Snapshots of DEC E-Book

Richard Seltzer

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 140

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

DEC was the creation of its co-founder and president Ken Olsen, who for four decades shaped the cadre of managers and the corporate culture that motivated and enabled one generation after another of creativity and innovation as his company grew from a small team in 1957 to a global corporation with over 140,000 employees when it was bought by Compaq, which was then bought by Hewlett-Packard. Fortune Magazine called Ken "the ultimate entrepreneur". This book consists of articles written for the company's employee newspaper in 1982-1983, around it's 25th anniversary, reflecting on the company's past and future. They provide insight into the myriad challenges of a rapidly growing company in the pioneering days of the computer industry.

Leseprobe

Snapshots of DEC

articles by Richard Seltzer from DECWORLD the company newspaper 1982-1983

Preface

DEC - The First Twenty-Five Years

Gordon Bell Talks About Engineering at DEC

Ken Olsen on Engineering Education

PDP-11: All Out to Win

Innovations and Risk-Taking -- Views on the Future of the Computer Industry from Captain Grace Hopper, Computer Pioneer

Captain Grace Hopper's Lessons

DEC's General International Area (GIA): Sales and Service from Sydney to Toronto, from Tokyo to Rio

Going International: the seeds of DEC's worldwide business

Jean-Claude Peterschmitt Remembers - The growth of Digital Europe

DEC Introduces Personal Computers

Preface

DEC was the creation of its co-founder and president Ken Olsen, who for four decades shaped the cadre of managers and the corporate culture that motivated and enabled one generation after another of creativity and innovation as his company grew from a small team in 1957 to a global corporation with over 140,000 employees when it was bought by Compaq, which was then bought by Hewlett-Packard. Fortune Magazine called Ken "the ultimate entrepreneur".  This book consists of articles written for the company's employee newspaper in 1982-1983, around it's 25th anniversary, reflecting on the company's past and future. They provide insight into the myriad challenges of a rapidly growing company in the pioneering days of the computer industry.

DEC - The First Twenty-Five Years

by Richard Seltzer, from DECWORLD, the company newspaper, September 1982

From modest beginnings in an old mill in Maynard, Massachusetts,  DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) has grown, in just 25 years, to be the second largest manufacturer of computers in the world (according to published surveys of the worldwide industry). Its products -- from tiny microprocessors to large mainframe computers -- have  become models of excellence in diverse markets and applications, helping individuals as well as schools, governments, research institutions and large and small companies of all kinds to perform their work more efficiently and effectively.

To respond rapidly to market needs, DEC divides its business into manageable pieces and delegates responsibilities to many individuals, rather than concentrate them in the hands of a few individual initiative, integrity arid accountability are encouraged at all levels. This work environment means that the talents, inspirations and efforts of many different people can quickly be brought into play to meet the shifting challenges of the highly competitive computer business.

In many ways, the most recent year was one of the most challenging and satisfying in the company's history, demonstrating the vigor and flexibility of this large organization and the resourcefulness of its 67,000 employees.

"Our twenty-fifth year was a great one." says Ken Olsen, President. "We grew 20%, invested heavily in new products, were able to offset strategic price decreases by reducing our costs in than ten years. That's not bad in the middle of a worldwide recession. We have reason to be proud.

"We have suffered from having good times for too long." he explains. "People, countries, economies and companies cannot tolerate good times for very long. It's not healthy.

Ken Olsen, President of DEC

"We had several years when things seemed too easy. Our sales people had to spend most of their time telling customers how long they'd have to wait to get our products. Demand for our existing products made it impossible for us to develop new products. Throughout the company, we developed bad habits.

"Two years ago I was frustrated. It took three years to develop a new product. It took four months to get a printed circuit board. We had committees on top of committees to check everything.

"But now," says Ken, "after a lot of effort and the recession, we are good. Now you can get a printed circuit board in a week; and the new products move so fast, it's hard to keep up with them.

"We did quite well with our old ways of doing things," notes Ken. "Now the way we've started turning things around, we'll be so efficient I don't worry about anybody in the world."

Win Hindle joined DEC in 1962 as assistant to the president. He was promoted to product line manager in 1964 and to vice president and group manager in 1967. He became vice president, Corporate Operations in 1976. (Photo by Peg Blanchet, U.S. Area News)

Win Hindle Remembers -- Managing a Fast-Growing Corporation

"When I started at DEC in September of 1962, the company had about about 400 active employees. It was growing well/ That year we did sales of $8 or 9 million. Of course, at that time we were a privately held company, and were not disclosing our sales and earnings information to the outside world.

