it was perfect!! Actually featuring Data General – Bastards, no fear. But sadly it was never run. I think it was Ed who pulled the plug on it. Too bad, the ad would have generated all kinds of additional free publicity.
Tandem: Killing Me Softly
By the spring of 1978 I was really in trouble. I loved my job but I was restless. Tandem was at its peak – they were the talk of the computing world. I was totally jealous of my old friends. These people were now rich and famous!! If I had tried harder in 1974 I could have been the founder of Tandem!! I messed up with great pleasure!!
Ok, so what do I do? Start a Computer Company?? Is this even possible? Well, my friends showed me that it was – I was just as good as the tandem guys and look what they had achieved! And look at DG – a highly successful company run by smart people with some quirky ideas that broke all the rules. Really, if DG and the Tandem guys can do it, why can’t I?
I’m a note taker. And a note saver. I still have the notes from the staff meeting at HP in 1972!! The notes for “Nimbus” begin in March 1978. (For some reason even at that time I had the idea of naming my company after a type of cloud.)
I will need money and an idea. At that time the ideas department was quite empty. I will start a company after DEC, HP, DG, Prime and Tandem. It would be a “low-cost, 32-bit, virtual memory machine with a fast commercial instruction set.” Quite weak. Nothing new really. no success. Therefore, most of the notes focus on staffing, schedules, and financing.
I knew this whole idea was terrible from the beginning. But by June of ’78 my focus began to change. I will go after the tandem. Strictly Tandem and the market they created – the “non-stop” computer. The only improvements I could make to Tandem were: “Less application tasks to provide non-stop”, and “Quick fix of the system.” Also, I was now considering the term 48 bit. But none of it was very exciting. There still wasn’t a technical contribution – the big idea that Dave Packard constantly preached about.
In terms of money I found a list of current venture capital firms on both the East and West Coast. And I thought some of my professors at Santa Clara University’s business school might have an idea for funding – I was going to look at them.
In June of 1978 I flew my ten-year-old Cessna to New Jersey to attend the National Computer Conference in New York City. I went straight to the Tandem booth and got a nice demo from Dennis McEvoy. Their operating system was basically HP’s MPE, their language was HP’s SPL. I knew that thing inside and out. It was the first time I touched their hardware – the computer looked like a tank. Very rough.
DG wasn’t doing anything about this new market, even though Tandem was getting all the headlines and lots of new business. As far as I can tell HP, IBM, DEC and all the others weren’t doing anything either.
This was in the days before apps. You have not downloaded free or nearly free content from the App Store. At that time customers wrote their own application software, or hired someone to do it. These applications ran only on one type of computer. DEC app will not run on DG or HP etc. One of the first people to break this rule was Jean Amdahl. His company made clones of the IBM 360 – their machines could run IBM software. Naturally IBM hated this and did everything they could to make Amdahl’s life hell.
I thought for DG or someone else to go after Tandem they would have to bring out a product that was incompatible with their current line. The customer base would hate this and probably abandon ship – especially DG’s customers who did not have a strong amount of loyalty. So it was unlikely that the first threat to Tandem would come from an older company. (I was wrong about this. It turns out there was a way to make a non-stop computer that ran on older software. But I hadn’t figured it out yet.)
We had a wonderful family vacation planned for the summer of ’78. We went to Harbor Island – a small island in the Bahamas. Two weeks. I decided to spend most of that time thinking. My real problem, the thing that was ultimately holding me back, was Dave Packard. His big booming voice keeps ringing in my little brain: “You have to make a technical contribution!!”
Oh crap, really? Can’t I try to improve the tandem? Is 32-bit or maybe 48 not enough?
“No!! If you don’t come up with something really different you will fail!!!”
Double nonsense. What can I do that is new, different and better?
For two weeks, whenever I was not playing with the family or doing other entertaining things, I thought, brainstormed, pondered. When the holidays ended I had nothing. Nada. Zip-zero. Big time depression set in. This was not going to happen. Not in this lifetime. I was never going to start a company. The tandem would continue to prosper and I would be stuck in this place in charge of a project that was bound to fail. I gave up.
