Oral History of Theodore G. (Ted) Johnson

Interviewed by: Gardner Hendrie

Recorded: May 14, 2010 Boston, Massachusetts

CHM Reference number: X5815.2010

Gardner Hendrie: With us today is Ted Johnson who has graciously agreed to do an oral history for the Computer History Museum. Thank you very much, Ted.

Theodore G. (Ted) Johnson: You’re welcome.

Hendrie: You’ve done an autobiography which has a lot of detail about your early life, but I’d just like to get just some summary details on this transcript before we get into your career at Digital [Equipment Corporation]. Maybe you could just briefly tell us a little bit about your parents and where you grew up and what they did and any siblings you had; just a little background.

Johnson: I was born in Iron Mountain, Michigan, and I lived there until I was 22 or so. My parents were Swedish origin, especially on my father’s side. My grandfather was born in Dalsland, Sweden. They were the first to immigrate over here and went into the iron mining business largely. That was the basis of my hometown: Iron Mountain, Michigan. At one point, it was the leading place for making iron ore for the country, until they discovered the Mesabi Range. My father was a grocer. My grandfather started farming here but then quickly started a company called Anderson and Johnson; Swedish food with Italian customers.

Hendrie:

Johnson: Turns out most of the Swedes left and the Italians stayed. So he was stuck with an Italian group. So I was raised in Italian town basically. My mother, she came from a family of Swede Finns. They were Swedish speaking. My whole family was Swedish speaking. We belonged to the Swedish Lutheran Church, for instance. They came from a small town, Fiala [ph?], in Finland. I went back there and visited them as well as my Swedish grandparents. I was just raised basically in a Swedish-speaking environment.

Hendrie: Did your parents speak Swedish to you at all?

Johnson: Oh, yes.

Hendrie: So you understood. You learned.

Johnson: Well, I should’ve learned more. They never made an effort to teach anybody Swedish, so none of my cousins could speak any Swedish, except little bits that we picked up in jokes and things like that. My father had a sister, identical twin, who’s very funny and very open and very humorous. She used to like to tell us Swedish jokes. It was a good hardworking Swedish family. My grandfather started a grocery store, Anderson and Johnson. My father basically managed that store for many, many years, until he finally sold it after my grandfather died a few years before that. What am I missing?

Hendrie: Siblings.

Johnson: Oh, siblings. I have one sister; my sister Jean, who’s younger than I am. She stayed at Iron Mountain and worked as a telephone operator and things of that sort. Basically, I was raised with cousins and friends, not family much. More about Iron Mountain?

Hendrie: Let’s talk a little bit about your early schooling. Where did you go to school in elementary school and then high school?

Johnson: Well, I stayed in the Iron Mountain school system. I went to Washington School, first Amidon School for half a year up in the North Side, which is where the Italians live and where our store was. But we moved down to the East Side where all the Swedes were . I started off well in school. Second grade, I had a very good teacher. She found I had an artistic bent. I was doing a lot of things like that. I started painting in all my classes. Became a big part of my grade school life anyway. Then I became a musician. I did very well at the piano.

Hendrie: When did you learn to play the piano? Who got you started? Did your mother have piano lessons for you?

Johnson: Oh, I had piano lessons, but I took them from my cousin’s teacher. He was two years older than I was, and he and I were very close. We were very good friends. We played duets together in the cold winter day afternoons. We’d go skiing in the afternoon and come back and play duets. I learned how to sight read because he was much better than I was at least at the beginning. Music became a very big part of my life. It turned out the environment was good, too, because my Swedish-Lutheran parents and environment were very, very supportive of music. I think I had plenty of opportunity to perform and to display what I’d learned. So that was a very big part of me. I started in high school becoming a professional piano player. I learned that just by playing in a job one night, finding I could get paid for it. So I started playing with bands and things while I was going through high school. In fact, we even had a trio, the GAT Trio [ph?]. We played for dances and all kinds of things like that.

Hendrie: Oh, that’s very cool.

Johnson: Yes, it was nice.

Hendrie: How young were you when you took up the piano and started playing?

Johnson: I guess I was eight.

Hendrie: You were eight?

Johnson: Eight years old, yes. She was a very good teacher, Belle Browning. So I learned a lot, and I liked it a lot. It was a town where I could play a lot. There’s plenty of opportunities, including when I got into Boy Scouts and stuff like that. So I was always kind of a semi-star, you might say. Yes, it was very much a part of my life. Iron Mountain was a very musical town.

