[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[John Wallace]

On Nov 25, 7:19 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> 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.

DEC.
Apple.
National Instruments.

Compare+contrast, using one side of the paper only (I think we've
largely covered DEC vs Apple?).