Nothing very exciting happened until the next summer. FHP was steadily going nowhere, but surprisingly no one seemed to care. Ed never pressured me – never said “Foster, get that thing on the right track or you’ll be fired!” I’m really surprised that he never trusted me strongly. By the time I left DG the project was at least 4 years old – I don’t know exactly when it started. Even on friendly old HP Some? It would have happened by then. At the very least the project manager would have been replaced, or the whole thing would have been canceled. Nothing on DG. Nada. Just keep putting good money in the rat hole. I have no idea when they finally shut down FHP – I was gone a long time ago.
Eagle, the 32-bit Eclipse, was making good progress. My software team did some amazing things to convert old 16-bit software into something that would work. Tom West and his boys were wandering around, naturally happy that they were saving Dizzy’s butt. Every time FHP missed another milestone the vest moved up a little.
Getting the ‘Monkey Off My Back’ by David Packard
In June of ’79 I decided to try again. Try for an idea. I need something, anything… Well, Tandem is the only fault-tolerant company. They have a good product, but what’s wrong with it? What don’t people like about Tandem? Perhaps the problem should be attacked this way.
The most obvious problem was that their systems were difficult to program. Originally, a tandem system involved two or more computers connected over a high-speed bus. Computers will periodically “checkpoint” each other to achieve reliability. Computer A will work on a problem for a period of time, then it will send information to Computer B when instructed by the application program. Similarly, B will send his goods to A from time to time. This way if either computer fails the other will always know what its partner is doing, and will step in.
It was a good idea. But it was complicated. Their operating system, an adapted MPE taken from HP, required extensive modifications to make checkpointing work. But the worst part was that the customer’s application had to actually execute the checkpointing command – the app had to be designed for a feature that only existed on Tandem. The names of these commands sounded really friendly, like checkopen, checkmonitor, checkswitch, getsyncinfo, etc. It was a royal pain for a programmer to work all those commands into an application. And this meant that you couldn’t take an app from an IBM 360 or another machine and transfer it over – it would have to be extensively modified, or worse, rewritten.
I knew the trend. Software was becoming a problem. Software budgets were getting bigger. Businesses began spending more on software than hardware. A paradigm shift was taking place. Historically hardware cost much more than software. If I could come up with a plan (“gimmick” as my friend John Couch later called it) that eliminated all the extra software – well, it would be a success.
But how do you make a non-stop computer look like a normal computer? Ok!! How about two computers?? Two computers running the same program??? After all, the cost of logic, the jelly beans from which computers are made, was falling rapidly. Why not have two computers work together on the same problem? It seemed useless, but it made things much simpler. Maybe this is the beginning of an idea…
The principle of non-stop work in hardware, which seems obvious enough on the surface, was the basis of my Big Idea. Tandem did its job with software – my plan would be to use hardware. It was just a glimpse of an idea and it needed a lot of work. But it was a start. This very simple but major difference ultimately got Dave Packard off my back. free at last!!!
The thoughts were coming fast and furious. I thought I’d better start writing things down. I had a composition notebook which was always with me in DG whenever I went to meetings etc. It was small and easy to carry around. It allowed me to keep a record – so I could look back and see how badly we were missing schedules, etc. So, for the dream company I had called “Nimbus,” I simply turned this book upside down and started writing on the back of the pages. On the front was Data General. The back part was the nimbus. Director General, Nimbus. Old world, new world. Old bullshit, new bullshit. Boredom, excitement. It was easy to move from one world to another.
This was actually a pretty dumb move, considering I worked for The Bastards, the toughest computer company I ever worked for. If my notes were ever found they would have trapped me. One morning people would come to work and Bill would be hanging by his neck on the flag pole, amidst Old Glory and the North Carolina state flag.
but never mind. I’m a risk taker. I ride motorcycles and fly airplanes. As a teenager I climbed Half Dome and sat at the top with my legs dangling straight down, 3000 feet below. Dumb And later that summer my friends and I climbed from the bottom of the tower to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. Really, really stupid!! If I could do that stupid thing I could afford to walk around to DG with these notes.
Every morning for the next two weeks on my way to work, I started visiting a secluded spot in downtown Ashland – where the electric clock is. (There are several iconic spots where historic things happened in good old New England.) I found a spot deep in the woods where I could park and no one could see me. Whatever ideas came to me in the middle of the night, I wrote them down before I lost them.