Hendrie: Tell me about your first exposures to science and math. I think, from reading your autobiography, you clearly were interested in that sort of thing. So when did that happen?

Johnson: When did that happen? Well, it started when I decided I want to go to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. That was a parting point. I decided I want to go to college at a technical school.

Hendrie: But in high school, did you have any good teachers that inspired you about science and math or you just sort of took what was there and did well?

Johnson: I had some good math teachers, people that I liked. But I was general purpose you might say. Some of my favorite teachers were English teachers, math teachers, science teachers, that sort of thing. I felt very fortunate. Reasonable education. But I didn’t really get very far in math. I mean, when I got to college and discovered calculus, I hadn’t even realized what that was before.

Hendrie:

Johnson: My roommate next to me all had had courses like that when they were at Brooklyn Polytech for instance, except I didn’t. So I had some catch-up to do.

Hendrie: When you got there.

Johnson: I didn’t stay there very long, though. But then I decided to go—I got sick, first of all, when I was at MIT. So after five weeks, I had to drop school and rest, part of that in a sanitarium, for two years. Then I started over again. I went to Caltech instead.

Hendrie: What was the illness?

Johnson: Well, basically it was pleural effusion, but the roots of that are TB [Tuberculosis]. They never were able to prove that to my satisfaction anyway, but they treated it that way. I had to rest a lot.

Hendrie: Oh, my goodness, that’s hard. You just found out about that when you got to MIT?

Johnson: I never realized it till I got to MIT.

Hendrie: Wow.

Johnson: The summer before, I’d gotten sick. Well, I had an episode, anyway, where I was feeling very weak and everything. But I went off to school anyway, and I did fine at the beginning. I was playing piano for all kinds of events at MIT, too.

Hendrie: What made you decide to go to an engineering school? What was the process that led you to pick MIT?

Johnson: Well, it was the best in my opinion . I got a scholarship when I was in high school. It was $1,000 a year. After I got sick, it became $2,000 a year. The tuition at Caltech, at that time, was only $600 a year. Now it’s $40,000 or something?

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: What was the question?

Hendrie: I’m curious about how you decided you wanted to do engineering. What inspired you to pick that? You said you enjoyed lots of different courses and lots of different things.

Johnson: I read a lot of books. I was very interested in a lot of technical people, the guy who started—I can’t even think of his name. I was always interested in my math courses at school and engineering. I realized that, being a poor kid, engineering was the best way to make a way in life. I decided from a very practical point of view. So I was an all-around person, I suppose. My interests were musical, art, everything. I loved the idea of creating things. My original idea was to be an architect, and that’s when I went off to college. In fact, when I went to MIT, I went there partly because they had a architectural engineering course. I decided I would switch after two years from engineering to architectural engineering, but never lasted. Only five weeks at MIT. I had to start all over again. I was at an age where I looked up to the big movers and shakers in the world at that time.

Hendrie: You were inspired by.

Johnson: Inspired by, yes, very much. I got even more inspired when I went to Caltech.

Hendrie: Why didn’t you go back to MIT?

Johnson: It was too cold. My mother wanted me to go where it was warmer .

Hendrie: Because of your…

Johnson: My TB, yes.

Hendrie: Because of your TB.

Johnson: Yes, that was one major reason.

Hendrie: That’s a big reason.

Johnson: That’s a big re—

Hendrie: So your mother influenced you.

Johnson: That was partly it, but mostly me, I guess. They sent me a copy of their manual. I opened it. It had mountains and people playing volleyball, things like that. It really appealed to me. So I said, oh, let’s go. Besides, my scholarship enabled me to go wherever I wanted to go.

Hendrie: So it was a scholarship from your high school?

Johnson: No, from a local contractor.

Hendrie: Really?

Johnson: Yes, he set up a scholarship. It was the second year of the scholarship. I really lucked out. But he used to—he had a big firm. He was building construction stuff, highways all over the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was a great break for me, and I figured being an engineer was a practical course to go. I figured, win that, I may get my way paid. I was really worried about being able to get tuition as it was.

Hendrie: Your parents didn’t have it.

Johnson: They didn’t have anything. I never counted on them for anything, except I got plenty.

Hendrie: So after just a very short time at MIT, you switched to Caltech [California Institute of Technology].

Johnson: Well, I did that after two years in a sanitarium.

Hendrie: Are there particular areas in engineering that you could’ve focused on? What did you decide to focus on at Caltech and why?

