The Soul of a New Machine Read online

  After mainframes, as the big computers were known, came the cheaper and less powerful minicomputers. Then the semiconductor firms contributed the microprocessor, the central works of a computer executed on a chip. For a while, the three classifications really did describe a company's products and define its markets, but then mainframers and microcomputer companies started making minis and minicomputer companies added micros and things that looked like mainframes to their product lines. Meanwhile, a host of frankly imitative enterprises started making computers and gear for computers that could be plugged right into systems built around the wares of the big successful companies. These outfits went by the names of "plug compatibles" and "third-party peripheral manufacturers"; those who lost some business to them called them "knockoff companies." Probably they helped maintain competition in prices. Many "software" houses sprang up, to write programs that would make all those computers actually do work. Many customers, such as the Department of Defense, wanted to buy complete systems, all put together and ready to run with the turn of a key; hence the rise of companies known as original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs — they'd buy gear from various companies and put it together in packages. Some firms made computer systems for hospitals; some specialized in graphics — computers that draw pictures — and others worked on making robots. It became apparent that communications and computing served each other so intimately that they might actually become the same thing; IBM bought a share in a satellite, and that other nation-state, AT&T, the phone company, started making machines that looked suspiciously like computers. Conglomerates, of which Exxon was only the largest, seemed determined to buy up every small computer firm they could. As for those who observed the activity, they constituted an industry in themselves. Trade publications flourished; they bore names such as Datamation, Electronic News, Byte, Computermania. IBM, one executive of a mainframe company once said, represented not competition but "the environment," and on Wall Street and elsewhere some people made a business solely out of attempting to predict what the environment would do next.

  I once asked a press agent for a computer company what was the reason for all this enthusiasm. He held a hand before my face and rubbed his thumb across his fingers. "Money," he whispered solemnly. "There's so goddamn much money to be made." Examples of spectacular success abounded. The industry saw some classic dirty deals and some notable failures, too. RCA and Xerox lost about a billion dollars apiece and GE about half a billion making computers. It was a gold rush. IBM set up two main divisions, each one representing the other's main competition. Other companies did not have to invent competitors and did somewhat more of their contending externally. Some did sometimes use illicit tools. Currying favor, seeking big orders for chips, some salesmen of semiconductors, for instance, were known for whispering to one computer maker news about another computer maker's latest unannounced product. Firms fought over patents, marketing practices and employees, and once in a while someone would get caught stealing blueprints or other documents, and for these and other reasons computer companies often went to court. IBM virtually resided there. Everyone sued IBM, it seemed. The biggest suit, the Jarndyce v. Jarndyce of the industry, involved the Justice Department's attempt to break up IBM. Virtually an entire large law firm was created to defend IBM in this case, which by 1980 had run ten years and had been in continuous trial for several.

  Data General took its place in this bellicose land of opportunity in 1968, as a "minicomputer company." By the end of 1978 this increasingly undescriptive term could in some senses be applied to about fifty companies. Their principal but by no means their only business, the manufacture and sale of small computers, had grown spectacularly — from about $150 million worth of shipments in 1968, to about $3.5 billion worth by 1978 — and it would continue to grow, most interested parties believed, at the rate of about 30 percent a year. By 1978 Data General ranked third in sales of minicomputers and stood among the powers in this segment of the industry. The leader was Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC, as it is usually called. DEC produced some of the first minicomputers, back in the early sixties. Data General was the son, emphatically the son, of DEC.

  A chapter of DEC's official history, a technical work that the company published, describes the making of a computer called the PDP-8. DEC sent this machine to market in 1965. It was a hit. It made DEC's first fortune. The PDP-8, says the official history, "established the concept of minicomputers, leading the way to a multibillion dollar industry." But the book doesn't say that Edson de Castro, then an engineer in his twenties, led the team that de signed the PDP-8. The technical history mentions de Castro only once, briefly, and in another context. They expunged de Castro.

  In 1968 de Castro and two other young engineers seceded from DEC. Several completely different versions of their flight exist and have by now acquired the impenetrable quality of myth. Did they quit because, after long and heartfelt labor on a new design, they found that DEC's management would not build their new machine? DEC's management did turn down a new design of de Castro's, and afterward, along with a man from another company named Herb Richman, de Castro and the two other engineers from Digital incorporated Data General and started building their own minicomputer. But did they design this new machine after they seceded, or had they done that job in secret, using DEC's facilities, while still on DEC's payroll? One version of the story suggested the latter. More than ten years later, DEC's founder and president would tell reporters from Fortune, "What they did was so bad we're still upset about it." But DEC never sued Data General's founders, and clearly there were other reasons why Digital might have become upset. For within a year, de Castro and company had set up shop in DEC's own territory and had started raking in the loot.

