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Topic: Hewlett-Packard

Old DEC code open sourced by HP

Summary: AdvFS offers solid security and back-up features, along with fine-grain control of file systems and free space, according to the SourceForge page. The documentation for AdvFS is living on the H-P site.

Dana Blankenhorn

By Dana Blankenhorn for Linux and Open Source |

Digital Equipment 1987 logoBeen a while since you've seen DEC, the acronym for the late, Digital Equipment Corp., in a headline, and this might be the last time.

But Hewlett-Packard has placed DEC's old Advanced File System (AdvFS) on Sourceforge as a Linux enhancement so let's all party like it's 1979.

AdvFS offers solid security and back-up features, along with fine-grain control of file systems and free space, according to the SourceForge page. The documentation for AdvFS is living on the H-P site.

For you younger readers DEC once defined the mini-computer space, and sold out to Compaq in 1998, which then sold-out to H-P four years later.

However it may be best known for this 1977 quote from co-founder Ken Olsen. "There is no reason for any person to have a computer in his home."

At that time DEC ruled the computing roost, and Olsen was sneering at a 22 year old kid's start-up, called Micro-Soft. The kid retires this week, aged 53, and probably made a million dollars while I typed this sentence.

Let that be a warning to the kid's successors. Feel free to add your favorite DEC stories to the comment thread. Be careful, though. Wikipedia says that Olsen, unlike George Carlin, is still with us.

Topics: Hewlett-Packard, CXO, Collaboration, Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems, Software

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24 comments
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  • Move on... why bother

    Wow, and if IBM open sources OS/2, we'd have two museum pieces to admire. AdvFS was DOA five years ago, the last thing we need is another retrieval from the grave.
    IT_Buyer
    Reply Vote

    • Yeah Microsoft does not need the ....

      competition :)
      mrOSX
      Reply Vote

      • You are illerate at history.

        The man who wrote OSes for DEC is the man who wrote NT, Dave Cutler. It really is sad to see folks go into attack mode without any thought. Pitbull genes perhaps.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler_%28software_engineer%29
        osreinstall
        Reply Vote

        • Well beyound the :) which was meant for humor...

          Lets see if I remember correctly here.

          Microsoft was developing OS/2 and Windows NT, and I remember NT complaining about missing an OS/2 Config file ??? So how much of the code was derived from Microsoft's OS/2 Code ???
          mrOSX
          Reply Vote

          • Depends on the poster.

            Cutler wrote the NT code from scratch and used his VAX experience to do it. I have always had good luck with NT code. Of course I used good quality components.

            Never complained on me when I ripped out the compatibility layer to speed it up years ago. Must not of remembered correctly. It is amazing on the FUD made up about the safety of windows.
            osreinstall
            Reply Vote

          • Well if he wrote it from scratch....

            Then he also worked on the OS/2 code ???
            mrOSX
            Reply Vote

          • Not exactly

            He came a little later. OS/2 and Windows 3.0 (9x) were in partnership when they broke up around 1990. NT was to have the name OS/3 but never got that far. NT3.1 was released in 1993. The earlier versions of NT were the least compatible with OS/2 and 9x. It was later added in to the astonishment of Cutler. But marketing always wins.

            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT

            By the way if you read up on his personality style, you would know that he was good at ripping out a lot of unnecessary code and had a lot of creative license.
            osreinstall
            Reply Vote

    • I haven't done a complete evaluation myself...

      ...so I can't speak to how good or bad AdvFS really is. I'd love to see some of those evaluations you speak of.
      DanaBlankenhorn
      Reply Vote

    • Pot calling the kettle black

      AdvFS would be a museum piece? Come on.

      And what is any *nix derivative (including NT)? They all trace back to the 1960's.

      Just because something is old doesn't mean it wasn't well designed or that it didn't incorporate some useful ideas.
      croberts
      Reply Vote

  • DEC started search engines

    Few people remember that DEC started search engines. Although DEC was there at the beginning of the Internet, when the Net finally started taking off everyone thought DEC was a Johnny-come-lately. A group of DEC engineers were sitting around moaning about it and wondering what they could do to change perceptions. Someone asked "How big do you think the entire Internet is?" The guess was "Probably 900 Gigabytes." The reaction was, "We could index the whole thing and set up a way to search it. Everyone would have to come to US." That search engine eventually became Altavista.com.

