Data General

The Fair Bastards

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

It’s tough to describe my three years at Data General. On the one hand, DG and its founder Edson de Castro are responsible for almost all of my business success. It just would not have happened if Ed had not brought me east in 1976.

On the other hand DG did some really weird things. Some things were kookie and funny, but others were wrong and mean-spirited. As CEO, Ed is ultimately responsible for many of the things I experienced at DG – both good and bad. But it’s not easy to be critical. Forty years later I have come to know Ed in a different light – far removed from the pressure and tension of business. He is a good person with many positive qualities. So, given the caveat that I consider my old boss to be a good friend, I will try my best to accurately describe my three important yet crazy years at his company. There’s no way I could describe my life in the computer industry without including Data General, and there’s no way to write about DG without mentioning the bad along with the good.

Culture Shock

I loved the Data General, but sometimes I hated it. Not hate – that’s too strong – but I really disliked some of the things than went on. And I was confused. I had been suddenly thrown in to the real world, after seven years of insulation while at Hewlett Packard, the giant love-in.

I loved the freedom. I loved the fact that my boss left me alone — as long as I stayed within budget I could do almost anything. But there was a lingering feeling of distrust. I felt sometimes that I was not to be trusted — it was like some of us had ulterior motives. And the customers, the folks who buttered our bread — they were sometimes treated strangely, if not harshly. DG’s culture was an anathema to me — in many ways it didn’t pass the common sense test.

The company was a puzzle. It broke all the rules and yet was extremely successful. It had the reputation of being the “bad boy” of the computer industry – heck, of any industry. And it enjoyed this reputation. DG became a public company less than two years after it was founded and shattered records in making it to the Fortune 500. Too bad Harvard never wrote a case study. It would have been groundbreaking! But if they did Harvard would have had to admit that EVERYTHING they taught about how to run a business could be wrong…

I was given very few orders from my boss. Just get the job done. I loved reporting directly to the president of the company — Edson de Castro, The Captain. The founder of what by 1976 had become one of the most exciting and successful computer companies in the world. Although I had a great job at Hewlett Packard I was way down the totem pole at that huge company. At DG I was close to the top. Close to being a star!!

At HP you felt secure, no matter how bad you screwed up. It would have taken an act of bloody murder to get fired. The contrast with DG was extreme. Employees were kept on edge. Your job was simple: help the company make a profit — that’s why you’re here. We were all given a lot of rope. But if you screwed up just take that rope and hang yourself before someone does it to you. It was clear that everyone was expendable.

Stockholders were put on a pedestal. Keep them happy. How? Profit. Everyone at DG knew the company was driven by profit — at all costs. This was new and different to me — at HP people hardly knew how to spell profit. DG was totally counter to the “HP way” — they were as different from Hewlett Packard as a cow is to an orange.

Ok, I loved the place and I disliked a few things. So what? The net result was very, very positive. In fact, it was life changing. Ed brought me from Silicon Valley to sweet New England, out of la-la land and into the real world. DG helped to make me tough. I was a cream puff at HP — I never could have started Stratus straight out of that company. Joining Ed’s company put me on the path to becoming an entrepreneur.

My first day at DG was right after Halloween, 1976. I remember it well. Marian and I had gone to a costume party at our friend’s houseboat at Jack London Square in Oakland. The party was fun as usual but I knew this was my last day in California — the next morning I would be leaving my family behind, getting on a plane for Massachusetts. I hated the thought of leaving them for the next two months. The plan was to let our three small kids finish their semester at school before the whole family moved out in January.

All five of us were natives of California. Nobody left that enormous state back then — everyone was trying to get to the Left Coast. Our family and friends thought we were crazy.

My title at DG was Director of Software Development, reporting directly to Ed. All of his other direct reports had the Vice President title. Oh well, maybe one day I would be a VP…

Right away I discovered that software was not at the top of the food chain. My people didn’t work in headquarters with everyone else. Instead they were exiled a few miles down the road to an abandoned shopping center. They shared a building with the cable-cutting operation. The programmers created software while listening to the constant CHUNK, CLUNK, CLANK of the cable-cutting machines. I learned that the previous year there was talk of moving software all the way up to Maine. A crazy idea — luckily it fell through.

For you non-computer people you need to understand that separating the software people from the engineers who design the hardware was very wrong. Software is the heart of a computer. A computer is useless without the basic stuff that my people developed: the operating system, programming languages, data management software, communications, etc. But DG didn’t see it that way. Its roots were hardware. Software was a necessary evil, created by hippy-freaks.

But in spite of the less-than-satisfactory working conditions the people were great. DG had attracted a bunch of top notch software engineers – equal to if not better than the ones at HP. I was used to the shiny new buildings that HP had built in the middle of some Santa Clara Valley orchards. I took me a while to figure out that if the programmers loved the company and the people that they worked with, the building didn’t matter –even if it was an old supermarket.

