I'm in my late 40s and have been a software engineer in New England since graduating college. We moved to Massachusetts in 1986, my father went to work at a startup company that was across the street from a DEC building and was in the DEC ecosystem.
The pervasiveness of DEC here is amazing even after all these years. My father in law also spent almost his entire career at DEC and retired as an HP employee. One of my mentors in my late 20s (older Gen X) started his career there. I've known many other people who worked at Digital.
My only real exposure was being like 10-12 years old and getting trucked to the office during "crunch time" and I got to sit at the console on a VAX at one point and got to play early text based games on it. This was weirdly right in the machine room at the operating console as there was some rework project in the room that my father had to be present for. Later on at my first internship in the mid 1990s I had a QA job and I had to test software and I remember having to install on both Ultrix and DEC Unix and I got to use some of the Alpha machines.
There are still all these buildings and artifacts all over the place from DEC all over MA. I bank with DCU. When I was in middle school my best friend and fellow computer nerd's father worked at another Massachusetts institution.. EMC.
I never got pushed into software but it seemed to be pre-ordained... we always had computers and I was given free rein to play with them starting in the early-mid-80s but not really allowed to have video games and we always had business type machines and not the more fun consumer oriented stuff.
If you're in New England, it's definitely worth a visit to the Rhode Island Computer Museum in Warwick, RI. They have a staggering amount of DEC stuff, including rare stuff like one of the nine remaining PDP-9 systems, a PDP-12, most models of the PDP-11 series, and a PDP "Straight" 8, the best looking computer ever made. And a bunch of later VAX machines, DECSystems, etc.
The Retro-Computing Society of RI, a few miles away in Providence, also has a bunch of DEC stuff, also including a PDP-12. These might be the closest working PDP-12s in existence.
The warehouse (Fraiser archives?) is fun, but off site from the museum. My partner noted that driving over there seemed like a start to a bad movie....
I remember the guy giving the tour telling us that he started by collecting cars, but computers seemed more manageable...
That's unfortunate. Movie people are notorious for destroying rented props. I know several (not just 1 or 2) people who rented rare to unique computers and computer parts (because who doesn't want to see your computer in a film), had them returned destroyed (painted, parts stripped off/glued on, burned or water damaged or obviously dropped from a good height), and were told 'collect the insurance...that's what it's for'. Not a single fuck given whether or not they even could be replaced.
I think is a big part of their budget and a lot of the old machines in their warehouse aren't currently running. Mainframe type stuff and comodore 64s were mentioned.
But it must suck to have something valuable destroyed, especially if it's still functioning. I will heed this warning.
It was a while ago but I seemed to remember ber them saying the machines came back cleaner than before.
As someone who was gifted and old MicroVax (a replaced by PCs, old cad/cam machine), many of those old machines are fun to have around but aren't super useful for day to day computing. Thank goodness for emulation.
Yeah, you're probably right; someone running it all as a business has likely figured out how to manage risk. So to be fair, my experience here is with individuals who rented out their toys. I don't think any of the (too) many classic computer forums I'm part of don't have horror stories about the film industry. And if there's say, one Sage console or one 360/195 front panel (soooo many blinkenlights) in the world, it doesn't matter if it's working or not if it's jacked up.
P.S.: The use of per production LLCs shut down asap to avoid all sorts of annoying 'rules' and 'regulations' is another fun topic.
Beyond DEC, there were many minicomputer and related companies in Massachusetts in their heyday. They weren't all on Route 128 (including DEC) but that was the shorthand.
I VERY briefly worked for EMC after they acquired Data General which was a DEC spinoff.
DEC influence was definitely all over the north east! The first multi-user system I dialed into was a VAX/VMS box. I went to a college that had almost all DEC systems - mostly DECstations (MIPS) and Alphas. I later worked at software company full of tons of ex-Digital folk, running most of their software on Alphas running VMS and Tru64 (aka Digital Unix.)
The pervasiveness of DEC here is amazing even after all these years. My father in law also spent almost his entire career at DEC and retired as an HP employee. One of my mentors in my late 20s (older Gen X) started his career there. I've known many other people who worked at Digital.
My only real exposure was being like 10-12 years old and getting trucked to the office during "crunch time" and I got to sit at the console on a VAX at one point and got to play early text based games on it. This was weirdly right in the machine room at the operating console as there was some rework project in the room that my father had to be present for. Later on at my first internship in the mid 1990s I had a QA job and I had to test software and I remember having to install on both Ultrix and DEC Unix and I got to use some of the Alpha machines.
There are still all these buildings and artifacts all over the place from DEC all over MA. I bank with DCU. When I was in middle school my best friend and fellow computer nerd's father worked at another Massachusetts institution.. EMC.
I never got pushed into software but it seemed to be pre-ordained... we always had computers and I was given free rein to play with them starting in the early-mid-80s but not really allowed to have video games and we always had business type machines and not the more fun consumer oriented stuff.