Johnson: Well, I used to read a lot of stuff about electricity when I was younger boy. That idea appealed to me, but I also had this artistic bent. I loved a course in drafting and architecture when I was there. So I decided I’d like to continue—that’s also when the Ayn Rand novels came out, for instance, and a lot of architectural, inspirational books. I took advantage of that. My main choice was electrical engineering and architecture. I picked MIT, as I said before, because I could get in electrical engineering but I could switch to architectural if I wanted to. That had been my intention. But once I got going in electrical engineering at Caltech, I just stayed with it.

Hendrie: Because you enjoyed that, too.

Johnson: Yes, used to have some big heroes in those days, like Norbert Weiner, people like that; read all of his stuff in high school.

Hendrie: Is that right?

Johnson: Yes, which was unusual for anybody to do. I thought it was very romantic.

Hendrie: You read about these people that were famous and had a particular field, and it inspired you.

Johnson: Right, absolutely. The guy that started Westinghouse, for instance—what’s his name? Anyway, I read books about Edison when I was smaller.

Hendrie: And Steinmetz.

Johnson: Steinmetz, yes, absolutely.

Hendrie: I could relate to that. I think I read those books .

Johnson: I bet you could, yes.

Hendrie: Had you had any exposure to computers at all at Caltech?

Johnson: Yes, some, but not very much and more analog than digital. I knew there was a computer center. There were a number of engineers that were working on computer engineering. I really didn’t have that much exposure, I don’t believe. Although my main exposure—well, not at Caltech. I’m ahead of myself. Okay. No, not much at Caltech, except, later, when I managed to sell them a PDP-10 .

Hendrie: So tell me about your getting out of Caltech. You’re going to go get a job because you need a job, yes?

Johnson: Right, right.

Hendrie: So tell me what your thoughts were, where you looked. I know where you ended up, but tell me the story of how you got there.

Johnson: Where I got to, obviously, was the Harvard Business School. I really thought about sticking around because I thought I would need to because of my scholarship. Because I’d been sick, I guess, just to make up for the years. I was very uncertain then because I only had two terms out of three to complete my degree. That was hardly enough. So I was playing it safe. I took courses in the summer. Then when I got accepted, I first was inspired to go to the Harvard Business School when I met one of the deans, Vern Alden, who later was on the board of Digital. I was encouraged to go to the Harvard Business School. I went to the Stanford Business School just to find out it’s a logical place to go—

Hendrie: You’re on the West Coast. You’re living on the West Coast.

Johnson: Absolutely. So I went to see him. He spent the first half hour running down the Harvard Business School. I said if he’s spending that much time doing that, I must be in the wrong place . So I decided to go to the Harvard instead. They had finally accepted me. I finished my two courses in the summertime.

Hendrie: Two courses at Caltech.

Johnson: Caltech, yes, in order to finish my degree. I got accepted to Harvard Business School, actually, in August.

Hendrie: Oh, wow, that’s late.

Johnson: One of my favorite stories is, Linus Pauling was one of our major professors at Caltech. There was always a special connection between the two of us. I don’t know why, but I felt it. But he never really talked to me. So he was walking ahead of me down the campus walk, clicking his heels. There’s a wind blowing. His tweeds [are] flapping in the wind. He stopped and waited for me. So, my goodness, I get to talk to Linus Pauling. He said, “Well, where are you going now?” expecting me to go [say], “Going to get my master’s degree.” He was a chemist. But who knows? He didn’t know what I was—anyway [I responded] “I just got accepted to Harvard Business School.” He stopped on a dime and turned around and walked away from me. That was the end of my Caltech career .

Hendrie: You were not doing what you were trained to do at Caltech.

Johnson: No, a big disappointment. He must’ve thought I was a brilliant physicist or something. But that was not exactly me.

Hendrie: That’s a great story.

Johnson: I’ll never forget that one .

Hendrie: Of course you won’t. Wow. But what made you decide to go to Harvard Business School rather than go to work someplace? Where were you going to get the money?

Johnson: I was still on my scholarship.

Hendrie: Oh, your scholarship is still good.

Johnson: I’m not sure, but I think so. My scholarship increased because of my illness. It actually doubled on me when I was still a freshman. I was lucky, plain lucky, if you call that luck . Unlucky to get TB, I suppose, but lucky to have it when I got my baccalaureate approved.

Hendrie: Why did you choose to go to Harvard Business School rather than go and get a job? Why did you want to go to business school? That’s really sort of strange. Don’t you think?

Johnson: I thought about it a lot. I said I don’t want to spend my time sitting and doing engineering kind of work, I want to do people work, more management kind of stuff. So that’s why I went there, because I felt I wanted a career in management.