"My first Job was assistant to Ken Olsen. He gave me a variety of assignments. For instance, I started a formal engineering scheduling system to ensure that engineering got done on time, and I also recruited some engineers and sales people.

"We had a small Personnel Department, but we had very definite ideas about how to handle people and how people should manage. We had a strong feeling for the individual and wanted to be sure our Personnel policies enabled us to provide Jobs that people would be excited about and could accomplish, that had goals and measurements, Many of the same things we talk about today, we were Just as interested in then,

"We recruited mostly in the Massachusetts area. I think at the time I Joined we had only one sales office and that was in Los Angeles, where Ted Johnson was the manager. Then we opened a second one in New Jersey, just outside of New York. A year or so later, when we needed to open a sales office in Chicago, I was sent there to hire someone to open and manage it.

We had a Works Committee that was the chief policy-making body, as the Operations Committee is today. Ken was the chairman and, as his assistant, I was the secretary and had to prepare the agenda and write the minutes. In that committee we decided that we were spending too much time on current issues and not enough on long range planning. So we decided to get away from our usual settings in the Mill and hold a meeting somewhere else. Later we decided we should really get off and away, not Just go to a motel. So we had a meeting at somebody's cottage in the woods. That's where the name "Woods Meeting" came from -- a meeting away from the plant where you consider longer range issues.

"In those meetings, we would plan the size of the company over the next five years. As it turned out, when we compared our actual performance to the long range plans, we found that we had usually grown faster than anticipated five years before."

PDP-6 and the product line structure

"We did, however, face a very critical problem around the time of the introduction of the PDP-6 in 1964. That machine was larger and more complex than we should have attempted considering how small the company was at the time . We had difficulty finishing the hardware engineering and the software, and all the best engineers in the company were recruited for that project to try to make it work. While they were concentrating on the PDP-6, where we were losing money, no one was working on our other machines -- the PDP-5, PDP-7 and our modules -- that were making money.

"It was at that point that Ken realized that we had to change the organizational structure so that we wouldn't arbitrarily put all of our resources into one product and to make sure that we spread our resources in the same proportion as we were seeing success.

’So it was out of that experience with the PDP-6 that the product line structure in the company came about. Each product line budgeted resources that nobody else could take from them, and those resources had to be planned by the beginning of each fiscal year, and the plans had to show how we were going to make a profit.

"We could have gone out of business because of the PDP-6 if we hadn't made those changes. Fortunately, we were in good shape with our other products and they more than made up for our losses on the P'DP-6, thanks to that change in our organization that protected their resources.

"Most of the first product lines were oriented around hardware products rather than markets or applications, and they each had their own engineering departments. In other words, instead of a central engineering department, we had PDP-4 engineering, PDP-5 engineering, PDP-6 engineering and Modules engineering, along with a few smaller projects.

"We still had Sales, Manufacturing and Field Service as separate functions. The product lines managed the marketing, the engineering and the planning. Each of the product lines asked for a certain amount of resources from Sales, Manufacturing and Service and negotiated their needs with the functional managers.

"Each product line started with Just the resources it had at the time the new structure went into effect. Because the PDP-6 had already taken away many of the engineers, these groups had to rebuild, either by hiring these engineers back from the PDP-6 or by recruiting new ones.

"You could propose adding resources, but we didn't add very many during the first year. It took us a while to get into the new organization.

"In 1965, Ken asked me to become the manager of the PDP-6. I was already product line manager for three small product lines and was asked to add the PDP-6 to what I already had.

"After looking at the situation and seeing how bleak it was, I recommended to the Works Committee and they agreed that we fill current orders, take our losses and get out of that business. When I told the PDP-6 group that, they pushed back, saying, “We think we can build a new computer based on the PDP-6 which will be really super." So I went back to the Works Committee with a proposal to start a new computer to be called the PDP-10. After several attempts to get the project approved, we finally succeeded, and that product became the basis of our very successful DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20 families of 36-bit computers.

Evolution of the product lines

"Originally, the product lines taught the sales force about each new product as it came along, and every sales person sold every product of the company. Then in the late 60s, some product lines began to feel that their products were getting so complex that they needed sales specialists. This need was particularly true with the large computer, the PDP-10. People felt that it was so big that you couldn't expect a sales person to understand it technically and also understand all the other products of the company. So the PDP-10 product line made a big push to have a specialized sales force concentrating in large computers, and to a large degree that was accomplished.

