the Onda

We just finished our first week as HP employees. Part of the transition meant moving from Cambridge to Marlborough (or Malboro as some folks spell it) to a gigantic building called MR01 which was originally one of DEC's buildings (before Compaq acquired DEC which HP then acquired in giant game of Russian dolls).

For fans of 24, the building reminds me of the bunker that Victor Drazen gets transported to during Season 1— gigantic concrete structure, built into a hill, and surrounded by grassy fields on all sides. It is quite the change from being right in the heart of Cambridge to say the least.

That said, the commute and the food— the two things that I was sure would annoy me the most in the first week— have been quite decent. Instead I've come to realize why Gmail, Meebo, and other communication/collaboration/productivity tools that are deployed as webapps are going to win big in the enterprise: because most of the IT impositions inside of large companies generally make life really really suck for regular employees. Two ways to get on the VPN, all web traffic proxied through slow caching servers, and more ports blocked than in Cuba are just a few of the things that make getting productive quickly really hard. Add to that the fact that all support comes from disembodied voices on monster conference calls and you've got a sure-fire recipe for insanity.

On the plus side, one of my absolute favorite things about MR01 is the deep sense of computer history lore that permeates throughout the entire place. This is the case with all of HP— as not only the biggest but also the oldest company in Silicon Valley, it is just fabulous to visit the Palo Alto campus if you're into the birth of this industry. Digital Equipment (DEC) is like that but for the east coast; despite the fact that DEC totally missed the shift to PCs, its pioneering work in minicomputers laid some serious pipes for those to come later.

For example, on Monday night Steve Wozniak spoke at an event at the Museum of Science in Boston and mentioned how the old DEC PDP machine architecture taught him a lot about computer design and influenced his own work. Similarly, Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the first MS BASIC with heavy influences from DEC BASIC and on an 8080 emulator running on a PDP machine.

Then yesterday I saw Dan Bricklin at a Business 2.0 roundtable at MIT. When I told him about working in MR01 his eyes lit up because he'd worked there back in the early 1970s for the typesetting group. He told me that DEC back then was like Apple today and that the typesetting group was like the iTunes music store.

Tabblo is now located in a part of MR01 that looks out on the old helipads that were used by all of the DEC employees to fly between the various different facilities throughout New England (and as Dan told me, for the occasional boondoggle). Ned found a really old printout from the 1970s that had been typed up with all of the driving distances between the plants behind a filing cabinet. It seems that everywhere you look in our new home, you can see a piece of the old DEC— even the folks from HP REWS (real estate services) who go all the way back to the original DEC days and remember when Ken Olsen would buy wood at the lumberyard to make cubes.

Despite that few physical artifacts remain of the old Digital Equipment Corporation, its legacy stretches far and wide, right to this very MacBook that I am typing on now. As an inspiration for the end of our first week at MR01, you could do worse.

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