It was perfect!! Really characterized Data General — the bastards, no fear.  But sadly it was never run.  I suppose it was Ed that pulled the plug on it.  Too bad, the ad would have generated all kinds of additional free publicity.

Tandem:  Killing Me Softly

By the spring of 1978 I was in a real funk.  I loved my job but I was restless.  Tandem was riding high — they were the talk of the computing world.  I was totally jealous of my old friends.  These guys were now rich and famous!!  If I had tried harder in 1974 I could have been a founder of Tandem!!  I screwed up royally!!

Ok, so what do I do?  Start a computer company?? Is that even possible?  Well, my friends showed me that it was — I was as good as the Tandem guys and look what they had achieved! And look at DG — a highly successful company run by some smart guys with quirky ideas that broke all the rules.   Really, if the DG and Tandem folks could do it, why not me?

I am a note taker.  And a note saver.  I still have notes from staff meetings at HP in 1972!!  The notes for “Nimbus” begin in March of 1978.  (For some reason even back then I glommed on to the idea of naming my company after a type of cloud.)

I would need money, and an idea.  The idea department was pretty empty back then.  I would start a company to go after DEC, HP, DG, Prime, and Tandem.  It would be a “low cost, 32-bit, virtual memory machine with a fast commercial instruction set.”  Pretty weak.  Nothing really new.  No breakthroughs.  So, most of the notes focus on staffing, schedules, and financing.  

I knew this whole idea was pretty lame from the get-go.  But by June of ’78 my focus began to  change.  I would go after Tandem.  Strictly Tandem and the market they created — “non-stop” computers.  The only improvements over Tandem that I could come up with were: “less application work to provide non-stop”, and “repair the system on the fly.”  Plus, I now was a considering a 48 bit word.  But none of that was very exciting.  There still wasn’t the Technical Contribution -- the big idea that Dave Packard constantly preached about.

On the money side I got a list of the current venture capital companies, both East and West coast.  And I figured that some of my University of Santa Clara business school professors might have an idea for funding — I was going to look them up.

In June of 1978 I flew my beat-up ten year old Cessna down to New Jersey to attend the National Computer Conference in New York City.  I went right to the Tandem booth and got a nice demo from Dennis McEvoy.  Their operating system was basically HP’s MPE, their language was HP’s SPL.  I knew that stuff inside and out. This was the first time I touched their hardware -- the computer looked like a tank.  Very rugged.  

DG was doing nothing about this new market even though Tandem was getting all the headlines and a lot of new business.  As far as I could tell HP, IBM, DEC, and all the others weren’t doing anything either.  

This was back in the days before apps.  You didn’t download free or nearly free stuff from the app store.  Back then the customer wrote his own application software, or hired someone to do it.  These applications only ran on one type of a computer.  A DEC app would not run on DG or HP, etc.  One of the first to break this rule was Gene Amdahl.  His company made clones of the IBM 360 — his machines could run IBM software.  Naturally IBM hated this and did all they could to make Amdahl’s life a living hell.

I figured that for DG or anyone else to go after Tandem they would have to come up with a product that was incompatible with their current line.  The customer base would hate that and maybe jump ship — particularly DG’s customers who didn’t have a strong amount of loyalty.  So it was unlikely that Tandem’s first threat would come from an older company.  (I was wrong about this.  It turned out there was a way to make a non-stop computer that was ran old software.  But I hadn’t figured that out yet.)

We had a great family vacation planned for the summer of ’78.  We went to a little island in the Bahamas — Harbor Island.  Two weeks.  I was determined to spend much of that time thinking. My real problem, the thing that was ultimately holding me back, was Dave Packard.  His big booming voice constantly rattled around in my tiny brain: “YOU MUST MAKE A TECHNICAL CONTRIBUTION!!”  

Oh crap, really?  Can’t I just try to improve on Tandem? Isn’t 32-bits or maybe 48 enough? 

“NO!! IF YOU DON’T COME UP WITH SOMETHING REALLY DIFFERENT YOU WILL FAIL!!!”

Double crap.  What can I do that is new and different and better?

For two weeks, whenever I wasn’t playing with the family or doing other fun stuff, I thought,  churned,  mulled. When the vacation was over I had nothing.  Nada.  Zip-zero.  Big time depression set in.  It wasn’t going to happen.  Not in this lifetime.  I was never going to start company.  Tandem would continue to prosper and I would be stuck in this place, in charge of a project that was going to fail. I gave up. 