DG was 8 years old when I joined. It had spun out of Digital Equipment Corporation in 1968. Ed was a young engineer at DEC and tried to convince its founder Ken Olsen to drop the 12-bit line in favor of 16-bits. In fact, he had a design for the new computer. For some reason Olsen wasn’t interested. So Ed and two others took the design and started Data General. Olsen didn’t sue — it wasn’t his style. But years later he was quoted in Fortune Magazine saying “What they did to us was so bad we’re still upset about it.” I’m mad as hell but I’m not going to do anything about it. Not surprisingly, Ed was always a little paranoid about anyone spinning out of DG and starting another computer company.

Ed is on the left. Herb is the good looking guy on the right :)

At its beginning in ’68 DG was essentially selling “naked” boxes with minimal software to highly skilled engineers. But by the time I joined a lot of their new business was in the commercial world, where their customers depended heavily on software that my folks developed. But DG still had the box mentality. Software was not part of their culture. This sometimes created big problems as DG entered the commercial marketplace.

In the year that I joined, 1976, Data General was flying high — one of the hottest companies in America and the clear number two in minicomputers, right behind DEC. Excellent financials. I didn’t know much about them while at HP — we didn’t cross paths much. I do remember being at a trade show in Las Vegas where DG posters hawking their products could be seen everywhere — at the airport, taxicabs, buses, all over the convention hall. It was very unusual for a tech company to be that much in your face. At another trade show in New York I saw a big crowd around the DG booth. I elbowed my way to the front and there was a belly dancer with a micro-Nova chip in her navel. A very bold thing for the stodgy computer industry. DG’s booth was the hit of the convention.

During my first week my head was spinning. What’s going on? I felt like Alice in Wonderland — everything was upside down and backwards. Or maybe I was the weird one and what I was seeing was normal....

One of my guys told me that DG was about to ship a newly developed disk drive, but my programmers had never seen one — they had never been able to check out their “drivers”, the software that controlled it. There was a great chance that it wouldn’t work — but when I called Paul Stein, the manufacturing VP, and asked him to stop shipments he told me “Forget it. The disks are going out the door. I need them to make my profit goal for this quarter.” Apparently Stein felt profit trumped shipping things that worked. Once it’s off the loading dock and in the truck we could log the revenue and satisfy the stockholders. And Paul would make his goal. Fix it later.

One of my people had his car squashed in the parking lot. DG was expanding the building and during construction a front-end loader rolled over the poor guy’s car. The kid always came to work at 6am so his car was parked in the front row. DG refused to cover his deductible. Jim Campbell, our VP of Personnel told me, “sorry Bill, it’s against policy. It’s between him and his insurance company…” I organized a fund and we all quickly chipped in the $500 that the kid needed. This was really silly – DG missed a golden opportunity to creat tremendous good will with their people.

At Hewlett Packard it seemed like we were always writing things down – producing tons of plans, most worthless. A waste of time. DG had the opposite mentally – don’t put too much stuff in writing. It might get into the wrong hands. Our arch-enemy DEC might steal our secrets. At Data General secrecy was a highly valued commodity.

Scary security guy

One morning I was accosted by a couple of burly security guards as I mistakenly tried to enter through a side door at headquarters in Southboro. Remember the movie The Firm? The chief of security was played by Wilford Brimley. Big, tough, no nonsense, walkie talkie glued to his hand. Looking back that’s what one of the guys looked like — a spitting image of Wilford Brimley. He demanded my ID. I was held there while he called it in, making sure I was who I said I was and not a spy from DEC.

While in the cafeteria line I watched Herb Richman, a co-founder and VP of Sales, take a bite out of a customer’s sandwich and then put it back on his tray. Cracked me up.

Herb was a character – a salesman’s salesman. Fun loving but tough. He had created one of the best sales forces in the industry. A few years later when Bob Freiburghouse and I had teamed up to start Stratus Bob said “let’s hire DG salesmen. They are the best in the industry.” He knew – Bob worked with DEC, Prime, and Wang as well as DG and he saw the differences.

I watched Herb’s Mercedes being towed away from visitor parking in front of our building one morning. Ed had his co-founder’s car towed because no employee was allowed to park there, not even Herb. I saw this towing thing happen several times over my three years. I wondered if it was really a set-up between Herb and Ed — to show everyone that at DG nobody got special treatment. But a good friend who knows both of them very well said he is certain it was real. Herb was constantly trying to pull something over on Ed but he could never get away with it — Ed was just too smart. And just because Herb helped found the company he wasn’t ever going to get any special treatment.

I learned right away there was almost no management structure for my 140-person software group. Programmers pretty much roamed around, doing whatever they wanted, with almost no accountability. For example, there were three projects working on three different versions of a Basic Interpreter. We only needed one. Meanwhile other software products that we needed badly weren’t being done. Management by Brownian Motion. This is why they hired me – Ed knew that the software department was out of control.

