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"A Walk Through The Mill" - In case you've never been there.

K

kenwickvs

Experienced Member
Joined
May 1, 2017
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109
Location
Raleigh, North Carolina, USA
Hello All DEC Heads (Sounds a bit off, but I'll employ creative license),

It's been a while since I've had time to post here, but I do follow along when I can. One of my supervised "job jar" activities today was cleaning out a bin with many boxes of my past business documents. There, I came across one document that immediately gave me pause. It was a very well presented, but forgotten, brochure titled "A Walk Through The Mill...". I quickly faked an intestinal attack and gained just enough unsupervised time to retire into the house to read the document cover to cover. It brought back so many memories of my numerous trips to Maynard to meet with DEC engineers and marketing folks at the Mill. I attended numerous privileged tech presentations and even once peered through the glass into the hallowed lab (under NDA) where the first Alpha silicon was being brought to life! I also got the opportunity to go on the official Mill tour. That's how I got the brochure.

Reading the document brought back memories, for sure, not only of the work I was involved in, but of being so in awe of the Mill itself and the sheer enormity of Digital Equipment Corporation. Being in the Mill as a guest and engineer was a bit like looking up at the sky on a dark winter night and feeling small and humbled by the view. I recall how the Mill smelled of wood and seeing that the ceiling beams in the halls were so enormous and so damned old. I recall the floors creaked with each step as they had done for over a century. But, the Mill stood as a stark contrast to the leading edge technology appearing from around each corner. A hallowed hall be sure.

I thought about scanning the brochure and posting here, but scans have been done so I have included the link. http://decconnection.org/documents/A_Walk_Through_the_Mill.pdf
I would love to hear from others here on VCFED about the Mill.

I wish y'all a very happy New Year and look forward to staying in touch on this forum throughout 2018.

-Ken Boyette
 
Ken, thanks for that. By the time I joined Digital, as a Mail and Messaging Consultant, right at the end as the Compaq take over had been announced, the Mill was no longer in use, but I did get to see it on my induction course at Marlborough as we were taken on a coach trip round the area. Incidentally I went on the last Digital branded training course...
 
Never worked for DEC but I visited their chip fab at North Queensferry in Scotland. Advanced but surprisingly small compared with some other fabs I've toured.

Really a step too far IMHO. Chip-making was a specialist business even then - DEC should have limited themselves to design and 3rd-party fab instead of looking for those costs.
 
Brings back good memories. I worked for DEC from 1975 thru 1982, and from 1975 thru 1980 was located in the mill. It was truly a magical place. I started out with the diagnostics group, located in ML21 (on the pond) on the 4th floor. Spent many nights debugging code on real PDP-11s over in the software systems lab in ML5-5, the largest building over along Thompson street. It was a couple of football fields long, and had pretty much every configuration of PDP-11 processor and peripherals available for software system development. My favorite system to use was when I would sign up for standalone use of a PDP-11/70 with a full load of 4MB of memory and a massbus RP06 disk. I would run RT-11 :) with a special VM driver that build (essentially) an RK05 pack in memory and would run the system from that image. I was in heaven as a new college grad.

My best office was after I moved on from diagnostics to DEC PDP-11 hardware engineering (working on the PDP-11/74 CIS microcode) us group of microcoders got office space in the old corporate office building right along Main Street. The interesting part was the old company safe (a large oval / egg shaped mass of cast iron about 4' x 4' x 6') was still located in the 'conference room'. It was probably put there before the building was built, and it probably is still there today, I suspect. Would take a crane to move it.

After a year or so in those digs (where we had to walk over to ML5-4 to the hardware lab) the whole of PDP-11 engineering moved up to the Tewksbury site (an old converted shopping center complex where I spent the last couple of years before I left to move out to the West coast to work at Apple in 1982.

Don
 
Quite and interesting booklet. I never worked for DEC or any other computer related company. My trade was Power Engineering. So, I worked in many old power plants. These are much like "The Mill". These older plants were places of innovation, pulverized coal for example. The buildings were elaborate structures that bordered on art work in themselves. The controls and wiring were laid in on 1 inch thick slabs of marble. The floors were were fancy tile. Stairways were wooden, curved and had cast iron banisters. I worked in many of these places starting in the 1960's and fondly remember the smells and sites. For example the Lakeside power plant in St Francis was built 1921 and my grandfather, during those years worked on sailing ships that sailed from the UP of Michigan to Chicago, supplying, mostly lumber to the city. The point is that my grandfather remembers the Lakeside plant being built, he could monitor it's progress each time they would sail past. There is a lot to say about progress, but we also have to remember the past. Mike
 
Again, Hello all,
My favorite quote from the brochure is near the top of page 8: "What is the point of technology if not to make life better, easier, more livable?". Spot on, I'd say. But many of us on this forum and beyond who are involved today in the technology of DEC from the '70's, '80's, and '90's would have to add "more enjoyable" to that phrase. Doesn't it give great joy to get an old system running and play with the very technology that sustained a viable computer giant like DEC back then? Plus, there's no way (I hope) you can experience this joy at a stoplight on a device.
-Ken
 
When I first got to the Mill in 1975 most of the interior space was kind of shabby. It was mostly painted over bricks and wood, and a very rough space. The ceilings were open beam and very high, and office and lab space was constructed by thin fiberboard partitions.

However, it was that year (1975) or just before that DEC finally bought the Mill complex instead of leasing space. In the process they started rehab. All the old paint was sandblasted off the bricks, leaving the raw bricks. Likewise the wooden plank floors were sanded and refinished. Better interior partitions and lighting were added. When I had to move out to the Tewksbury site around 1980 I was sad to leave. The Mill interior had been transformed from pretty groady when I arrived in '75 to a really nice environment to work in by the late 70s early 80s.
 
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