Reading Museum is hosting an exhibition marking more than 60 years since Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) opened its first UK office.
The office was opened in 1964 and rapidly grew until DEC employed more than 2,000 people in the Berkshire town west of London.
This writer is a fan of dusty beige boxes so jumped at the opportunity to attend a preview of the exhibition, a step up from the solitary DECMate III that originally graced one of the museum’s rooms.
The exhibition occupies much of the Sir John Madejski Art Gallery and, as well as some pre-DEC artifacts, has a range of hardware on show, from PDP racks and panels, through retro terminals, to VAX machines, a few of which still bear hopeful “Alpha ready” stickers. The walls show a timeline and quotes from the people involved, with screens to tell the story.
The 1990s were not kind to DEC, and the once-mighty tech giant faded from relevance due to a series of business decisions that, in hindsight, proved detrimental. One of the graybeards at the preview suggested the cost of Alpha chips may have contributed to the downfall, although the rot had arguably set in long before then.
Sadly, the machinery on loan from The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park was not operational during our visit, mainly due to power demands and a lack of personnel on hand to keep the systems running. Readers wishing to see the beige boxes doing their thing would be advised to take a trip to TNMOC.
However, The Register understands that discussions are ongoing regarding possibly firing up some of the old machines on an occasional basis in the Reading gallery.
Considering how things turned out, it is difficult to imagine just how much of a big deal DEC was all those decades ago. The company’s PDP line of minicomputers proved hugely successful during the 1960s and 1970s, and this writer has fond memories of grabbing time on a university VAX in the 1980s.
A former Royal Air Force engineer recalled being sent to Reading for training on the PDP 11/45.
DEC PDP 11 at Reading Museum (pic: Richard Speed) – click to enlarge
“This was at the Digital Equipment Corporation’s training facility in Reading,” he recalled. “This was based on the top two floors of the Butts Centre, a shopping mall in the center of Reading. The course was for four weeks and consisted of computer architecture, basic programming, and fault diagnosis.”
Software was loaded from an RK05 removable disk drive – a good deal quicker than the previous magnetic and paper tape systems.
However, even then it was noted during training that the 11/45 would soon be replaced by the 11/70 or a DEC VAX.
He noted that the PDP 11/45 and RK05 systems seemed very reliable, certainly compared to the ICL 4130, which was also in use but ran with a mix of reel-to-reel magnetic and paper tape.
A visit to the Reading Museum is strongly recommended. Entrance is free – the UK National Lottery Heritage Fund has funded the exhibition – although the sight of exhibits we’re pretty sure we were using only yesterday might be a bit disconcerting.
While the region in south east England might be better known for other tech vendors nowadays – Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, to name a few – a study of DEC’s impact on both the tech industry and Reading itself, and a look at last-century tech, is well worth a few hours of anyone’s time. ®