Hendrie: You said this is a good thing to learn about.

Johnson: I always had an active life. I was always a leader of one kind or another. I was a political leader in high school, political leader in college. I was always in the student body or head of the student body. I enjoyed that. I thought it made a lot of sense for me. Except disappointed people like Linus Pauling .

Hendrie: But your parents were supportive of doing whatever?

Johnson: Whatever. What they going to say about me? They never told me what to do, never even strongly recommended doing anything. It’s up to me. I had the most free life with my parents you can imagine, total confidence.

Hendrie: But it builds independence. Doesn’t it?

Johnson: Oh, absolutely, yes, right. I was on my own. I was proving every step of the way that I was doing great. My mother was especially very supportive.

Hendrie: So you’ve decided you don’t just want to be an engineer. You’ve gotten some idea of what engineering’s like. Because when you went, you had no idea. You just had these people that you sort of looked up to and said, yes, I’d like to sort of be like them.

Johnson: Who are we talking about there…

Hendrie: Oh, I was thinking about…

Johnson: …the business school guy?

Hendrie: …Norbert Weiner or anybody. You read about Steinmetz. You read about all these engineers.

Johnson: I learned about things I didn’t want to do when I went to Caltech for instance.

Hendrie: Yes?

Johnson: First thing they did was took us out to Lockheed. They had these girls with rubber wheels on their skates going up and down, grabbing blueprints from people and sending them down to the main person at the end of this huge hall. I said that’s not for me, I’m not going to be sitting at a drafting table the rest of my life. But I loved drafting. I loved to draw. I was—like I said, I wanted to be an architect.

Hendrie: You liked the creative part of drawing.

Johnson: I like the creative part, absolutely, yes.

Hendrie: That’s pretty good.

Johnson:

Hendrie: So you did learn a lot about what you did want to do, too.

Johnson: Well, that’s the nice part of my life. I learned a lot about life just avocation-wise, my piano for instance.

Hendrie: You’ve made it to Harvard Business School. What did you think of Harvard Business School when you got there?

Johnson: It was stressful . I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the people, whole different group of people that I’d known before, made some very good friends. I discovered I was not a good participant in the class. I was not an articulate speaker. I couldn’t get off my seat and do something about it. But I did well. I did particularly well on my writing. I was one of the best people in the class when it came to writing cases and stuff like that. I also played the piano there a lot, too for…

Hendrie: Of course.

Johnson: …parties and friends. It just followed me around all my life actually. Big part of my life.

Hendrie: Did you concentrate in marketing?

Johnson: Marketing international, I should say.

Hendrie: Marketing international?

Johnson: International, yes.

Hendrie: Did you take [Georges] Doriot’s courses?

Johnson: Oh, absolutely. In fact, Doriot was one of my fans. Not only had him as a teacher. He was so respectful of the fact that I’d gone to Caltech. “Good school, good school,” he says …

Hendrie:

Johnson: …and, “very good school.”

Hendrie:

Johnson: When I was thinking of going to Digital, I went to see him because I knew his firm financed Digital. I said I better get his permission, too. I’ll never forget this, because I walked into his office, little timid. He said, “You’re Scandinavian, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, I’m Swedish.” He says, “Hm. Swedes work very hard,” he said, “very hard.” He said, “Let’s see. I’ve got three Scandinavians in my,” “company now, Ken Olsen, Harlan Anderson, and Stan Olsen, Ken’s brother. I could use one more Scandinavian,” “hardworking Scandinavian.” That was it. I got up and I started going out. He

walked to the door. He stopped me, says, “You do that.” He said, “You go to work for Digital Equipment. You make them work hard as hell.” And that was it.

Hendrie: Oh, my goodness!

Johnson:

Hendrie:

Johnson: That was the interview.

Hendrie: That was the interview.

Johnson: Yes, I was scared stiff of him at the beginning. I’d see him walking down the aisle with his entourage when I was working in a tradeshow or something like that. Later on, I got to know him, particularly after I became the head of the whole operation, sales and service. We hit it off. I’d go over to his place up in Lime Street, got to know him very, very well. We had a few martinis together, . It was a lot of fun.

Hendrie: Did you look at any other companies after Harvard Business School?

