Last week I went to visit a friend at Google, and ended up talking with several of his colleagues. One of them showed me an image of some text that was captioned Spectra 70, but didn’t know that the Spectra 70 was an IBM-compatible computer made by RCA in the 1960′s and 1970′s. That triggered memories of IBM and the Seven Dwarves, going back to the time in the 1960′s when IBM had about a 70% share of the computer market. I stood there trying to remember the other dwarves, and quickly came up with Univac, Honeywell and Burroughs. My friend recalled Control Data and I then remembered GE. Eventually – that evening – I remembered NCR and Sperry Rand, which merged with UNIVAC to form Unisys. So that made the list complete. I felt a little bit like a walking Computer History Museum….
There’s a huge list of minicomputer vendors from that era, and I couldn’t begin to name them all. Of course, there’s DEC (PDP and VAX), Data General (Soul of a New Machine), Prime, MODCOMP, SEL, Harris, and Interdata (first non-DEC Unix implementation). I didn’t include Wang, because they wanted to be viewed as an office automation tool, not a computer system, but neither of these terms saved them. Indeed, it’s a sign of the rapid evolution of our technology that so few of these companies are their products are remembered today.
The software business is even more brutal in discarding products and companies, but that’s a topic for another day.