[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[JF Mezei]

Finally finished reading the Book of Jobs.

In many places, there is mention of the debate on closed vs open
architecture, and how Apple would succeed by making a solution from
hardware to application and content that works, even going as far as
buying a chip design company to ensure they got features they wanted in
the CPUs.

Jobs speaks very highly of HP throughout the book, they inspired him
(since Hewlett and Packard also started ina garage, and Jobs first job
was at HP etc). But at the very end of the book, where Jobs speaks of
hoping he has injected Apple with his long lasting DNA, notes how
Hewlett and PAckard had done the same and seemed to have succeeded  but
now, HP was self destructing having lost its initial culture.

Digital Equipment is mentioned once in the book, with Woz working on a
PDP-8 in one of his early jobs.


What I find interesting is that Jobs never mentioned Digital in his
discussion about open/closed architecture. He mentioned IBM briefly, and
of course the Apple-Windows and now Apple-Google competition on closed
vs open.

I find it interesting because at a time where Jobs matured between his
two stints at Apple, he would have seen Digital's demise, going from a
vendor similar to Jobs's aspirations (selling everything and making sure
it all worked together and being succesful) to being an also ran that
had become irrelevant in the industry (same as Apple did while Jobs was
not there).


Jobs was old enough to know about mini computers. He was old enough to
have known about VMS. So it is interesting that he totally ignored this
large part of IT back then.

Perhaps his world was really bounded by a short radius around palo alto
and cuppertino and because DEC was on east cost, he didn't know they
existed.

Or perhaps Digital also had a reality distortion field, making believers
think DEC was far more important than it really was and that Alpha was
far better than other chips of the day, and Jobs' own reality distortion
field made him immune from propaganda from other vendors.