  They rented space in what had been a beauty parlor, in the former mill town of Hudson, Massachusetts. Practically all that remains of that time is a black-and-white photograph of this first headquarters. In the foreground stand four young men with short hair, wearing white shirts and skinny ties and the sort of plain black shoes that J. Edgar Hoover's men favored. They are engaged in what is obviously meant to look like routine conversation. The linoleum floor, the metal furniture, evoke motor vehicle departments, and the youths in the picture could be members of some junior chamber of commerce, playing capitalists for a day. Not shown in this bemusing picture is the shrewd and somewhat older lawyer from a large New York firm who helped Data General's founders raise their capital and who became a crucial member of their team. What also doesn't show is the fact that some of these young men were already computer engineers of no mean repute — their age in this case was no impediment, for computer engineers like athletes often blossom early.

  They started Data General at an auspicious time. In the late 1960's, the period memorialized in John Brooks's The Go-Go Years, venture capital (among other things) abounded, and although they started out with only $800,000, more lay in reserve. They also entered a good territory for fledglings. They could not have dreamed of moving in on IBM's markets without truly vast amounts of capital. But the people who bought minicomputers — engineers, scientists, and, mainly, purchasing agents of OEMs —¦ understood the machines. A new manufacturer could reach them through relatively inexpensive ads in the trade journals, and didn't need to build a service organization right away, since these customers could take care of themselves. These were also the sorts of customers who could be expected to embrace a newcomer, if the price was right; they'd prefer a bargain to a brand name.

  But around the time when Data General established itself in the beauty parlor, other entrepreneurs were starting up minicomputer companies at the rate of about one every three days. Only a few of those other new outfits survived the decade, whereas Data General, before it had exhausted its first and fairly modest dose of capital, achieved and never fell from that state of grace, a positive cash flow. Why?

  The company's first machine, the NOVA, had a simple elegance about it that computer engineers I've talked to consider admirabl
e, for its time. It had features that DEC's comparable offering didn't share, and it incorporated the latest, though not fully proven, advances in chips. Data General could build the NOVA very cheaply. Such an important advantage can depend, in computers, on small things. In the case of the NOVA, the especially large size of the printed-circuit boards — the plates on which the chips are laid down — made a crucial difference. For several reasons, large boards tend to reduce the amount of hardware in a computer. Data General used boards much larger than the ones that DEC was using. Speaking of this difference and of other less important .ones, one engineer remarked, "The NOVA was a triumph of packaging."

  Good machines don't guarantee success, though, as RCA and Xerox and others had discovered. Herb Richman, who had helped to found Data General, said, "We did everything well." Obviously, they did not manage every side of their business better than everyone else, but these young men (all equipped with large egos, as one who was around them at this time remarked) somehow managed to realize that they had to attend with equal care to all sides of their operation — to the selling of their machine as well as to its design, for instance. That may seem an elementary rule for making money in a business, but it is one that is easier to state than to obey. Some notion of how shrewd they could be is perhaps revealed in the fact that they never tried to hoard a majority of the stock, but used it instead as a tool for growth. Many young entrepreneurs, confusing ownership with control, can't bring themselves to do this.

  When they chose their lawyer, who would deal with the financial community for them, they insisted that he invest some of his own money in their company. "We don't want you running away if we get in trouble. We want you there protecting your own money," Richman remembered saying. Such an arrangement, though not illegal, might raise some eyebrows in some comers of the Bar Association. But the lawyer said, again according to Richman, "That's the first time anyone made an intelligent proposition to me." Richman also remembered that before they entered into negotiations over their second public offering of stock, after the company had been making money for a while and the stock they'd already issued had done very well indeed, their lawyer insisted that each of the founders sell some of their holdings in the company and each "take down a million bucks." This so that they could negotiate without the dread of losing everything ("Having to go back to your father's gas station," Richman called that nightmare). As for the name of the theory behind selling enough stock to become millionaires, Richman told me, "I don't know how you put it in the vernacular. We called it the Fuck You Theory."

  In the computer business, your market can be your fate. Although by the late 1970s it was hard to define a company's place in the industry by the sorts of machines that it made, certain broad historic distinctions in ways of doing business still divided a large part of the industry into three segments. The differences showed up in the nature of a company's expenditures. IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive. Minicomputer companies split the differences more or less; they sold some machines and service to actual users, but spent most of their money on hardware and did a big business by selling machines in quantity to OEMs.

  From these distinctions, others hung. A seasoned executive in marketing explained, "With micros it's even more competitive, but historically the world of minicomputers is very rough-and- tumble. IBM would say, 'You got a problem, Mr. Customer? A team of four will be there in an hour.' Implicitly a Data General would say to its customers, 'You have to look out for yourselves.' The sophisticated customer, particularly the OEM who buys a lot of computers and looks for discounts, not service, goes for minis. They're capable of living in a rough-and-tumble world. And I'm not sure that IBM, with its organization, can compete in the traditional minicomputer market. It's like putting a goldfish in a bowl with a piranha."