My first evening on the job Ed hosted a dinner party at the local Sheraton so that I could meet the “managers”. It turned out he and the personnel guy had to guess at who to invite because the software group had no formal structure. Several people were invited who definitely were not managers and some real managers were passed over. This pissed off a lot of people – one of my first jobs was to calm them down.

One morning Jacob Frank, the company’s chief lawyer walked in to my office with a document.

“Bill, you need to sign this.”

“What is it?”

“Your employment agreement. Everyone who reports to Ed has to sign.” I quickly read it. The document said that everything I did or even thought about while working at Data General belonged to them. EVERYTHING, whether it had to do with computers or not, and for ONE YEAR after I left!! They owned me and my thoughts now and into the future!!! I’d already burned all my bridges to HP. There was no turning back. I had to sign. What I didn’t realize then was that non-compete agreements were not uncommon at the higher levels of businesses. In my naivete I figured they were pulling a fast one on me, because nothing like this existed at HP.

This little piece of paper would haunt me for years to come. It made me feel like my skinny neck was glued to the chopping block with an ax hovering just above, ready to slice. The agreement almost prevented me from quitting and pursuing my Big Idea. Later, just as Stratus’ venture capital deal was about to close, our investors discovered this agreement and nearly backed out. In 1981 I lied to Harvard when they wrote their case study about Stratus because even though I had left DG more than two years earlier my ex-employer and this agreement still worried me.

In the middle of the night during my first week I was jolted awake with an epiphany!! I know what’s going on — this isn’t real — it’s a test! Kind of like Candid Camera — someone created a totally crazy scenario. If I survive I’ll become President of Data General!!! That must be what’s going on — it’s just a big, elaborate, test… If I pass I will run the entire company!!

When I came back down to earth depression set in big time. Had I made the biggest mistake of my life? HP would not take me back. We had sold our house in California. We were committed. There was no turning back.

I needed a break. A diversion. I needed to relax. I decided to go to the movies. There was something called The Marathon Man playing nearby. It had a good cast: Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, Roy Scheider. How could I go wrong?

Is it safe?

Let me tell you, if you ever want to chill out with a relaxing movie, never, EVER watch The Marathon Man. It is one of the tensest movies imaginable, especially if you’re already frazzled like I was. When Laurence Olivier used a dentist drill to dig into a nerve in Dustin Hoffman’s tooth, softly saying “is it safe?” while Hoffman screamed bloody murder, I bolted from the theater. I couldn’t stand it. The worst possible movie that I could have picked at that time.

My first priority was to put together some kind of structure for the 140 people who worked for me. For the first month I spent most of my time organizing the group. Getting to know everyone. Searching for some leaders. I found a few good ones within software and managed to convince a couple of others from different parts of the company to join me. Finally I was ready to present my new organization to Ed’s staff. It was pretty standard for software development in a computer company: operating systems, languages, communications, user manuals, and FHP — DG’s new super secret computer system.

After the meeting Ed pulled me aside. “Don’t mention FHP around Herb.” The soft spoken guy almost raised his voice!

“How come? He’s on your staff and he’s a founder of the company.”

“Herb will leak it. He’ll sell it. Don’t talk about FHP in front of Herb.”

Hmmm. The most important project DG was working on — the future of the company. And Herb, one of the founders, was supposed to be kept in the dark. I began to realize Ed had a fairly unusual relationship with the sales guy that helped him start DG.

In the early 80’s, after I had left DG, group of sales guys started a band to chronicle the culture of this wacky company. Check out the song by The Talkingpropellerheads about Ed and Herb, with Dan Fennelly leading the group. Ed’s wife Eileen was an occasional member of the band – that shows how tolerant Ed was of much of the fun stuff that went on. The guy that ultimately replaced Ed killed the band....

Edson was an enigma, just like his company. He was (is) a brilliant person. He flies his own jet and could probably take the whole thing apart and put it back together again, blindfolded. One day I saw him pouring over the schematics for some complex piece of electronics. He had just added some new avionics to his Beechcraft Baron and wanted to completely understand the design.

He was a shy person. One-on-one conversations could be awkward. Oftentimes in his office when we were discussing something and then the conversation finished he would just stop talking and look down at his Wall Street Journal, which was always open on his desk. No “I’ll see you later” or “have a good day” or any conventional closure. Just silence. I would stumble backwards out of his office, trying to avoid falling on my ass.

Maybe it was the work environment that made him reticent to make small talk with his employees. Maybe he didn’t believe in it. I know from experience it is very hard to be good friends your people, and then have to take harsh action like demoting or firing. I think in hindsight Ed kept his distance from his people for good reason.

Ed is very soft spoken. I’ve never heard him raise his voice, no matter how angry. He could whisper “that’s bullshit” in the softest possible voice but somehow the words penetrated down to your bones. But put him in front of a large group and he was dynamite. At annual meetings or sales events — anything with a big crowd, he was great. Always in command of the facts, a superb public speaker.

