So out on lunch with a coworker today, he tells me how he knows a little Greek store/lunch spot around the corner from our office. We walk to the corner of the parking-lot and take a little cut-through from the lower corner of the property and find ourselves in the back of the neighboring Harley Davidson dealership in Bellevue.
He starts telling me about how he knows of the area, that he used to work in the very building we're walking next to. Turns out that it used to be a campus of a company called DEC, the Digital Equipment Corporation, or just Digital. From there, it became part of Compaq in 1998, the same PC business that HP merged with in 2002. The campus that we work out of now, part of HP Software, used to be "DEC west" or some-such.
Since we moved back to Bellevue, he said that he stopped into that Harley dealer and found that where his cube/desk used to be is now a rack of brochures. How's that for perspective.
But the interesting part of the story, for people who have followed along this far and don't know any more about these companies than I do, is what remains of these companies and what work they did there.
Software is a funny thing. It's the only product that you can manufacture, then sell, and still have it in your possession afterward. Those of us fully living a "digital lifestyle" probably have a few copies of old anti-virus software lurking around the junk-drawers of our homes. This assumes you're not a pack-rat like me and still have 3-1/2" discs under the bed somewhere. What is state-of-the art one day, something that took some poor soul hours upon hours, days and weeks and months to carefully craft, becomes landfill the next.
But other little references remain, if we're lucky enough to catch a glimpse. Turns out that my office building location name, a short alphanumeric code purely internal to HP today, is the same as what DEC used years and years ago. It's a minor detail, but it tingles my history-funny-bone.
What really got it humming was when he told me what type of software they were working on. It was operating system code. Bits that eventually became the foundation of Windows NT. That really struck me. I work in an office where Windows NT was conceived. That's like, hallowed ground for the mainstreaming of the computer age. Think of the growth of the information economy since it's release in 1993. Every version of Windows to date is a derivative of Windows NT. Many of us may curse our PCs and chuckle at Mac ads, thinking of how Microsoft is headed the way of the dinosaur (or of DEC). They still make the software that runs much of our world, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
I guess I want to know that software that I write will run some small part of someone's world. I want to know that my corporate code will persist on after I've left software engineering & design behind to work on sustainable housing projects or some other pursuit. Maybe someday, some new graduate from UW will come into the office and have to set their subnet to CPQ01. Will they wonder if that was the same "CPQ" that Compaq used as their stock symbol? They'll go look for code in the "iconclude" package to learn about the code we wrote just a few years ago.
There's a legacy there. But it's an uncertain, new kind of history. How does one share a "digital-tradition" with one's descendants? What age will I ask my son to join my friend list on Facebook. What will he find there, lurking in the subnet that I'm using for my home network?
2 comments:
From the mouth of a Mac man . . . HUH?
Although I certainly do understand your view. But, in a much more archaic way. I constantly run across remnants of advertising slogans and techniques that I helped develop during the predigital age. It's amazing how "good" stuff lingers on and on and on. Remember, I come from an era where girls in Playboy had no mechanism below the waist. Imagine how surprised the general public was when that found that not to be true. And, by the way, Mrs Sally's Mother still has a large supply of 3-1/2" discs that she uses to back up her PC. (which probably runs some of that stuff you talk about)
See, that's fascinating - that you see repetition and reuse everywhere that people only see "new and improved." Like if Pottery Barn started selling a revolutionary new device for making your own butter called a CHURN, and was selling it for only $299.95!
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