Happy 26th Anniversary to Pats Fans

[Actual Pats Fan]

I'm a relative newbie on PatsFans, and my discovery and introduction was born out of immense personal grief and sadness, upon the passing of Julius Adams.

We all gotta go sometime, and the Jewel lived a long, great life. But any person with any awareness of the Boston Patriots (who drafted him along with Jim Plunkett prior to changing the name to New England Patriots) can see that Julius not only comported himself as a champion on the field, off the field, and in the locker room, but also in public, in the spotlight, in front of the cameras where people simply did not see anyone anywhere demonstrating open, unapologetic, uncompromising pride and strength as a member of the Patriots, counteracting the rampant, brazen ridicule and derision that was already in high gear as far as media portrayal of the franchise was concerned since the merger was consummated.

Any objective analysis of the 1970's & 1980's must acknowledge that it was then that the Patriots established themselves as championship contenders and consistent winners in the modern era of the sport.

And Julius wasn't just there, he led the way through many triumphs and tragedies, bridging generations as he was teammates with Houston Antwine and Bruce Armstrong.

He has lots of company in Russ Francis, Mosi Tatupu and Darryl Stingley as men who should have been recognized, honored and celebrated by being inducted into the team's Hall of Fame when they were still with us.

 

[Actual Pats Fan]

I'd been here less than a year when I got lambasted on the Pats-Falcons Super Bowl GDT at halftime where I kept insisting we still had a chance and we could win it.

 

[n1997y]

Yep, me too. Didn't post because I was a contract employee at the late, great Digital Equipment Corporation and was reading stuff on company time. What else were you supposed to do when building the software took so long? Was making very good money and didn't want to put that at risk just to post stuff to USENET. I'm sure my boss would do his best to sweep it under the rug if someone made a stink about it since he was so short staffed, but you just don't want to risk it by leaving an electronic paper trail.

Was shocked to be walking around late at night (contractors were paid overtime, sweet!) and looking over a cubicle wall (I'm tall enough to do it) and seeing a guy looking at p0rn he downloaded from the infamous alt.binaries groups. I thought that person was insane to put a job at risk just to look at a tiny picture of someone naked. Just take the sweet cash you're earning and buy some mags, dude!

I was a sys admin as well as sw engineer for DEC, and worked with their corporate security on a few things. There was no routine monitoring program. That wasn’t KO’s style, and there would be enough messy policy issues around it that nobody would open that can of worms. Only way you’d get caught would’ve been really really bad luck, or to really screw up somehow, or to be targeted because somebody was out to get you. And if somebody was targeting you like that it was because you screwed up. Still very prudent not to take such risks.

 

[Patjew]

Red Letter Days In Patriots History, post-Y2K:

January 27, 2000 - Bill Belichick Hired

March 24, 2000 - CMGI Field Construction Begins

April 26, 2000 - Tom Brady Drafted

June 17, 2000 - PatsFans.com Registered

And to think we were all freaking out about Y2K.

 

[Bill Lee]

I was a sys admin as well as sw engineer for DEC, and worked with their corporate security on a few things. There was no routine monitoring program. That wasn’t KO’s style, and there would be enough messy policy issues around it that nobody would open that can of worms. Only way you’d get caught would’ve been really really bad luck, or to really screw up somehow, or to be targeted because somebody was out to get you. And if somebody was targeting you like that it was because you screwed up. Still very prudent not to take such risks.

Agree. A lot of it was my own internal paranoia. DEC had a lot of internal online forums that were really good, but I did notice some criticism being directed at employees who spent time on the non-technical ones. Also as a contractor I felt vulnerable. Renewals were frequent and it was an "at will" situation, they could get rid of us at any time with no questions asked. This was during the Internet gold rush and I was being paid quite well, I didn't want to do anything that could kill the goose laying the golden eggs.

One cool thing was that a few engineers used lunch time to do LAN gaming. They were playing ACM, basically a flightsim game. Pretty remarkable since this was the early/mid 90s and most of us had workstations with 12 MHz MIPS R2000 CPUs in them and were using old-school 10 Mbps Ethernet. I think the shared server was a 25 MHz R3000 but that didn't do any of the rendering. They were allowed to play at lunch but it really did drag the network down so pretty much at 1:00 they had to stop the games so people could get some work done. And, again, it was all salaried employees. Contract employees just didn't take the risk of being criticized for goofing off.