There were two classes of people at DG: the Insiders and the Outsiders. Ed, Herb, and Jim Campbell were the insiders. Jim was the VP of Personnel, and an old high school friend of Herb’s . Everyone else felt like an Outsider. We were not part of the inner circle, and were always a little on edge.

It was very odd that Herb, a co-founder, had very little authority. On paper he ran sales and marketing but in practice it seemed like he couldn’t sign for a cup of coffee. Many mornings I would see him camped out in front of Ed’s office, waiting for the magic time of 10:30, waiting for The Captain to arrive, waiting to get authorization for whatever. Something must have happened before my time to cause Ed to strip Herb of all power.

The World’s Best Computer

Back to FHP — Fountainhead Project. DG’s new, SUPER SECRET computer. So secret they rented rooms miles away from headquarters in the Fountainhead Apartments so that the hardware and software guys who worked on it wouldn’t mingle with the rest of the company. Keep them away from mainstream DG. Keep them away from Herb. Keep them away from spies.

A fellow by the name of Bill S. ran my part of the project — the software part. The hardest part. At first glance Bill seemed like a capable enough person. Smart, witty, seemed to say all the right things. I asked him to tell me about FHP. Describe the product, the computer’s architecture. Bill said “I could do it but the best person would be Jerry. Talk to him.”

I found Jerry. He suggested I talk to Lem — “Lem is a great communicator and has a super presentation on FHP.” I tracked down Lem.

“Bill, the world’s best describer of FHP is George. While I could tell you about it, George would do a much better job.”

I began to smell a rat. This project has been underway for more than a year and I was getting the runaround. George finally sat me down in front of a black board and starting drawing. He didn’t have anything in writing (big surprise) — he just put up a bunch of things on the board. The “exciting” thing was what they called a “soft” architecture. This meant that the instruction set was not fixed — the machine would swap instructions in and out depending on what language the application was written in. One set for Cobol, another for Fortran, etc. There was also a plan to imbed much of the OS in microcode. The rest of FHP was pretty standard: multi-tasking, virtual memory, maybe multi-processing.

Variable instruction set? Burroughs tried that and it bombed. Way too complex, and switching between instruction sets was very slow.

Embed the OS in microcode? That sounded really tough, really risky. I asked George what the goals were for FHP? What were the design objectives? “No goals in particular. Just build the world’s best computer.”

“When will we be shipping?”

“Haven’t figured that out yet — probably in two or three years”

I left the building even more depressed that ever. Comically, I couldn’t help but notice that FHP had taken over several ground floor apartments at Fountainhead. Everything George drew on the blackboard was facing the parking lot. Anyone could easily look through the windows to see DG’s plans.

Now, this gets to my biggest failing at DG. I should have tried hard to kill the project right then and there. There was no frigging way that FHP as described was ever going to see the light of day. Telling a bunch of engineers to “build the world’s best computer” was crazy. Computer geeks need limits, boundaries, deadlines. Otherwise the project gets hopelessly complex and nothing gets out the door. Keep it simple, stupid.

I didn’t have the power to kill FHP but at least I didn’t just sit on my thumbs. I immediately wrote Ed a memo — about 15 pages. I put my heart and soul in to it. It meant so much to me that I still have a copy, four decades later. The first 10 pages were pretty general stuff under the heading “A newcomer’s View of DG.” For example, we needed to always test software on new hardware before it shipped.

The last five pages focused totally on FHP. HP taught me that long, complex computer projects always fail. I told Ed we should drop the “soft” architecture — it was way way too complex and risky. Instead, there should be one small, simple instruction set. FHP should be a 32-bit mid-range product, not a big, expensive main-frame. We needed a replacement for our 16-bit Eclipse.

Sadly, my memo had no effect. Nothing changed. FHP continued down a path towards oblivion. An enormous waste of money. Not being able to either kill or drastically change FHP was my biggest failing at DG. I suppose I could have been more forceful, but I wasn’t. My bad.

Gonzo

DG hired several new VP’s between 1975 and 1976. Business was growing fast and they needed to beef up management. While HP nearly always promoted from within, Data General looked outside to fill most important jobs. I benefited from both sides of that equation. At HP I was promoted to run the computer development group while I was still very wet behind the ears. And DG rarely looked inside to fill big positions. I don’t know how many candidates they went through for my job but I know I wasn’t their first choice.

DG hired Dick Weber from Honeywell to run U.S. Sales. Back in the ’70’s Honeywell was one of many companies in the computer business — one of many that are now defunct. I really liked Dick. He was smart, very capable, a real straight arrow. I went on numerous sales calls with him, always had a good time and learned a lot about selling. I was an engineering geek and figured it couldn’t hurt to learn how to sell.

One day Herb stuck his head into my office. “Hey Bill, how’s it going?”

“What’s up Herb?”

