A Mildly Amusing (I hope) Anecdote Involving Ken Olsen, RIP by Barry Shein on Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 4:07pm
In the early 1980s I was in charge of the Harvard chemistry computing facility for about a year. We had a Vax 11/780 and a fancy Evans & Sutherland graphics tube (it had its own embedded PDP11/70!), amazing device, and other stuff.
Our 780 had the extra double-wide memory cabinet -- a whopping 8MB total which at the time was a lot. This cabinet was the size of two full-sized refrigerators side by side, just for the extra memory.
The 4MB in that second cabinet wasn't ours. We let a very small company which made 3rd party memory boards for the Vax exercise their new boards in our machine. We got an extra 4MB, they got their memory tested. This arrangement preceded my arrival but it seemed win/win. We got to use what was a lot of memory for the time, probably $50,000 worth of memory, they got their boards tested.
The arrangement meant that every couple of weeks I'd have to meet the guy who basically was the company and power down the Vax briefly so he could take away the tested boards and put new ones in. We'd do this at night when there weren't too many people using the machine and announce the downtime in advance, it was all very friendly.
The problem was that almost every other time we turned the power off on that memory cabinet it wouldn't come back on, the power supply would die.
So I'd call DEC service, we had a full parts and labor contract, and they'd come either in a couple of hours or the next morning and replace the power supply. This wasn't a big deal for the dept because we could run without the extra 4MB until help arrived. I convinced service to leave me a spare power supply so I could do the swap myself, it only took a minute, and they could just bring me a new spare at their convenience.
One day, after blowing maybe the 5th power supply, I get a call from the district service manager. Why were we blowing so many power supplies? Any ideas? I said they always blew when I power-cycled the machine. He wanted to know why we power-cycled the machine so often? I sensed a problem between us but basically said the machine shouldn't die just because we turn the power on and off, the reason is irrelevant. We argued but I really didn't want to tell him we were testing memory in the machine, at least not right then. A power supply was only about $1,000, I thought maybe the memory company could offer to pay for them, or maybe we should? I figured I'd figure something out and somehow get this paved over amicably, or maybe end the testing relationship entirely.
When I got off the phone I immediately called Al, the guy who owned/was the memory company and told him we have a problem. He said he'd be right over. When he arrived he asked for the schematics. In those days DEC gave you a pad of electronics schematics to the computer as thick as a Manhattan phone book.
I kept him company making coffee etc as he pored over the schematics all night. Finally, around 7AM, he announces that he's found the problem in their power supply. Can I get him a phone?
I get him a phone and ask who he's going to call?
Ken Olsen, he should be having breakfast about now.
You're going to call Ken Olsen at home about a problem in their power supply design?
Sure, this is ridiculous, there's a small flaw which is what's causing them to blow, he'll get it fixed.
Olsen will take your call?
Yes. We were roommates at MIT.
Aha.
He called. From what I could hear Olsen was glad to hear his voice. He explained the problem to Olsen in some detail and mentioned how service was giving me grief for what was really their bad design.
Then Al got up, said he had to go get some breakfast and a shower, Olsen wanted him to explain the problem to a bunch of their engineers at 2PM.
I got a call a few days later from the district service manager apologizing for our falling out and promising to get us a new power supply as soon as he had one and thanks for getting the problem fixed!
The computer industry used to be a much smaller world back then.
Barry Shein Boston, MA 9 February 2011