On my recent posting about adhesives, deep state covert operative flex commented, kindly. [stderr] And it reminded me of an actual thing that happened.
Back in the late 80s, I worked for Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) – at one time, an industry giant, that lost its way during the cost-cutting and desktop revolutions, and eventually was sold off piecemeal. DEC made some really incredible computers, which were notoriously over-designed and concomitantly expensive. Finally, after several quarters of multi-billion-dollar losses (motto: “We were Elon Musk before Elon Musk”) the company’s board brought in an axe-man who parted the company’s valuable properties off and sold them piecemeal. Remember altavista, the search engine? Yeah, DEC owned that, and managed to lose money on it. Etc.
A 3-rack of DEC RA-81 winchester drives. These were 400MB and weighed about 80lb. Belt drive!
Anyhow, fast forward years later, and I was at a conference dinner with the CSO of a major hard drive maker (one of the big three) and a former executive from Sun Microsystems, DEC’s big competitor. Sun, by that time, had been torn apart, too, and sold for scrap to Oracle. The Sun guy and I were rehashing old days – mostly complaining about what crap operating systems have become, nowadays – and he mentioned the Storage Works division of DEC. “Now, those guys, had some really good stuff.” It’s true, they had some of the industry’s first dual-ported disks that supported hot fail-over (and I wrote the software management layer for that, on behalf of GenRoCo) and some nifty RAID arrays that could hold almost a terabyte fully loaded, etc. The guy from Sun paused, then said, “you know, given who’s sitting here, here’s a funny story…”
When we started selling systems, our engineers thought we shouldn’t make our own hard drives, and we needed a selection process to qualify hard drives for our platform. So, we hired a guy who used to work for DEC in the storage group, and he outlined all these crazy tests that they used to do to qualify a drive. They’d put them in vibration mounts (not damping mounts, but actual vibrators) and hot boxes, and drop them from calibrated heights, etc. We specced that process out and it turned out we’d have to spend nearly $5mn to build the capability and hire the people, etc. Then, somehow, the discussion came around to a meeting where one of our sales executives was in the room, and he said, “why don’t we just go to the hard drive manufacturers and ask them ‘has DEC qualified this drive?'” And, so it was. Digital would spend a huge amount of money and effort testing and qualifying each new drive that ${our other dinner companion’s company} came out with, and then we’d buy it or not without a second thought, based on whether DEC had decided it was good enough.
Corporate parasitism at its finest!
As flex said:
Better than learning about all these things by trial and error myself.
Part of brilliant strategy is to be lazy when you can, and leverage the work of others.
Related: paraglider pilots often get asked “how much is the equipment?”. After a while, you learn to fear this question. Not because you don’t know the answer – you KNOW the answer – but because you also know what they mean. If they ask “how much is the training? Where can I find an instructor?” or even “Can you teach me?”, then you can relax. But if question 1 is “How much is the equipment?”, there’s a good chance you’re talking to a prospective self-teacher, or “wheelchair user” as we usually end up calling the lucky ones.
I honed a speech for those people, which included a line heading off at the pass a comment I often heard: “The first people who paraglided taught themselves”. The answer is yes – they did, because they had no alternative. And often they paid for their lessons with their legs, spines and/or lives. And now, today, you, sir/madam have the privilege of skilled instructors being available to make sure you avoid all the mistakes those people made, and all it will cost you is enough to keep the instructor in barely-functioning off-road vehicles and sweet tea. It was hard to keep on having to explain that the lazy, cheap way to learn to fly is to pay the relatively tiny cost of the lessons, because they’re much cheaper than the cost of getting it wrong.
Good story. I worked on both DEC and Sun systems at various points back in the day. I remember the hype about how the Sun systems were going to re-invent animation techniques because of their power. They did, but the company still didn’t last. Which was a shame, there was some excellent engineering in their designs.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that part of my job involves automotive product-level testing (think braking or steering control modules), and we spend hundred of thousands of dollars running the same parts through the same tests for different OEMs because they haven’t learned that little lesson. What my company hasn’t learned internally is to charge the OEMs for these tests. Then they might be willing to accept the results from a single common test effort rather than require us to run tests specifically for them. Only a few more years and I can retire from this madness.
But my favorite saying is that, “The written word is condensed experience.” If I can learn from Marcus’ knowledge, I can avoid making mistakes. I’d be happy to share my mistakes with Markus, but I’m lazy. Incredibly lazy.
Right now I’m on vacation. Drinking cerveza, eating tapas, and looking out the window at the Alhambra. Anyone looking for a deep state operative will never think to look for me here.
The first real computer I ever really understood was the original model of the PDP-8, still built with discrete transistors and magnetic core memory. I can’t seem to forget the machine language. 8-)
I used to maintain systems that used RL01/RL02s. Massive single platter in it’s bulletproof housing, with a whopping 10.4Mb in the ’02 version, as I recall. Mostly installed mid-80s, ran until Y2K.
I honed a speech for those people, which included a line heading off at the pass a comment I often heard: “The first people who paraglided taught themselves”. The answer is yes – they did, because they had no alternative. And often they paid for their lessons with their legs, spines and/or lives.
Michael “Pelican” Helms is a friend of mine and he told me some pretty mind-blowing casualty figures among the first generation of hang glider (pilots?) (operators?) (wossnames?) When you’re writing the book, there’s no book to refer to. He described watching several of his friends go splat. I think he said that of the 20 people he started out hang gliding with in the 70s there are only 2 survivors. But that may have something to do with the overlap between hang gliders and mixed gas diving.
Oh, and he once said that the guys who fly the wingsuits are crazy. That really made me think, “wow, that’s probably an understatement for the Guiness book of understatements.”
(Apparently he also invented the 80s guitar-keyboard thingie that you sometimes see in old videos. He had the originals sitting in his garage next to a first generation hang glider and an eclectic collection of great eclecticity)
Part of brilliant strategy is to be lazy when you can, and leverage the work of others.
As I used to tell my engineering students, “Technology is all about avoiding work in an uniquely efficient manner”. Not to be confused with not doing the work at all, which is called sloth. Technology was born when a caveman discovered that all of his stuff in his cave was blocked off by a landslide of boulders. He thought “Clearing this is going to be a lot of work”. And thus was born the lever.
@5:
Ballast.
@6:
…manager.
I have a weak spot for Sun hardware, for some reason. Especially their weirdo graphics hardware – video memory with built-in ALUs so you can do alpha blending by poking a few registers and then just writing values into memory ( as used on ffb/Creator and related boards ). Or a vector processor built into the SS20’s memory controller ( which I got some docs for and wrote a driver )
Regarding that “guitar-keyboard thingie”: It’s called a keytar (yes, a portmanteau word combing “KEYboard” and “guiTAR”), and the beasts are fairly popular today.