  So you could say that Data General entered a territory that asked for a certain brashness. And you could also say that life in this territory became less decorous than it had been, when Data General came along. They set out to get noticed, first of all.

  In the lobby at Westborough hangs a copy of the first advertisement that Data General ever ran. It consists of just one page. On one side of the page is a grainy photograph of a man's face. This person looks about to do something very mean. On the other side of the ad, he speaks: "I'm Ed de Castro, president of Data General Corporation. Seven months ago we started the richest small computer company in history. This month we're announcing our first product: the best small computer in the world." The message goes on for a while and winds up as follows:

  Because if you're going to make a small inexpensive computer you have to sell a lot of them to make a lot of money. And we intend to make a lot of money.

  This ad's chief architect, a man named Allen Kluchman, who was the company's first director of marketing, told me with a smile, "That ad was independent of any aspect of Mr. de Castro's personality that I knew about at that time. He's the shyest guy I know. He's essentially a pretty humble, private guy."

  The ad achieved a certain local fame. It said what many others presumably were thinking, but what none of them felt they should say publicly. For some years thereafter, most of Data General's advertisements contained something slightly brazen. One of the best-known ads wasn't published — some people in the company were by then apparently having second thoughts about the firm's image. But a copy of this unpublished ad hangs in de Castro's office. Over the Data General logo, on a field of white and blue, it reads:

  They Say IBM's Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome. Before Data General unveiled the NOVA in 1969 — at the industry's yearly fair, the National Computer Conference — the marketeer Kluchman talked a trade magazine into putting a picture of the NOVA on its cover. They rented billboards on the road from the airport to the conference and put a picture of the NOVA on them; at the hotel where most of the people attending the conference stayed, they talked the management into having bellboys distribute free copies of the Wall Street Journal with Data General's advertising flyer inside; at the show itself, they raised the placard bearing their company's name higher than any other. When it came to pricing their machine, they announced extraordinary discounts for customers who bought machines in quantity. Never mind that customers had to buy a virtual warehouse of NOVAs to get the truly big discount. Data General had brought a new ferocity, a bit of Forty-second Street, to the pricing of minicomputers.

  "DEC owned 85 percent of the business and there was no strong number two. We had to distinguish ourselves from DEC," Kluchman remembered. "DEC was known as a bland entity. Data General was gonna be unbland, aggressive, hustling, offering you more for your money We spread the idea that Data

  General's salesmen were more aggressive than DEC's, and they were, because ours worked on commissions and theirs worked on salaries. But I exaggerated the aggressiveness."

  According to Kluchman, DEC actually gave them some help in setting up "the Hertz-Avis thing." DEC's management, he said, ordered their salesmen to warn their customers against Data General. "It was great! Because their customers hadn't heard about us." Kluchman imagined DEC's salesmen telling DEC's customers that a dangerous new company was on the prowl, and DEC's customers responding to this news by saying, "Where is this Data General, so we can be sure to avoid them? What's Data General's phone number, so we'll be sure not to call it?" Kluchman laughed. "The calls just rolled in. DEC's customers would say, 'We hear you're bad guys. You must be doing something we oughta know about.'" .

  And thinking back to those first heady days, when nearly every little strategy seemed to pay off, and the first mil
lions started coming in, Kluchman said, "It was probably more fun than I or anybody else has ever had in business. It was great ego satisfaction. It was just a pure gas."

  At the end of fiscal 1978, after just ten years of existence, Data General's name appeared on the list of the nation's five hundred largest industrial corporations — in that band of giants known as the Fortune 500. It stood in five-hundredth place in total revenues, but much higher in respect to the various indices of profit, and for a while climbed steadily higher on the list. Surely by 1980 such a record entitled Data General to respectability. But some trade journalists still looked askance at the company; one told me Data General was widely known among his colleagues as "the Darth Vader of the computer industry." Investors still seemed jittery about Data General's stock. An article published in Fortune in 1979 had labeled Data General "the upstarts," while calling DEC "the gentlemen." The memory of that article, particularly the part that made it sound as if Data General routinely cheated its customers, still rankled Herb Richman.

  Building 14A/B is essentially divided into an upstairs and a downstairs, and in one corner of the upstairs the corporate officers reside. A wall of glass separates them from the rest of the company. There is no mahogany here. If there is ostentation in the bosses' quarters, it is ostentation in reverse. The table in their conference room, it was proudly said, was the same that they had used when the company was small. Richman's office was comparatively plush. But saying, "We consider ourselves the Robert Hall of the computer industry," Richman pointed out that he had paid for all his furnishings himself and that what looked like paneling on his walls was really just wallpaper.