"Around the same time, the PDP-8 group developed a wide variety of applications for their product -- such as for laboratories, factories, medical departments and schools. So we began to train the sales force on these applications, At first, every sales person had to learn about every one of those applications. Then there started to be some specialization in the sales force by market.

"Not long after the PDP-11 came out in 1970, there was some competition between product groups. The PDP-8 group was pressuring sales people to sell 8s, and the PDP-11 group was pushing them to sell 11s. We became concerned that our sales people were confused as to what they should sell to a given customer. We felt that it was time to specialize our small computer sales force by market area because small computers were such an important and growing part of DEC's business and the number and complexity of applications was also growing. So we kept the Large Computer Group and the Modules Group as separate product-oriented product lines, and we broke down our minicomputer business, the 8s and 11s, into a series of market-oriented product lines. Many of those — Laboratory, Education, Medical, Industrial (which we now call Manufacturing) are still in existence today.

"At first the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) business was a part of the PDP-8 group, of which Bill Long was the manager. When we divided the PDP-8 group by markets, Bill became the OEM product line manager. That group handled both 8s and 11s, as did the other market-oriented product lines.

'These market-oriented product lines determined the marketing thrust for the PDP-8 and the PDP-11 in their area, and would then educate the sales force and the customers as to which machines were appropriate for which applications.

"That change in the product line structure raised the Question of what we should do about engineering. People who were working on PDP-8 and PDP-11 engineering were brought together into a central engineering organization, under Gordon Bell, and the Large Computer Group continued to do its own engineering as a more traditional product-oriented product line.

"I think the whole idea of managing the business through our product lines was a stroke of genius. I don't believe we could have ever grown as a company nearly as rapidly as we did if we hadn't formed product lines, if we'd tried to manage it as one whole business.

I believe you just can't manage a fast growing, fast moving organization in detail from the top. It limits the growth if you try to do it that way. So we've continuously tried to push decision-making functions down inside the organizations to product lines, to engineers.

DEC's future

"One of the concepts that hasn't changed from the beginning of the company is that people are responsible for the success of the projects they propose. 'He who proposes does.' When they propose projects and get acceptance, then they go ahead and carry them out and are Judged on the results. That fundamental philosophy hasn't changed. I hope it never does.

"But the complexity of things has changed. It's very easy for a company of our size to get so locked UP in bureaucratic decision-making processes that people feel like they go from committee to committee making proposals and never getting anywhere. So we have to keep working to make sure engineers feel they can propose things and can, once they get acceptance, go out and do them, that they aren't powerless, that they can get decisions made.

"One of the thi9ngs you do as a company grows is try to beat down the hierarchy and the red tape so people can get their jobs done easily. A lot of what we do, certainly a lot of what Ken Olsen does, is to tear away the red tape and allow people to do their jobs. We spend a lot of time trying to make it fun to work here, make it challenging, make you feel as though you can make important contributions.

"As for the future, I'd like to see a company where each individual really feels that he or she has a role to play and has the freedom to succeed or fail based

on their own ingenuity. One of the horrors of modern society is 'group-think' or 'group-do,' where you're never singled out as an individual and don't have an opportunity to show what you can do all by yourself, based on sour own drive and ingenuity. I hope 25 years from now we will have a company where individuals feel challenged and feel that they can really live UP to their full potential.

"My vision of a beautiful company is one where individuals when they go home at night feel that they really made an impact, that they've been able to accomplish something, and they feel proud of themselves and proud of the company they work for."

Jack Smith came to DEC in 1958 as a technician. He was involved in building and testing the company's first logic modules and its first computer, the PDP-1. Later he was responsible for the development and growth of the Systems Manufacturing operation. He was promoted to vice president, Systems Manufacturing, in 1976 and to vice president, manufacturing, in 1977. In 1982 he took on additional responsibilities as associate head of Engineering (Photo by Peg Blanchet, U.S. Area News)

Jack Smith Remembers -- Growth In Manufacturing

"In 1958 when I started at DEC there were only 12 people in the company. I was hired as a technician. Sometimes I did engineering work. sometimes manufacturing. I also spent a lot of time painting system modules and sweeping the floor. There wasn't any formal structure. You Just pitched in and did whatever had to be done.

"As we grew to around a hundred people, about I960, we started organizing departments.