Johnson: I looked at a number of them. I was offered a job working with a company that made façades on banks in New York City. They wanted to build— what was it they were going to build? Anyway, they were going to build a whole building, and they wanted me to come down and lead the parade. I said, “What do I know about that? But okay.” He was so hung up on the fact that I’d been to Caltech and Harvard Business School. He was a young guy in the group. He decided why not. I realized later. I said, “What am I doing? I have acrophobia. What are we doing on top of a tall building? It’s ridiculous.” That was probably the major one I looked at. Also looked at one in…

Hendrie: But it had a piece of architect on it.

Johnson: Right, exactly, yes. Then in California, I was offered a job helping one of the project leaders as an administrator or something like that. I ended up—

Hendrie: In what company?

Johnson: One of the big ones out there. Who was it? One of the big electronics firms in Southern California. Oh, I got a job when I was working at Lincoln Lab. One of the assignments was for a new enterprises course. We had to go and interview and learn about a different company. We could either write a paper about it or come up with a product or some idea like that. We wrote a paper instead, and we

said the big problem about Digital is they did not have a sales organization. Nobody was an official salesperson at the company at all. So you better get your act together. That’s what we wrote in our paper, you need to start a sales organization. They said, “Okay, we think you’re right, why don’t you start it.” So I was asked to become the first sales engineer at Digital. I decided that’s what I’d do. I went out to see Harlan Anderson to turn down the job, though. I decided I really didn’t want their offer. I was going to go back to California. I still wanted to go back to California. He wasn’t there, and Ken was. I hadn’t really spoken to Ken very much at all. He came in and interviewed me. We just talked like we’re talking now. I talked about what my thoughts were. He says, “Well, we like the fact that you’d like to go back to California. We respect that. But why don’t you come here first. Later on, if you want to go back out there and start an office, maybe by then you’ll be the head of sales. Who knows?” So that’s what we did. I was so impressed with Ken Olsen and his self confidence. He had the ability to really get somebody excited and turned on based on his own personality and determination. He had no reason to have so much confidence in himself, but he emanated confidence. So I’d made a decision almost right then and there that that’s what I’d do, I’d join Digital. That’s what happened.

Hendrie: That’s pretty interesting. You’re about to turn down the job, but he was flexible to your needs, too, which is very good.

Johnson: Yes, to my needs. Maybe overly optimistic but still flexible .

Hendrie: So now you’ve joined Digital. Tell me a little bit about what you did there. I’m particularly interested in sort of when you got there after having met Ken. What did you see? What was it like?

Johnson: Well, remember, I had been there before. I was like a consultant before. That’s why I wrote that paper. So the two of us were studying this company, and I spent a lot of time with a little office they’d given me while I was there. I got to meet people. I went with Harlan Anderson on sales calls. I saw what that was like. I interviewed a few people that were themselves— like IBM people. Getting a view of what they were really like. It was all a learning experience for me. In the meantime, I was still working at Lincoln Labs as a designer, I mean, helping to clean up. I was really redrawing prints. So I learned a lot about…

Hendrie: So you had a job at Lincoln Labs?

Johnson: Oh, yes, right.

Hendrie: I didn’t realize that.

Johnson: I’m sorry.

Hendrie: While you’re at Harvard Business School or afterwards?

Johnson: No, while I was at Harvard Business School.

Hendrie: So that you earn some money.

Johnson: Yes, I had to have some money. I think it was frowned on to do outside work when you’re at the business school, but I did it anyway. I’d work nine hours a week. Trying to remember some of the names of the people that I worked with. Mostly it was cleaning up prints. I was learning about logic design and computers, too. My first job, when I finally went to work, was, in fact, logic designer. I was out traveling around, teaching people how to use modules, what they really were. People didn’t even know what transistors were then and logic. I had a lot of fun with it, actually. I enjoyed people. I liked working with people, and people liked me, I guess. It worked out well.

Hendrie: So you’d been working at Lincoln Labs. But this was a Harvard Business School assignment to go and find out stuff about Digital, right?

Johnson: From Digital itself.

Hendrie: Yes, from Digital itself…

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: …and write up this report.

Johnson: Yes, they had nothing to do with my taking a job at Lincoln Lab.

Hendrie: Yes, that was just…

Johnson: Lincoln Labs is where I learned about Digital.

Hendrie: And decided to go and do your report on Digital.

Johnson: Exactly.

Hendrie: Now I’ve got the pieces connected.

Johnson: A lot of fun. It really was a lot of fun. So I got to know the people as part of the organization sort of de facto.

Hendrie: So you joined Digital. What was it like? How did it work? What was the culture? I’m interested in what made Digital different. You may not be able to say what made Digital different from other

companies, because you didn’t have other company experience, but how’d they make decisions? How did people work together?

