I started DEC in 1977 and left 1993 . Most of my time, I was working in field Service
as well in computer engineering, department "special system" / Munich.
I am still living in Munich and I am in the glad position to be involved in high tech
technology during my normal working hours and in my free time I am still working with
DEC PDP-11 hardware. A special PDP11/23 and the fastest "PDP-11" has been restored and
are up and runnig again. For me, it's nostalgia and nothing more. Ava Schutzman was so
friendly and did made a anouncement at
http://www.decconnection.org/ComputersinUse.htmabout myself. I have made some technical videos which you will find if yout want at
http://de.youtube.com/user/PDP11GY . They are witten and spoken in English and sorry,
please apologize my German accent. I used the youtube channel to get in contact with
ex-DECie engineers to share information but this was not so successfully and I decided
to use the DEC connection site to get in contact. For me it looks like, that the US
people are a little "shy" to get in contact , but contact from ex-DECie to ex-DECie
should work much more better ? I appreciate every comment/concern !
Some words to my time with DEC started 1977: First I was working in the PDP-8 environment
as field support engineer. It was great start with DEC for me. Adjusting sence/inhibit
signals on core memory via scope and current probe was very sophisticated and I liked it.
I still can reminder on a device, called DF32. 32kB Hard disk, which I hated because it
was too much mechanical stuff involved for me . This device did cost me a lot of nights
and week-ends. Sometimes it was so hard to get it repaired , just for 32KBytes only :-))
3 years later, I moved over to the PDP-11 world and the greatest time for me with DEC
did start. I was responsible for UNIBUS and primary Q-BUS based PDP-11 systems. My most
known system was the PDP-11 MINC system. I was a very happy employee and absolut
committed to DEC with their culture. Traveling around Europa during the normal working
time and working with DEC products in my free time was my live at this point in time
until about 1988 ( Have a look to my videos ).The best time with DEC was over and
conerning the Topic "So what went wrong?" I would be able to write lot of sheets about
this subject and if I follow the articles here , in Germany it was sometimes more worst.
In 1993 I left DEC und did start self-employed working, only for 15 month and now, I am
also a happy employee over more than 10 years with another US Computer Campany.
Take care!
Reinhard
DEC Connection
Author
