Computer engineer Tom West died a few days ago. He occasionally made an appearance at the office, and although I never met West, he had a significant influence on me, through his work at Data General.
In 1999 DG was acquired by EMC, located just a few exits down Route 495 in Massachusetts. What made DG worth buying was CLARiiON, a mid-range storage system that I know quite well.
The development of the CLARiiON was led by Tom West, marking the second time he postponed scrappy DG’s inevitable extinction. West’s first great success was the MV-series of 32-bit minicomputers, as detailed in the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.
Tracy Kidder and Tom WestWest didn’t smoke cigarettes while he was at work. Away from Westborough, between sunset and bed, he might smoke a pack or more. Once he muttered that smoking wasn’t harmful if you didn’t do it at work. Of course, West knew it was silly in any literal sense, and he uttered it barely loud enough to be heard. Some nights he would go away from Eagle [the project name for the MV] and play music, with friends and acquaintances, sometimes all night long, and then, fingers raw from his guitar strings, he would drive right in to work and become once again the tough, grim-looking manager. One evening that winter I said to him that I didn’t think it was really possible to be a businessman and a dropout all at once. West said, “But I do it.”
During the dot com boom of the 90’s, the unthinkable happened — DEC failed. Despite having a new, cutting-edge 64-bit system called Alpha that put Data General’s AViiON servers to shame.
Prime and Wang were the first Massachusetts minicomputer companies to fall, and the assumption was they’d next be followed by DG. The idea that mighty DEC would be split up and disappear, let alone be survived for a time by its much smaller competitor, was ludicrous, and yet it happened.
EMC retained the CLARiiON name after acquiring DG and it’s only now being retired, in favor of the VNX label. To this day, when you do a SCSI inquiry on a CLARiiON logical drive it returns “DGC,” for Data General Corporation.
If you poke around the videos that show up after the Bonzo Dog Band skit-song I used in my last Neil Innes post, you’ll find this amazing video.
http://youtu.be/-VxV0ZjOcQg
Keep in mind this was before Monty Python’s Flying Circus. And these are cartoons that Terry Gilliam did for the programme.
http://youtu.be/edsgfNFjLYw
As I pointed out years ago, Gilliam had met John Cleese in New York in 1965, and they collaborated on a somewhat notorious magazine project. Later, at the same time when Palin, Idle, and Jones were being very silly with Innes and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, Cleese and Graham Chapman were working with Marty Feldman.
http://youtu.be/DAtSw3daGoo
So, in a way, Gilliam was the bridge between the two camps — Palin-Idle-Jones and Cleese-Chapman — and Neil Innes was the de facto seventh Python.
And, of course, they just have to knock Belgium, don’t they? 😉
From Neil Innes last Saturday I got a typically nasty autograph from his Rutles alter ego, Ron Nasty.
After Innes and the Bonzo Dog Band were in Magical Mystery Tour with the Beatles, they were on a BBC TV show for kids called Do Not Adjust Your Set, where they met Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and Terry Gilliam.
http://youtu.be/AI4ekBi5Hhc
During A People’s Guide to World Domination last Saturday night, Innes sang the “Brave” Sir Robin song from Monty Python and the Holy Grail…
… but he didn’t do the famous Knights of the Round Table song, for which he wrote the tune but not the words, which were by Cleese and Chapman.
http://youtu.be/sGAYk5VWkTw
A People’s Guide to World Domination is a wonderfully funny and engaging show, mixing British music hall humor with social satire. When Innes was in town he did this interview, and on his way up to Boston he stopped at the NPR music studios in Washington, for a Tiny Desk Concert. When I saw Innes he didn’t play Urban Spaceman, a Bonzo-era favorite, but you’ll hear it here.
A tip o’ the virtual toupee to Samjay, for spotting a Rutles song in the credits when he saw The Robber last weekend. It’s I Love You, from the Rutles second album, Archaeology.