Johnson: Hm. Where do I start with that one?

Hendrie: Any place.

Johnson: Yes. First of all, when I joined, there were only nine people and there were no salespeople. Management was doing all the selling. They were dealing with their old customers that they had worked with at Lincoln Lab. Lincoln Lab was still one of their customers, and they had a few people scattered around. I remember making a trip to RCA [Radio Corporation of America] for instance. Later on, that’s also where we hired some extra people, too. But mostly my work was outside matching the outside to the inside, I guess you might say, calling on people for the first time with a new technology, new idea, what modules really were, at that point, and learning from my associates. Harlan Anderson, he was the de facto of corporate sales manager. That was one of his areas of interest or responsibility. He was my first boss, Harlan Anderson. Later on, Stan became the sales manager. When I went to California, that’s when I was working for him. We had a lot of work together. I worked for him when I went to Europe for instance. But Harlan was an intellectual in his approach when it came to logic design and the whole history of that stuff. He was an important person for me to learn from. I learned a lot from him when he’s talking to customers, too, making presentations. Bit more formal than I would’ve been. But nevertheless still good experience, good training. So what did I do?

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: Basically I went out. I looked at all the bingo cards. Digital’s first move was to go into any tradeshow they could get. Ken Olsen had a big name with the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers], for instance, because he had been Young Engineer of the Year 1960. What can I think of to say here?

Hendrie: So they’d go to tradeshows, and they’d collect bingo cards…

Johnson: Bingo cards, yes.

Hendrie: …and then go follow up.

Johnson: I was principally in charge of following up bingo cards. For instance, I should tell you one story. I came in one day. This gives you sort of flavor of the place. Ken Olsen called me into his office and he said, “When have you been in the Southeast?” I said, “I’ve never been down to Southeast.” He said, “Let’s see. When would you like to go?” I said, “When do you want me to go?” He says, “How about tomorrow?” I said, “Wait a minute. I’ve got a date,” “I think I better put that off for a week, but I’ll go next week.” “Okay.” So I made a determination I was going to cover nine states in five days . So I went like a bandit, ran into some interesting people. That’s when I met Wernher von Braun, for instance…

Hendrie: Really?

Johnson: …from Huntsville [Alabama], people like that, I mean, all over the place. I ended up selling some modules to National Bureau of Standards at the very end of my trip. It paid for my trip I suppose you might say . But I didn’t know where I was going. I just went down there and called on people that I’d never met before. Somebody had sent them bingo cards or whatever. That was my ammunition. I was pretty good at finding people like that. That was probably the most ridiculous one.

Hendrie:

Johnson: I made my date that Friday night .

Hendrie: That was good.

Johnson:

Hendrie: You drew your line.

Johnson: I drew my line. I was actually a little irritated. I didn’t like to be told what to do so much. But I said, “Okay. You’re the boss. I’m going, but I’m going to do it my way.” I did a good job, laid the groundwork for a lot of future business.

Hendrie: You mentioned that one of the things that they asked you to do was design a memory tester. That seems a little peculiar to ask somebody who’s doing sales. So maybe you could tell me how that happened and a little bit of—just tell me that story.

Johnson: Well, I think the principle thing about that story is what was the Sales Engineer? He's the walking Logic Designer, right? They had to design something, a system using our modules. That’s what my tools were. I knew what the tools were, and I'd been used to designing things for other people too as part of my job. That’s why they drafted me, I suppose. I was available, and there weren’t many people in the company at that point. They needed somebody with experience who knew how to do that stuff.So they asked me to do it. That’s all I can remember. Why they weren’t more concerned about what I was doing other than that, I don't know, but they wanted me. I did it, didn’t take very long. I knew logic design.

Hendrie: Yes, so you just went and did it?

Johnson: I went and did it.

Hendrie: Then they hired somebody to take over the business or—

Johnson: Oh yes, John O’Fadderman [ph?], he was the memory test person over at Lincoln Lab. So he was in the wings, so to speak, of potential DEC [Digital Equipment Corporation] employees. That was his specialty, memory design. So they decided to bring him on board and start as a system selling these darn things. That’s all there was to it.

Hendrie: Was it a customer request that they wanted a memory tester? Is that why they wanted—?

Johnson: Well, RCA [Radio Corporation of America] wanted them memory tested.

Hendrie: Oh, there was a customer at RCA?

Johnson: Yes, there was at the RCA end. The other person who was selling memory testing on this was a company called Reese Engineering. I still have not settled that in my mind. But I remember going down with them and meeting them and being very impressed with them and their interest. We sort of assured them we weren’t going to be in the memory tester business. But guess what we did? We went in the memory testing business. So .

