The folly that was Tandem Computers and the path that led me to NonStop ...

With the arrival of 2018 I am celebrating thirty years of association with NonStop and before that, Tandem Computers. And yes, a lot has changed but the fundamentals are still very much intact!

The arrival of 2018 has a lot of meaning for me, but perhaps nothing more significant than my journey with Tandem and later NonStop can be traced all the way back to 1988 – yes, some thirty years ago. But I am getting a little ahead of myself and there is much to tell before that eventful year came around. And a lot was happening well before 1988.

For nearly ten years I had really enjoyed working with Nixdorf Computers and before that, with The Computer Software Company (TCSC) out of Richmond Virginia. It was back in 1979 that I first heard about Nixdorf’s interests in acquiring TCSC which they eventually did and in so doing, thrust me headlong into a turbulent period where I was barely at home – flying to meetings after meetings in Europe and the US.

All those years ago there was a widely read publication called Datamation – a publication I swear was written, with some subterfuge, by IBM folks who wanted to communicate details about their projects to the rest of IBM. However, it was the advertisement on the very back page of that magazine that caught my eye – a picture of a Tandem Computer complete with Mackie Diagram showing what a truly fault tolerant system looked like. Datamation was my go to reading material while I flew so each time I stuffed the magazine back into the pocket of the seat in front of me, there was that Tandem advertisement.

So, imagine my surprise when I went to the Hannover Fair for the first time (before technology split from the primary event) only to see being constructed across the aisle from Nixdorf, a rather large exhibition booth housing a team from Tandem Computers. This was back in either 1983 or 1984, I cannot recall exactly. But at the time, fault tolerant computers were getting a lot of attention – IBM was reselling Stratus as their own System/88 and even Olivetti, a fierce rival of Nixdorf, was reselling Stratus.

A short time later and after the Hanover Fair wrapped up, Nixdorf revealed it was working with the New Jersey company building fault tolerant computers - Auragen Computers. The plan was for Nixdorf to rebadge and sell right alongside its other platforms, which at this time included a range of IBM Plug Compatible Mainframes (PCM) called the 8890. However, it didn’t go so well and at one point, it was reported that Nixdorf founder, Heinz Nixdorf, totally frustrated by the progress being made to create a fault tolerant system utilizing Unix, told an audience that the only thing fault tolerant about the system was the sales team!

As I recall those days, I am quite sure thoughts of Tandem were gradually entering my subconscious. But having worked with mainframes for such a long time, my colleagues thought it foolish of me to change course and to them, getting involved with Tandem was sheer folly! Which brings me back to the photo at the top of this post – a double magnum of a 1998 vintage of Lake’s Folly bought for me just as it was released!

It was a wedding present given to me by my wife of only a few weeks, Margo Holen. According to Max Lake, owner of the vineyard, the wine would need another twenty to twenty five years before it could be consumed. You see Max had pursued a highly successful career in medicine but reached a point where he too wanted to change course. As he announced his plans to open a winery, his friends called it foolish so of course, he named his new endeavor, Lake’s Folly!

It was in 1987, when living in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was working for an SNA networking company Netlink, Inc. that I ran into folks from Tandem – people like Jerry Held, Andy Hall, Jeff Tonkel and Suri Harish. At the time, Tandem was interested in the SNA_Hub product that eventually found its way into the Tandem price book and featured in the Tandem Update publication. It struck me at the time just how innovative Tandem was and how well they were doing pursuing a completely different approach to solving business issues to do with maintaining uptime.

These folks that I came into contact with were Tandem evangelists of the highest order and over an adult beverage or two, Suri convinced me that it was time for me to consider joining Tandem. I couldn’t really do that in 1987 as there were visa issues so, returning to Sydney around this time in 1988, after almost three months of interviews with the local Tandem operation in Australia, I was given an opportunity to work for Tandem out of the Sydney offices.

The journey to Tandem had been circuitous – with stops in Richmond, VA, and Raleigh, NC, together with weeks spent in Germany as well as in Cupertino, CA. But the camaraderie and openness across the entire Tandem organization was unlike anything I had previously experienced.

It wasn’t simply the infamous beer busts or the swimming pool. It wasn’t the creativity behind the Tandem Television Network and the filming of First Friday. It wasn’t even the sight of such a sprawling campus that has now been ploughed under to make way for Apple. What it really came down to where a group of people who simply said that there was a better way to compute and that you could build these better ways to compute where no single point of failure could disrupt the processes - cool! The world could indeed be changed and yes, for a very long time, Tandem changed the world!

Long before Tandem became NonStop, the stars aligned in a way that was unique to the late 1970s – every financial institution wanted to own a network of ATMs but none of them wanted their ATMs directly connected to their mainframes. Traditional front-end-processors weren’t capable of running the software needed for payments processing so essentially, Tandem got its big start in life as an intelligent front-end. And they redefined the world of commercial front-end processing. I saw the impact that made on IT when I was at the Hannover Fair and I read about it so many times in the pages of Datamation.

Looking back at thirty years of association with Tandem and now, NonStop, that little spark of magic that saw the earliest Tandems carve out a niche as an intelligent front-end processor is about to be revisited. And in a way that could prove to have an even bigger impact on the marketplace than simply connecting to ATMs – blockchain. We hear the term “disruptive” so often nowadays that we no longer really react to it. Everything that makes it past the critical reviews of venture capitalists is disruptive in one way or another.

However, NonStop and blockchain is almost like a marriage made in heaven – if the distributed immutable ledger is to anchor commerce in the future, you don’t want to see copies of that ledger off-line for any period of time. True, the architecture really has an element of consensus about it but even so, when the underlying blockchain is used to support just a small finite group of entities – say just two or three nodes – then trust may indeed be jeopardized if it comes down to just two or even one working copy of the ledger.

NonStop with NonStop SQL underpinning blockchain has so much upside the likes of which I haven’t seen in a very long time – but is this just another foolish observation or wish? Is it a return to the days when jumping ship and joining Tandem was considered Buckle’s Folly? The jury will be out on this topic, debating the issue for quite some time, and yet I see all the signs that HPE may just have had good fortune fall right into its lap.

The year has only just begun but somehow, someway, after being around Tandem for thirty years I have a sense that, just as the first use-case scenario featuring blockchain on NonStop is being developed even as I blog – and yes, back down in Sydney as I understand it – a very positive chain reaction is likely to occur. And while I may not be able to track how this all pans out for the next thirty years, at least I will know that sometimes, folly can be a very good thing for not just me but for anyone in the NonStop community!

Happy New Year!