“Ed is firing Weber right now. I know you like Dick and I wanted to make sure you don’t freak out.”

This was crazy. Dick was one of the good guys. And US sales were booming.

“Why is Dick being fired?”

“He doesn’t fit in. We don’t like him. But I want you to know that you do fit in. We do like you.”

Gee Herb, thanks. It’s nice to know that I fit in. My thoughts – I didn’t have the guts to say it. I never learned exactly why Weber was canned. But this episode really put me on edge for the rest of my time at DG.

Three years later I tried to recruit Dick to join me as a co-founder of Stratus — to run sales and marketing. Dick wasn’t going for it. He was a big company guy — he had returned to Honeywell. No interest in hanging out with a bunch of engineers in a dumpy old building. Oh well. He would have been good. But we lucked out and eventually got a much better guy from Honeywell — a little man in a green rumpled suit who years later went on to run and grow Cisco, one of the computer industry’s iconic companies.

Having an office next to Herb’s was always a ball of laughs. Once when I was interviewing a techie from MIT Herb suddenly walked in with the latest issue of Playboy. Sticking the centerfold in my face he said, “Hey Bill, what do you think of those???” The MIT geek turned beat red and mumbled something about going up the road to DEC.

Customer Dissatisfaction

I was still brand new at DG when Ed asked me to come with him to Chicago the next day. “We’re going to visit Hyster. They’re really pissed off. Tom is coming with us.” That would be Tom Cook, our VP of Customer Service. Tom had recently joined from IBM. He was a another really good guy. Really knew his stuff. If a customer visit involved Tom they must have been very upset.

I knew of Hyster, the fork lift company. At the tail end of my HP days we were fiercely competing with DG for the Hyster account. DG won and we were devastated.

We walked into the Hyster board room. The chairman and about 10 of his VP’s were there. The chairman proceeded to tell us how crappy our product was. The computers kept crashing — and a some of the promised software hadn’t been delivered. “What are you going to do about it?”

Ed spoke softly: “I know that you’re upset. But you have to realize these are computers. There are always problems. Especially with the software. That’s why I brought Foster. He will get that stuff working. But meanwhile, you’re not living up to your volume purchase agreement. We gave you a big discount, and we expect you to take all the Novas that you agreed to buy.” My jaw dropped. Tom Cook’s jaw dropped. We could’t believe what our boss just said.

The Hyster guys couldn’t believe it either. “You mean you want us to keep taking that crap even though it doesn’t work?? Really?? Please leave the room, we need to talk in private.”

In the hallway outside I wanted to ring Ed’s neck. I wanted to shout “YOU JUST PISSED OFF A CUSTOMER!!! NOT JUST ANY CUSTOMER, BUT AN EXTREMELY IMPORTANT ONE!!!” But I didn’t say say a thing. I was still in shock, and besides, I wanted to keep my job.

Ed spoke: “I really love to pull their chains.” He was having fun!! Ed thought that pissing off a customer was cool! Tom and I were flabbergasted. It wasn’t because we were from IBM and HP — customer friendly companies. NO company in its right mind would do what Ed just did!

Ed knew that Hyster was pretty much locked in to our stuff — they had invested lots of money in software that would only run on DG computers. So maybe that’s why he didn’t care. No matter, it still didn’t make any sense. We eventually fixed the problems and Hyster was satisfied. But the next time they needed to develop a new computer system do you think they chose DG?

I’ve seen Ed many times since we both left DG. I’ve had plenty of opportunities to ask him about that crazy Hyster trip, but I never have. I guess I’m still a little intimidated by him. Maybe that’s natural — your old boss is still your boss, even 40 years later….

Ed normally started work late, around 10:30. But there was one time that I remember him coming in early. One morning sitting at my desk I was startled to see Ed walk by. It was only 8:30! What’s going on! Then I remembered the strange flag flying on the pole next to Old Glory. Turns out it was the North Carolina state flag. Their governor was visiting. Ed came in early to greet him!! Ed was in the process of sticking it to Massachusetts and its liberal, anti-business attitude, and was starting a division in North Carolina. Those guys were tickled pink to be taking some jobs away from Massachusetts.

One morning Jim Campbell rushed into my office, grabbed the Data General Mini News out of my in-box, and as he left he said “Bill, you need to get control of your people!” What’s going on? I hadn’t yet read the latest issue of our company newsletter.

I should have guessed. It was April Fool’s Day, and some of “my people” had come out with their own edition of the Mini News. Campbell was scurrying around trying to grab them all up. I called down to Matt Blanton, one of my guys, and told him to hide his copy. I still have that newsletter.

It was a was pretty benign joke — not too horrible, in my opinion. Jim should have just left it alone. Maybe he was worried about the announcement of a $5,000 cash bonus for referring new hires. There was no such program.