Hendrie: That’s really interesting. This is a side note, it probably shouldn’t be on this transcript, but I know all the founders of Reese Engineering.

Johnson: You do?

Hendrie: Knew them very well. Very interesting. Let's continue. Talk some more about things you did during—this is your first or second year at Digital?

Johnson: Yes. Let's see. I started at Digital in ‘58.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: Then I went—

Hendrie: Do you remember what month you started in?

Johnson: Oh, it was July. I spent the rest of the next year roaming around and finding out where our customers were and what they wanted and just learning—all over the world. I was the only person in the world that was the Sales Engineer, so I got around mostly in the United States. It was after we got into the computer business that they suddenly decided they needed a man in California. I was asked to go out to California. We had received our request for quotation from US Ordnance Test Station in Pasadena. I knew that area pretty well, of course. I'd gone to school there. So they decided maybe I should go out there. I set up an office, sharing an office with somebody and then I developed JPL [Jet Propulsion

Laboratory]. I eventually ended up selling a Mariner project or computer, PDP-1 for JPL. I influenced them in a lot of different ways, selling them a lot of modules. A funny story is, I won't mention the name, but we had a Salesperson, a student, at Caltech. When I went out there I delivered—they didn’t go to US Ordnance Test Station because I knew we'd had people out there and we had started a project with them. Then it was decided back at headquarters we weren’t going to continue that project. We had to tell them— they had an application in there, request for quotation. They were extremely disappointed. I can't remember the name of the company, it might have been RCA, a big company. I decided, given that experience and the attitude out there about us, I didn’t want to go out there. I decided one day—we'd been around enough, so I'll go out there and I'll talk to them. I called somebody down and they sent out a guy who was really strange. We had this fellow at Caltech—I was the Student Body President— I mean, I was a student, I was President for Caltech. We had a student there, and Senior Day they would do crazy things like he had an experiment where he would drop a sodium from opening a door into a pail of water and it would have all kinds of repercussions. Then he put tear gas into student’s rooms in the dormitory. Well, I know that can be very irritating. So I said—that was a no-brainer for me, I just said “We gotta do something about this guy.” So I ended up being the guy who forced him out of school. I had to go to my Student House Associates, but I basically am the guy who forced them to throw him out of school. It's okay?

Hendrie: Yeah.

Johnson: So when I came up to US Ordnance Test Station and I asked to speak to somebody, who should come waltzing down the door but this fellow. I won't mention his name. But he said he had— after he left, he said he had an opening. He worked on an island off the coast of California, and he worked with some workers. They invited him out by a cliff one night and they threatened to throw him off down to the ocean.

Hendrie: Oh my goodness.

Johnson: They scared the hell out of him. So he had a big change of his life, he had quite a changed attitude actually .

Hendrie: I say, that would change—he wasn’t such a prankster.

Johnson: But that was so funny.

Hendrie: Oh my goodness.

Johnson: What a twist in life—

Hendrie: Yes, for you to have that—

Johnson: —experience that at Caltech and then that experience. But—

Hendrie: That is funny. Alright. The—

Johnson: That was kind of a break from our—anyway.

Hendrie: Right. So you moved out to California. What were you doing there? You were now working for Stan Olsen, they had a s—

Johnson: Back at headquarters, yes.

Hendrie: Back at headquarters, he was at headquarters.

Johnson: I was one of the most senior regional managers.

Hendrie: You were a regional manager and you hired other people and was . . .

Johnson: Yes, I had an office of about four or five salespeople, and I brought the first field service engineer into the company there. I had the very first software services engineer coming in to work for me.

Hendrie: Who was the first field service engineer that you brought in?

Johnson: Well, field service engineer, his name was Gene Hinton [ph?] I think. I hadn’t yet become the Head of Sales. So Gene was officially the first—Jack Shields always played a very dominant role as a service engineer, he was considered to be a bit of a guru or a very experienced guy and did a good job. But Gene Hinton worked as the sales associate. They were building—putting PDP-10s in airplanes and they were doing seismic work from airplanes trying to figure out where oil wells were. I'll never forget that—this is a side story, we may not .

Hendrie: That’s okay.

