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> Shortly afterwards, in 1974, developers squeezed a reduced PDP-8/A logic board into a VT50 terminal and demonstrated it as one of two potential personal computer products to Olsen. To their disappointment (including a young David Ahl), he vetoed them also on the advice of management concerned it would cut into existing product lines, making the infamous observation that no one would want a computer in their home. This effort was led by Tom Stockebrand, who had previously worked on a number of MIT Lincoln Labs and/or Wes Clarke machines, such as the LINC, which are celebrated for looking a bit like personal computers if you squint. (See Digital at Work, Jamie Parker Pearson ed., ISBN 0-13-213489-6 https://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/_media/pdf/dec.digital... pp. 90-1 : > “One version was going to have a PDP-8 built into this slot in the back, along with a cassette tape drive that could be used like DECtape. The cost goal was $600. Even in 1971, that was dirt cheap for what would have been the first personal computer.” Overall, this may have been one of the most important turning points in the history of the personal-computer market, and it's surely one of the biggest omissions from the usual telling of that story. The capabilities and form factor weren't all that new—the Datapoint 2200 and the Wang 2200 had already launched that decades, two bright red warning flares for the industry—but anything like a $600 price would have been quite something for the time. > Barely a month after, the emergence of the IBM PC 5150 in August and its rapid sales sent a shockwave through the industry, causing Olsen to abruptly reconsider his negative opinion of the personal computer segment. There's probably quite a lot of dramatic irony in this. I suspect that Digital's and Olsen's long-term ambition was usually for DEC to grab IBM's mainframe crown. That was probably the default long-term ambition for anyone in the computer business before the 1990s, but moreover the history of DEC—from Olsen coming out of his secondment from SAGE to IBM manufacturing muttering that he could do much better, to Gordon Bell's "VAX strategy" which aimed to put byte-addressed VAX-instruction-set machines in nearly every product category in a notably System 360ish way, to the decision to charge IBM's mainframe guns with the VAX 9000—mostly seems to suggest that that was the dream. To see IBM then tonk Digital and transform the whole industry with an IBM microcomputer must have set their heads spinning. Small consolation to them that it turned out to be the beginning of the end of IBM's dominance, too. |
Indeed. Perhaps it's a mercy that DEC didn't know at the time that the thing that 'tonked' them was really an "almost didn't happen" skunk works sponsored directly by Thomas Watson over the objections of most of his staff. While there were probably a few wild-eyed true believers in the Boca Raton ranks, to IBM senior management the 5150 was much more a small experiment to learn about these emerging desktop systems and perhaps a tiny hedge against low-end encroachment than any belief the future of computing would be desktop micros.
It's ironic that the 5150 PC that took out the minis then escaped and turned on its creators, unleashing the margin-eating barbarian horde. I've always interpreted IBM's failed PS/2, OS/2 and micro-channel efforts as an attempt to recapture and tame the monster their little experiment had accidentally unleashed. The fascinating question is: if IBM senior management had really believed the PC would become huge, how would the 5150 have been different? And would that less OTS and more proprietary machine have launched the PC juggernaut at all?