machine and don’t worry what it’ll look like to the technology bigots when they peek inside. West espoused these principles of computer design: “There’s a whole lot of things you’ve gotta do to make a successful product. The technological challenge is one thing, but you can win there and still have a disaster. You gotta give ’em guidelines so that if they follow them, they’re gonna be a success. ‘Do ABC and D without getting the color of the front bezel mixed up in it.’ ” Another precept was “No bells and whistles.” And a third: “You tell a guy to do this and fit it all on one board, and I don’t want to hear from him until he knows how to do it.” — 111: 1720-1727
Later on, though, one Hardy Boy would concede that the managers had probably known something he hadn’t yet learned: that there’s no such thing as a perfect design. Most experienced computer engineers I talked to agreed that absorbing this simple lesson constitutes the first step in learning how to get machines out the door. Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West was the voice from the cave, supplying that information: “Okay. It’s right. Ship it.” — 112: 1730-1734
To Alsing, West still had that knack for making the ordinary seem special, and the way West said “Trust” made Alsing wonder whether either of them had ever heard the word before. — 122: 1892-1893
“With Tom, it’s the last two percent that counts. What I now call ‘the ability to ship product’—to get it out the door.” Rasala looked at me squarely. “And I may not be the smartest designer in the world, a CPU giant, but I’m dumb enough to stick with it to the end.” — 133: 2068-2070
“There was no question of deadlines. You’d already missed it, whatever it was.” — 204: 3175-3175
We could use another computer, they said. But don’t bother to ask, they told each other; after all, we had to battle West just to get Trixie. — 208: 3222-3223
Asked about the meaning of the term competition for resources, he smiles broadly and says: “It’s there. What it really does, in a sense, is allows for the accomplishment of certain projects that some people would prefer not to do.” — 252: 3927-3929