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Digital's 'end' is nostalgia time for Indian computer community

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore June 7. The official announcement from Mumbai today by Digital Globalsoft Ltd. that it would "combine with Hewlett Packard's India Software Organisation (ISO)" had been predicted by market watchers for a week now. But its actual happening — and the effective end of "Digital" as a separate brand name in India after almost half a century — is sure to open the floodgates of nostalgia for many computer professionals here: they learnt their trade on what was the world's first, best loved self-assembled minicomputer, the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) "PDP 11".

When HP and Compaq merged in May last here, corporate changes at Digital Globalsoft became a possibility. Compaq had earlier acquired Digital's parent company in the U.S. in 1998 — but uniquely in India, it retained the separate identity. The original Digital was mostly a hardware player which had a good presence in India with its Unix and Windows NT-based workstations. Since Compaq was also a contender for this market, the Digital hardware line was closed and the Indian end reinvented itself as a successful software and services company.

But for most Indian IT professionals who began their career in the 1960s and 1970s, Digital was part of `growing up'. Established in a derelict mill in Maynard, Massachusetts (U.S.), by the Olsen brothers Ken and Stan, both engineers from M.I.T., Digital Equipment as it was then known, took only three years to create and market the world's first mini-computer that you could assemble and programme yourself. It was called PDP-1 and few today remember the full form of the abbreviation: Programmed Data Processor. It cost $125,000.

The best known of the early models was the PDP-8 (an 8-bit machine) that came in 1965 and remained for long the only computer the academic community could afford. That was why the PDPs are till recalled with affection the world over.

In 1970, the most famous and longest lasting of the range, the 16-bit PDP-11 hit the streets and variants continued to be made till the 1980s.

Like their fellow engineers worldwide, Indian users in the IITs and the Government research labs who were among the first to handle PDPs here, had to programme them the hard way: the machines had a row of 16 toggle switches and one had to set them up to read ones or zeroes to boot the machine. Subsequently, software programmes could be loaded by running perforated paper tape through a teleprinter-like machine, the "ASR 33 Teletype" which was for decades the only input method.

Users loved it because unlike the mainframe computers from IBM, Honewell and others, this was a machine that needed no trained staff. You could run it yourself.

In the late 1970s, when Indian import regimes were a barrier to computer acquisition, it took a lot of paperwork before the Director-General of Technical Development (DGTD) at Delhi's Udyog Bhavan allowed an institution to import a PDP. The machines were therefore prized possessions.

Digital's machines — the PDPs and the successor VAX-11 — were for long distributed in India by the Mumbai-based Hinditron Services, a company which for this reason alone built up a lot of goodwill in the country. The parent company had a new claim to fame in the 1990s when it created the DEC Alpha processor, the world's first 64-bit computer chip. This fuelled a new generation of "DECstations" — mini-computers that packed the wallop of a supercomputer.

But Digital's days were numbered after the PC proliferated and the workstation business became more competitive. Nobody wanted mini-computers anymore. In its heyday, it allowed users to cock a snook at behemoths such as IBM and carry on computing. But like all legends of the West, Digital had to retire. It is one of the ironies that the Digital name lasted longest in India, well after it was forgotten in the parent country. Today, Digital's Indian avatar too rides off into the sunset. How sad that it has to do the last ride in the saddlebags of another Western pioneer, HP!

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