    (Moral: Just because you are the leader and innovator and develop something truly useful doesn't mean you'll be able to KEEP your lead. ... You might want to talk to the folks who created VisiCalc, Harvard Graphics, WordPerfect and a few others.)
    Rick_R
    Reply Vote

    • Not to mention Xerox PARC

      My shorthand for this is "having a Clue doesn't guarantee anything."
      DanaBlankenhorn
      Reply Vote

  • VAX was infamous for fragmentation

    I remember a couple 3rd-party tools came about because there wasn't a DEC utility to defrag or reorg the VAX disks, and the system would slow down over time. Other than that, the VAX was a pretty decent system.
    NotMSUser
    Reply Vote

  • OS/2 and NT started from the same code

    Microsoft and IBM were jointly developing it. IBM got upset and took their marbles home and finished the project themselves. Sort of a repeat of the MS-DOS/PC-DOS split.
    See where Digital Research ended up? Makers of the CP/M OS that was supposed to run the IBM PC. They got arrogant with IBM thinking they were the only show in town, that was what drove IBM to Microsoft. Had DR played nice, CP/M would have ruled and everything in the PC world would be different. BTW, CP/M was a great OS, DOS was just second-best.
    NotMSUser
    Reply Vote

  • Two good points and two bad points for DEC

    The VMS operating system had some major technology leaps that boosted the industry at large: cluster technology, intelligent storage management (precursor to SAN), and powerful file systems that gave users database-level capabilities without purchasing expensive add-on packages. VAXes and VMS also made 32-bit virtual systems a mainstream technology, and contributed many advances to today's Intel processor technology (Intel bought DEC's technology and chip fabs in the 1990's).

    But Olsen and his execs were not able to think outside their own self-imposed boundaries. The company was cash-rich enough in the early 90's to do almost anything or buy almost any company except IBM. They were early Internet pioneers who turned their backs on the potential of a "consumer-oriented" Internet instead of the old-boys-club research network that it started from.

    Olsen's two most famous statements were the downfall of the company: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." and "UNIX is Snake Oil." The rest is history.
    terry flores
    Reply Vote

  • Yay!

    I always did like AdvFS, particularly its ability to have multiple file systems drawing from the same pool of disk space (no resizing of logical volumes required). I look forward to seeing it on Linux.
    John L. Ries
    Reply Vote

  • DEC Alumni

    DEC was an innovator - they just fell down in marketing
    (like a lot of other arrogant tech companies).

    Don't forget Dave Cutler - a VMS engineer who went to
    Microsoft for the foundation of NT. "Eat your own
    dogfood" is the quote from the book 'Show Stoppers"
    (from memory), making them work on new non-intel
    environments without legacy code. Probably the last completely new operating system ever.
    Matt R.
    mrfur
    Reply Vote

    • DEC/NT

      Besides the Cutler defection, wasn't there a big flap about MS stealing DEC code for NT and an attendant suit and large settlement? I remember seeing a huge building with a DEC logo magically appear in a hollow off the 520, suspiciously close to Microsoft turf, around that time.
      rickearley
      Reply Vote

    • DEC was an important part of computing history

      DEC made computing affordable for mid-sized companies. DEC broke the stranglehold IBM once had on the market. DEC helped create Route 128 as a competitor to Silicon Valley.
      DEC had many great engineers and innovators who did wonderful things.
      But DEC was very, very late to the PC party, in either hardware or software. This killed DEC.
      DanaBlankenhorn
      Reply Vote

  • Good ideas live on new generations..

    In many ways DEC defined the space that others later occupied. In the 70's I worked for a city where there were dedicated wordprocessor (DEC-8) forerunners to desktop computers. The software was originally invented by DEC engineers to edit code. There was also a DEC PDP-11 (later VAX) that ran all the city's finance transactions, including payroll. And, using an added node, it also ran the city's fire and police computer-aided dispatch system faster than any newer sytem since. DEC world shined most in the comparisons to its major competitor, IBM. DEC allowed live interaction rather than all batch-mode, and featured internal automated system management tools and resources, thus not requiring a fulltime 24 hour staff of human "console managers" to maintain operations. Failure to innovate or provide user-friendliness are not among the explanations for why DEC ultimately failed. Those who sneer do so into a mirror - much of today's compu-genome evolved from DEC-DNA.
    fire1
    Reply Vote

  • RE: Old DEC code open sourced by HP

    DEC put workstations on people's desks before the PC showed up. So, in a way, it helped set in motion the concept of personal computing. At the company where I worked, DEC workstations were used for word processing, e-mail and accessing applications running on servers. I think costs might have been part of its downfall. As more popele wanted desktop computing, DEC might have been too costly compared with networked PCs. Just a guess. Their non-standard keyboard and shortcut keys might not have helped either.
    brucegil@...
    Reply Vote
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