 

[Patjew]

My company worked very closely with DEC when they first implemented no clean solder paste. It was a little before my time. DEC had some awesome engineers that started spreading out in the electronics industry after they were acquired by Compaq.

 

[jmt57]

At one time Novell dominated the network software space with Netware. Microsoft attempted to break in with NT, and it was an absolute failure, mocked as 'Nice Try'. Correct me if I am wrong, but if I recall correctly at that point Microsoft recruited a slew of DEC engineers for their networking software, and the second go-around worked incredibly well.

I had started working towards my Novell CNA at the time, with a plan of obtaining a CNE afterwards, but could see what was happening well before Novell did.


As for Compaq, I can remember at one point in time there was talk that Tandy (Radio Shack) was planning on buying them out, lol. Talk about a company that made one bad decision after another. . .

 

[WhatJustHappened]

I used to buy electronic parts at Radio Shack way back in the day...bad decision would be accurate.

 

[Actual Pats Fan]

Red Letter Days In Patriots History, post-Y2K:

January 27, 2000 - Bill Belichick Hired

March 24, 2000 - CMGI Field Construction Begins

April 26, 2000 - Tom Brady Drafted

June 17, 2000 - PatsFans.com Registered

July 1, 2000 - NFL League Office Officially Notified By New England Patriots That Iconic Logo And Uniform From Patriots' Rise To Competitiveness In The Modern Era, Last Worn In 1983, To Be Restored As Primary Uniform Effective In 2001



...in my dreams...

 

[n1997y]

At one time Novell dominated the network software space with Netware. Microsoft attempted to break in with NT, and it was an absolute failure, mocked as 'Nice Try'. Correct me if I am wrong, but if I recall correctly at that point Microsoft recruited a slew of DEC engineers for their networking software, and the second go-around worked incredibly well.

IIRC at the time Novell dominated the SMB market segment for LANs, with some competition from IBM’s token ring, DECnet, and Banyan Vines, among others. Novell did not scale well (nor did token ring, and it had some other problems too) so DECnet was the leader in WANs and large corporate and academic environments. This was before TCP/IP rode the coattails of Unix to become ubiquitous especially in the all important academic environment. Problem was, Microsoft was late to the party, didn’t really have a dog in the fight.

Version 3 of Windows, especially Windows for Workgroups, exposed the problems in the base product. It was really a GUI layered on top of MS-DOS which was a very simple rip of DR-DOS, itself a simple rip of DEC’s RT-11, the simplest of the three PDP-11 operating systems DEC had been selling for years. Windows was, quite frankly, a kludge to get a graphical interface shipped to compete against Apple, and technically it was a mess.

To fix it Microsoft hired some DEC engineers, most notably Dave Cutler. Cutler was a legend in DEC for leading evolution of RSX-11, the most sophisticated PDP-11 operating system, then leading development of VMS when DEC created the VAX, among other major accomplishments. Hiring him was a big deal. He lead the creation of Windows NT which was essentially a port of the RSX/VMS architecture to create a graphical environment on Intel. Problem was, native Windows networking was inadequate so that capability lagged until there was a robust host platform, which NT successfully provided. VMS already had that with DECnet, so NT was network ready once the Microsoft networking side caught up.

DEC was light years ahead of competitors in things like that partly because engineers were given a very large sandbox. Things like lunchtime interactive games exercised the network and created real world performance testing most vendors just did not have. The internal VAXnotes usage was similar, basically providing capabilities that would rival today’s products like Microsoft Teams, forty years ago. When DEC imploded and they were laid off a group of friends tried to build a startup based on VAXnotes concepts. It failed largely because the world wasn’t ready to buy capabilities nobody else could imagine let alone know how to use.

Really too bad it ended, but DEC was a fun ride while it lasted!

 

[Bill Lee]

My company worked very closely with DEC when they first implemented no clean solder paste. It was a little before my time. DEC had some awesome engineers that started spreading out in the electronics industry after they were acquired by Compaq.