Nothing much exciting happened until the following summer.  FHP continued to go nowhere, but surprisingly no one seemed to care.  Ed never put pressure on me — never said “Foster, get that thing on track or you’re fired!”  I’m really surprised he never leaned on me hard.  By the time I left DG the project was at least 4 years old -- I'm not sure exactly when it started.  Even at friendly old HP something would have happened by then.  At minimum the project manager would have been replaced, or the entire thing would have been canceled.  At DG nothing.  Nada.  Just keep pouring good money down a rat hole.  I have no idea when they finally pulled the plug on FHP -- I was long gone.

Eagle, the 32-bit Eclipse, was making good progress.  My software team did some amazing things to morph the old 16-bit software into something that would work.  Tom West and his boys were strutting around, naturally happy that they were saving DG’s butt.  Every time FHP missed another milestone West strutted a little higher.

Getting David Packard’s Monkey Of My Back

In June of ’79  I decided to try once again.  Try for an idea.  I need something, anything….  Ok,  Tandem is the only fault tolerant company.  They have a good product, but what is wrong with it?  What don’t people like about Tandem?  Maybe that’s how to attack the problem.

The most obvious problem was that their systems were hard to program.  Basically, a Tandem system consisted of two or more computers connected together with a high speed bus.  To achieve reliability the computers would “checkpoint” each other now and then.  Computer A would work on a problem for a while, then when instructed by the application program it would send information over to Computer B.  Likewise, B would send it’s stuff to A now and then.  That way if either computer failed the other would always know what it’s partner had been doing, and carry on.

It was a good idea.  But it was complex.  Their operating system, the morphed MPE taken from HP, needed extensive modifications to make checkpointing work.  But the worst thing was that the customer’s  application had to actually perform the checkpointing commands — the app had to be designed for a feature that only existed on Tandem.  These commands had really friendly sounding names, such as CHECKOPEN, CHECKMONITOR, CHECKSWITCH, GETSYNCHINFO, etc, etc.  It was a royal pain for a programmer to work all of those commands into the application.  And it meant that you couldn’t take an app from an IBM 360 or some other machine and move it over — it had to be extensively modified, or worse, rewritten.

I knew the trends.  Software was becoming a problem.  Software budgets were getting large.  Businesses were beginning to spend more on software than hardware.  A paradigm shift was happening.  Historically the cost of hardware had far outweighed software.  If I could come up with a scheme (“gimmick” as my friend John Couch would later call it) that eliminated all that extra software — well, that would be a breakthrough.

But how could you make a non-stop computer look like a normal one?  Ok!!  How about two computers?? Two computers running the same program???  After all, the cost of logic, the jelly beans that computers are made of, was dropping very fast.  Why not just have two computers work on the same problem at once?  It sounded wasteful, but it made things so simple.  Maybe this is the beginning of an idea…..

The principle of doing non-stop in hardware, which on the surface seems pretty obvious, was the basis for my Big Idea.  Tandem did their’s with software — my scheme would use hardware.  It was just a glimmer of an idea and needed a lot of work.  But it was a start.  This very simple but major difference finally got Dave Packard off my back.  Free at last!!!

Ideas were coming fast and furious.  I figured I better start writing things down.  I had a composition notebook that was always with me at DG as I went to meetings and such.  It was small and easy to carry around.  It allowed me to keep a record — so I that could look back and see how badly we were missing schedules, etc.  So, for the dream company I called  "Nimbus" I simply flipped this book upside down and backwards and starting writing on the back side of the pages.  The front side was Data General.  The back side was Nimbus.  DG, Nimbus. Old world, new world.  Old shit, new shit.  Boredom, excitement.   It was easy to flip from one world to the next.

This was actually a pretty dumb move considering that I worked for The Bastards, the toughest computer company ever.  If my notes were ever discovered they would string me up.  People would come to work one morning and there would be Bill, hanging by his neck on the flag pole, between Old Glory and the North Carolina state flag.

But never mind.  I’m a risk taker.  I ride motorcycles and fly airplanes.  As a teenager I climbed Half Dome and sat on the ledge at the top with my legs dangling over, 3000 feet straight down.  Dumb.  And later that summer my buddies and I climbed the Golden Gate Bridge, from the base of the tower on up.  Really, really dumb!!  If I could do that dumb stuff then I could take the risk of walking around DG with these notes.

On the way to work each morning for the next two weeks I began pulling over at a secluded spot in the town of Ashland — home of the electric clock.  (There are many iconic places where historic things happened in good old New England.)  I found a spot deep in the woods where I could park and no one would see me.  All the ideas that had come to me in the middle of the night I wrote down before I lost them.