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.