Or the article about the town of Westboro voting to move their town line to the west so that DG would no longer be part of the town — this was actually pretty funny. The article mentioned that Westboro didn’t want to process all sewage that we were producing, and that Southboro, on the other side, had already moved their town line further east so that DG headquarters would no longer be in any township in Massachusetts. A man without a country... This article was immediately followed with the headline “Need Fertilizer?” DG suddenly had a surplus of unprocessed organic fertilizer which anyone could pick up for free. To top it off it was being packaged by Servamation, the people who ran our cafeteria.

Another article entitled “Muskrat Love” mentioned that we were being sued by the Captain and Tennille for $1 million because of the constant sounds of muskrats in our phone system. At the end of the article there was this: “Caution!!!! Turn down your telephone buzzer — muskrat mating season is about to begin!!!”

Another headline: “VP Takes Leave” “Herb Richman, comedian and part-time DG Vice President, will take a two-year leave of absence beginning next week to join the Kansas City Bombers roller derby team.”

The newsletter ended by reminding everyone that since April 2 was John Galt’s birthday it was a paid DG holiday and everyone could sleep in. There were some pretty funny folks at Data General. And of course since Jim was trying to destroy the fake newsletter everyone devoured every word.

More Humor

The new headquarters building finally placed software next to hardware, which was a good thing. Software and hardware are integral to a computer system. It was kind of hard for the software guys to do their job when the guys who developed the hardware were in the next town.

But being co-located did cause some problems. Just like at HP, the DG software guys were a little weird — a little off-kilter. The hardware guys were pretty normal, as far as geeks go. Late one evening I got a call from Tom West, DG’s top hardware guy. He sounded angry. “Bill, I was walking through software on my way to the parking lot and I got hit in the head with a frisbee!! What the F!!!” I went down to investigate. Turns out there was a good reason: The guy who threw the frisbee was riding a unicycle through the halls. The next day I told Tom I would not let them toss the frisbees “whilst ridding unicycles.” He wasn’t amused.

Washing Machine or Disk Drive?

Back in those days some computer disk drives looked like washing machines. About the same size, with a removable stack of 15-inch disks inside. The idea was that when you filled up the stack you could remove it and drop in a new one. The disks had a big, maybe 5 inch hole in the middle. One of our guys thought it made a perfect hat. Dan would walk around the building with the disk on his head, with his ample thick, curly hair poking through. No one gave it a second thought.

These washing machine drives had a quality problem — the lids on top kept randomly popping open causing the computer to crash. One day I walked into the lab and saw a heavy construction brick on the top of the disk drive holding the lid down. The brick was painted in the official DG blue color, with a DG logo pasted on the side. The construction brick looked like an official part of the DG product line.

Matt Blanton, one of the guys that I recruited to help run software, called me early one morning. “b-b-Bill, I’ve decided to f-fire Dan but he’s here in my office with a t-t-tape recorder.” Matt, the nicest guy in the world, was a little upset. He was thrown off kilter by the tape recorder, and this briefly affected his speech.

I told him “don’t worry about it, just fire Dan if that’s what you want to do. If he decides to sue us we have an army of lawyers — with plenty of experience.”

I had started to get used to this firing thing. At HP we never fired anyone. It would have been impossible to fire someone and besides, that would be against The HP Way. I’m sure Matt had a good reason for getting rid of Dan, but I didn’t ask — I trusted Matt’s judgement. Dan probably screwed up one too many projects.

In the summer of 1977 I fired Bill S., the leader of the super secret FHP project. He was screwing up everything, missing every schedule, way over budget. The more I got to know him the more I learned that he was just a giant b.s. artist. (Hence, his initials?) Almost everything he said was crap. Sounded good at first, but was always crap. The final straw was a trip he took to a trade show. Bill had been twisting my arm and insisting it was vital for him to go, to see what the competition was doing. He never showed up at the show, and spent the entire time visiting old friends in San Francisco. I was looking for a reason to get rid of Bill and finally had one.

It all happened quickly. At the end of the day I called him in to my office — I told Bill he was fired. He didn’t protest — he had sensed for awhile that he was on thin ice. Security escorted him out the side door, straight to his car. He was gone. Everyone in software pretty much knew that when Bill S. didn’t return to his desk he was gonzo.

The very next week I needed to talk to one of my guys, Jit Saxena— one of our best people. It was late in the day. When we finished our conversation Jit figured rather than making the long trek back through software he would just go out the side door straight to his car — he never returned to his desk. Everyone figured I fired him. When he told me the next morning about all the calls he got that night consoling him for the loss of his job, we had a big laugh. A big, nervous laugh, because at DG this could happen to anyone. At any time.

Best Mission Statement Ever

In 1978 Fortune magazine wrote an article about DEC and DG. Mostly about the animosity between the companies. It talked about how Ken Olsen thought the Nova rightfully belonged to him because Ed designed it while at DEC. But the highlight of the story was Herb Richman’s quote when he was asked about DG’s tough reputation. Herb said, “Sure we’re bastards. But we’re fair bastards.” The best possible elevator pitch to describe Data General!

