09/13/2026
New England's connection to computer startups..
In 1957 two engineers rented 8,680 square feet on the second floor of an old woolen mill in Maynard, Massachusetts for twenty two cents a square foot a year, and started building computers in a room that still smelled like lanolin. 🖱️
Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson called it Digital Equipment Corporation. Their investors would not let them use the word computer in the business plan, because in 1957 computers meant IBM and nothing else, and no sensible person funded a company that intended to compete with IBM. So the first products were listed as digital modules. Test equipment. Very boring on paper.
The machine that changed it was the PDP-8 in 1965. It was the size of a large filing drawer, it cost about eighteen thousand dollars instead of a million, and it did not need a raised floor, a staff, or a glass room. A hospital could buy one. A high school could buy one. That is the moment a computer stopped being an institution and started being a piece of equipment, and it happened in a Civil War era mill on the Assabet River.
DEC grew into the second largest computer company on earth and employed well over a hundred thousand people. It missed the personal computer, got bought by Compaq in 1998, and vanished. 🧵