Yep. The talent DEC (and others) drew to the area ended up in other big tech giants (Intel, AMD, NVidia) giants setting up shop here as DEC went into decline. Most of these still have a presence in the area. It also drew network outfits such as Cisco and Juniper. Another factor was all the facilities they built. Tons of startups took shape in their facilities. Kind of a shame that DEC didn't put all the pieces of the puzzle together, but in the end, pretty much all of their competitors of the 1990s (Sun, HP, SGI, IBM, etc) either died off or became Intel resellers, so it wasn't a problem unique to DEC.

IIRC at the time Novell dominated the SMB market segment for LANs, with some competition from IBM’s token ring, DECnet, and Banyan Vines, among others. Novell did not scale well (nor did token ring, and it had some other problems too) so DECnet was the leader in WANs and large corporate and academic environments. This was before TCP/IP rode the coattails of Unix to become ubiquitous especially in the all important academic environment. Problem was, Microsoft was late to the party, didn’t really have a dog in the fight.

Microsoft really misread the room. In the 1990s when the Web was taking shape, they were putting time and money into building their own BBS product to try to compete with AOL. They had no TCP/IP stack for Windows 3 (although 3rd party ones existed). For WIndows 95 the code was there on one of their 'driver diskettes' but wasn't installed by default. Once CDs became common, installation became easier.

I agree academia was a big driver of TCP/IP, but IMO everything transitioned because of the Web, which of course emerged from academia but was embraced by corporations pretty early on. Once corporate giants started having their own web pages and e-commerce was being enabled by TCP/IP, the battle between network protocols was over.

M$ was lucky that so much code was either royalty-free or cheap to license. Once they had a code base they had rights to reuse, they then enacted their "embrace and extend" strategy to perform product lock-out. They could have embraced Mosaic but nope, they had Internet Explorer. They could have promoted NFS, but nope, they did their own file server stuff. And so on, and so on, and so on. Guess what, it's a strategy that works, presuming you have the clout to do the lock-out, and M$ did/does.

DEC was light years ahead of competitors in things like that partly because engineers were given a very large sandbox. Things like lunchtime interactive games exercised the network and created real world performance testing most vendors just did not have. The internal VAXnotes usage was similar, basically providing capabilities that would rival today’s products like Microsoft Teams, forty years ago. When DEC imploded and they were laid off a group of friends tried to build a startup based on VAXnotes concepts. It failed largely because the world wasn’t ready to buy capabilities nobody else could imagine let alone know how to use.

While that sounds like a good thing to be light years ahead, it's problematic when your product is so far ahead that customers can't figure out how to use it. The things I worked on were like that. They led us to set world records on database performance, but most customers couldn't cope with the complex setup needed to gain similar results.

My career arc went IBM -> DEC so I saw a lot of things that DEC really could have done better.

IBM bent over backwards to retain customers. You literally could buy a mainframe in the 2000s that could run code written in the 1960s. I worked with the UNIX group at DEC but even as a UNIX bigot I though the idea of prioritizing Windows NT over VMS was insane. DEC were able to command a premium from the loyal VMS customer base they had built up over a long time, but they basically told those people to move to NT, with no sensible migration path. They gave up a premium market for a low-margin, highly-competitive market. So f'in stupid!

And, while KO was a legend, by the end he had lost touch with tech. He poured money into projects like VAX 9000 that never returned a dime because he simply could not believe a microprocessor could not outperform a mainframe, despite a lot of smart people trying to show him otherwise. If you don't believe me, the end part of the following is worth watching:

(part 2)

(part 1)

Really too bad it ended, but DEC was a fun ride while it lasted!

I agree. I used to say "the inmates ran the asylum". DEC's engineers had a lot more power than what I had seen at IBM. That worked out quite well when the customers were mostly engineers, but over time the customer base changed and DEC didn't change fast enough. Regardless, it made it a lot more fun to be an engineer at DEC than it was at IBM.

It was fun to be a contract employee there. I saw a lot of commitment from the salaried employees, but also a lot of frustration because they could see their competitors cashing in during the Internet Boom while they were just scraping by. As a contractor I could be a lot more detached than they were. I also went to a lot fewer meetings, a huge win!