At a staff meeting it was mentioned that Apple promised to take all of their employees to Hawaii if they made their sales goal. Apple was new, booming, and still a private company. I blurted out “we should have a similar program. A really big sales goal — a real stretch. If we make it we could charter a bunch of 747’s and take everyone to Hawaii. We could drag banners behind the jets that say “THE FAIR BASTARDS.” I thought this was pretty funny. Nobody else in the room laughed. I guess I was starting to feel a little more secure to even come out with such blasphemy.

WSJ November 1975

Fast forward a year later. One day in a staff meeting there was talk about a DG competitor in New Jersey that was making knock-off Novas — Digital Computer Controls. DG sued DCC the previous year for stealing their design. Now we were going to buy the company and give its CEO really tough if not impossible sales goals, so that he would never get his earn-out.

WSJ January 1975

This reminded me of an old story that had circulated the industry. It was rumored a few years earlier that DG had burned down a west coast company because they were duplicating DG parts. Keronix filed suit, accusing Data General, Ed de Castro, and Fred Adler of having their building set on fire and while they were at it wiretapping their phones. I was vaguely aware of this caper but didn’t pay any attention — I was still at HP. Keronix was unable to prove their allegation and eventually dropped the lawsuit. But maybe they did deserve to be torched. Keronix had stupidly copied DG’s designs down to the last detail, including duplicating mistakes that were on the circuit boards.

32-bits Or Else

Ed wanted to do something in North Carolina. He wanted to send a message to The Commonwealth of Massachusetts and our governor Mike Dukakis that the state’s attitude towards business sucked. It was decided to move super secret FHP there. After we secured a building I began bi-weekly trips to Research Triangle Park near Raleigh. A pretty neat place, with the town of Chapel Hill nearby. Except for being away from family I liked going down there.

I got to meet the famous Fred Brooks who taught at the nearby University of North Carolina. I set up a meeting to find out if he would look in to FHP to help sort things out. He had about 20 little clocks in his office — alarm clock size. He was constantly punching them, stopping one and starting another. “Fred, what are you doing with all these clock?” Turns out he had become a fanatic regarding time management. He wanted to spend his time in the most efficient manner, and at the end of each week he would look at the clocks and figure out how much time he spent on various thought processes and activities.

My meeting with Fred was just a year after he had published “The Mythical Man-Month,” a book about his experiences as project manager of OS 360, the operating system for IBM’s iconic 360 line of computers. This was a hopelessly complex software project that included hundreds of programmers spread around the world. Fred had some great one-liners, like “adding manpower to a late software project only makes it later.” Maybe he figured that by managing his time more carefully he would avoid repeating the mistakes of IBM’s largest ever software project. In any case, after a brief description of FHP Fred said “No thanks. Not the slightest bit of interest. And Bill, good luck with that one….”

About a year after the move to North Carolina Ed put me in charge of all of FHP — the software and the hardware. I now owned the whole enchilada! Carl Carman, my counterpart on the hardware side, was happy, even eager, to rid himself of any connection to the project. FHP was still going nowhere and was hopelessly complex. My excuse for still holding back and not working harder to kill it was that Ed had promoted me to VP. Looks like I was willing to do anything to get that that title, including run a project that I didn’t think had a chance of seeing the light of day.

Many smart engineers at headquarters saw what I saw — the odds of FHP ever getting finished were close to zero. DG desperately needed a 32-bit computer, and all the eggs were in the FHP basket. Until Tom West woke up. Tom, the guy that my freaks beaned with a frisbee, was one of the sharpest people in the company. He and Steve Wallach, another extremely smart guy, decided to do a 32-bit Eclipse. In other words, lower the risk of getting to 32-bits by leveraging off the existing product line.

A writer named Tracy Kidder wrote a pretty good book about this project — it won a Pulitzer Prize. Tom West did the hardware part and my guys in Massachusetts did the software. As is always the case, the software was the hardest part. Morphing a 16-bit operating system and it’s programming languages over to 32-bits is very complex.

Now there were competing projects to get to 32-bits — the relatively low risk Eagle (code name for the 32-bit Eclipse) and FHP, the pipe dream. Kidder’s book (Soul of A New Machine) did a reasonable job of describing the process, but he got a couple of things wrong. He didn’t give Tom and Steve and the project team nearly enough credit for saving DG’s buttocks. Eagle was an underground project. It was done in spite of management — it did not start as a sanctioned project. If Tom and Steve hadn’t done Eagle DG would have been screwed royally. Also, Kidder didn’t really mention how unusual DG was as a company. He talked a little about the weirdness, but the reader might have thought all computer companies were like DG. No way, it was in a class by itself.

