The Soul of an Old Machine
November 4th, 2009 by Paul CeruzziI am at work now, about to go home. But according to this news flash from local radio station WTOP, I may have a difficult commute. It seems that the computer controlling traffic signals in Montomery County,Maryland, has failed, and traffic signals are not being synchronized. Traffic in suburban DC is chaotic anyway, so a glitch like this is not good.
According to the report, the computer is a “Data General main frame” [sic]. Now there’s a name I had not heard in a while. That company was a spin-off from DEC, about which I blogged a few weeks ago. They were located a few miles from the Mill, DEC’s headquarters. Most of know Data General from the book by Tracy Kidder–still one of the best books ever written about computing. Was this Data General Eclipse the “main frame” whose creation Kidder chronicled so well? Could be. Any computer that served as such a workhorse for so many years must be pretty good. Data General alumni can hold their heads up high.
David Grier, former Editor of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, once wrote of a “great machine” theory of history. I would not put the Eclipse on that list. But the Data General Nova, on which the Eclipse was based–now there was a computer! Let us raise a glass to DEC, Data General, and the fantastic engineering that came out of the Massachusetts woods.
November 10th, 2009 at 8:22 am
When I worked at DEC (1976-1982) we tried to “do the right thing”. We were faced with a major transition in the field, then often charactered by the number of bits: 16 to 32, characterized the PDP-11 to VAX-11 transition. (even the VAX brand paid homage to it’s roots).
The compilers were world class (disclosure: I worked on a couple). The run time systems were ambitious – cross language interoperability was the gold standard and was largely achieved.
There were solid, experienced based standards which the software engineers followed (e.g. VAX-11 Software Engineering Manual). If you followed the guidelines and standards, things just worked.
There are many lessons to be learned from the “Massachusetts woods”, for sure.