DG had a really clever and aggressive PR machine. They were brash, in your face, cocky. At the trade shows DG posters were everywhere. Gimmicks like the microchip in the bellybutton got a lot of free publicity. When my guys came out with a new Fortran compiler PR came up with an unusual way of touting it. This compiler produced really good code — very efficient. But in churning out the machine instructions our Fortran compiler was very slow. It was a real pig. So, our PR guys came up with a full page ad with a pig right in your face. You couldn’t scan through Computerworld without stopping and reading ad. They did a lot of similar things — ad’s that you just couldn’t ignore.

The best ad that DG unfortunately never ran had to do with Big Blue. In 1977 IBM finally decided to get into the minicomputer business with the Series/1. This market was growing too fast for them to ignore any longer. Our PR guys came up with a great full-page ad that was supposed to run in the Wall Street Journal:

SOME SAY IBM’S ENTRY LEGITIMIZES THE

MINICOMPUTER INDUSTRY

THE BASTARDS SAY WELCOME!

Data General

It was perfect!! Really characterized Data General — the bastards, no fear. But sadly it was never run. I suppose it was Ed that 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 in a real funk. I loved my job but I was restless. Tandem was riding high — they were the talk of the computing world. I was totally jealous of my old friends. These guys were now rich and famous!! If I had tried harder in 1974 I could have been a founder of Tandem!! I screwed up royally!!

Ok, so what do I do? Start a computer company?? Is that even possible? Well, my friends showed me that it was — I was as good as the Tandem guys and look what they had achieved! And look at DG — a highly successful company run by some smart guys with quirky ideas that broke all the rules. Really, if the DG and Tandem folks could do it, why not me?

I am a note taker. And a note saver. I still have notes from staff meetings at HP in 1972!! The notes for “Nimbus” begin in March of 1978. (For some reason even back then I glommed on to the idea of naming my company after a type of cloud.)

I would need money, and an idea. The idea department was pretty empty back then. I would start a company to go after DEC, HP, DG, Prime, and Tandem. It would be a “low cost, 32-bit, virtual memory machine with a fast commercial instruction set.” Pretty weak. Nothing really new. No breakthroughs. So, most of the notes focus on staffing, schedules, and financing.

I knew this whole idea was pretty lame from the get-go. But by June of ’78 my focus began to change. I would go after Tandem. Strictly Tandem and the market they created — “non-stop” computers. The only improvements over Tandem that I could come up with were: “less application work to provide non-stop”, and “repair the system on the fly.” Plus, I now was a considering a 48 bit word. But none of that was very exciting. There still wasn’t the Technical Contribution – the big idea that Dave Packard constantly preached about.

On the money side I got a list of the current venture capital companies, both East and West coast. And I figured that some of my University of Santa Clara business school professors might have an idea for funding — I was going to look them up.

In June of 1978 I flew my beat-up ten year old Cessna down to New Jersey to attend the National Computer Conference in New York City. I went right 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 stuff inside and out. This was the first time I touched their hardware – the computer looked like a tank. Very rugged.

DG was doing nothing about this new market even though Tandem was getting all the headlines and a lot of new business. As far as I could tell HP, IBM, DEC, and all the others weren’t doing anything either.

This was back in the days before apps. You didn’t download free or nearly free stuff from the app store. Back then the customer wrote his own application software, or hired someone to do it. These applications only ran on one type of a computer. A DEC app would not run on DG or HP, etc. One of the first to break this rule was Gene Amdahl. His company made clones of the IBM 360 — his machines could run IBM software. Naturally IBM hated this and did all they could to make Amdahl’s life a living hell.

I figured that for DG or anyone else to go after Tandem they would have to come up with a product that was incompatible with their current line. The customer base would hate that and maybe jump ship — particularly DG’s customers who didn’t have a strong amount of loyalty. So it was unlikely that Tandem’s first threat would come from an older company. (I was wrong about this. It turned out there was a way to make a non-stop computer that was ran old software. But I hadn’t figured that out yet.)

We had a great family vacation planned for the summer of ’78. We went to a little island in the Bahamas — Harbor Island. Two weeks. I was determined to spend much of that time thinking. My real problem, the thing that was ultimately holding me back, was Dave Packard. His big booming voice constantly rattled around in my tiny brain: “YOU MUST MAKE A TECHNICAL CONTRIBUTION!!”

Oh crap, really? Can’t I just try to improve on Tandem? Isn’t 32-bits or maybe 48 enough?

“NO!! IF YOU DON’T COME UP WITH SOMETHING REALLY DIFFERENT YOU WILL FAIL!!!”

Double crap. What can I do that is new and different and better?

For two weeks, whenever I wasn’t playing with the family or doing other fun stuff, I thought, churned, mulled. When the vacation was over I had nothing. Nada. Zip-zero. Big time depression set in. It wasn’t going to happen. Not in this lifetime. I was never going to start company. Tandem would continue to prosper and I would be stuck in this place, in charge of a project that was going to fail. I gave up.

Nothing much exciting happened until the following summer. FHP continued to go