Johnson: Later on I decided to give a guy a chance to come join the Sales organization by giving him a job to be district manager in the Rocky Mountains. I remember at one point he was going to quit. I said “Why are you quitting? I gave you the most ideal job you ever wanted.” He's 45 years old, great job for him at this point in his life, in his territory he loved so much, the Rockies and whatever. So I met him in the Middle West and I said “Tomorrow afternoon”, I said “I'm coming out tomorrow, see you there, and I'm going to talk you out of this”. He was having a mid-life crisis being 45, his “last chance;” he could be a CEO, take a chance and build his thing. He made a very bad choice. I said “You're making a big mistake”. He did, so he basically in the first year or so, he flopped, and they probably fired him. Gene Hinton, this service guy, was helping him, and he left at the same time, too. Nevertheless that guy failed— he took the job, failed, and he committed suicide.

Hendrie: Oh no.

Johnson: I had a few like that. That goes with the territory, but—

Hendrie: I suppose, but still.

Johnson: He couldn’t take it. It was the end of his life, the failure. Yes, terrible.

Hendrie: So he had ambitions beyond his ability?

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: Failed and then couldn’t deal with it?

Johnson: Yes. He didn’t think about “What if I fail?” He wasn’t thinking very clearly.

Hendrie: Yes, clearly. Alright, so—

Johnson: I've had other guys too, we had a field sales guy out in Germany that didn’t get the job to run Germany and he committed suicide.

Hendrie: Oh my goodness.

Johnson: Anyway.

Hendrie: Oh, that’s hard. Alright, so you're out in California, when did you get called back to do—how long were you out in California before you got called back to—?

Johnson: Three or four years maybe.

Hendrie: Four years?

Johnson: Yes. I had an office of about nine people or so. I had a good secretary and three or four salespeople and a software engineer, field service engineer. We mostly—I did my own selling pretty much. They got advice from me, we'd talk—it was a nice group of people. Mostly technicians. People had worked in—like people from JPL. I had three guys that came from JPL. They had all been high-level technicians and were very commission-oriented. We had a big problem wondering [about] them because

we had never paid commissions, as you know. I'd pick up the phone in my office, and SCS [?] would be on the line talking to them. I never lost a single person in four years.

Hendrie: Really?

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: Good. They understood the technical thing? They needed to be technicians or engineers, they needed to have—?

Johnson: Well, absolutely, yes.

Hendrie: Because they had to explain how it worked and how it could be used?

Johnson: Yes, and from a practical point of view.

Hendrie: Yes, they really were sales engineers, not just—

Johnson: That’s exactly right.

Hendrie: Salesmen.

Johnson: That’s what they were called, as a matter of fact.

Hendrie: Very good. So when you got back to—tell me a little bit about what Digital was like when you finally returned. I mean, I'm sure you had made trips there, but now when you became a head of Sales, you move back to Maynard, right?

Johnson: Oh, yes. My office was in Maynard, Building Five.

Hendrie: What happened then?

Johnson: What happened then?

Hendrie: Yes, what happened when you got back? Why do you think they picked you? Why didn’t Stan [Olsen] keep doing it?

Johnson: Why didn’t Stan keep doing what?

Hendrie: Running Sales.

Johnson: Oh, he was still running Sales.

Hendrie: Oh, I see.

Johnson: Yes. The first thing they did was send me to Europe. I was trying to think through this thing. Yes, I was asked in July to go to Europe. We had hired a guy for Germany who was going to start Sales in Europe. He became—it became obvious pretty soon that he was not a great communicator. He wouldn’t send a Teletype message for days, maybe weeks. So I just went over there and met him.

Hendrie: Okay, you were saying?

Johnson: Yes, so he asked me if I'd like to go. I said “I sure would.” The next day I said “Is it okay if bring my wife with me?” So in the meantime I proposed and we got our act together, got married and moved back there on the way to just go to Germany. I got to Germany; it was just a small office, a salesperson, a junior salesperson, and a secretary.

Hendrie: Wow, that’s pretty small.

Johnson: In Maximilianstrasse . I just went out and did my thing. I mostly was there, CERN [European Organization for Nuclear Research] was our biggest customer at that time. That was a big reason they said they were worried about what's going to happen with CERN. I made a very good friend, Tori Lignarda [ph?]. I just talked with his son on the phone this morning. He was a big module customer of ours. I managed to get the company to propose selling them a PDP-4. Then politics took over at CERN and they decided that they could not buy another American computer. So they bought a French computer, which happened to be made under SCS’s rule. So SCS—

Hendrie: Oh.

Johnson: Managed to sneak their system in. Of course, I was put off by that, but that’s okay. That was interesting. That later became a pretty big customer of ours, CERN.

Hendrie: Good. So you did—they were able to—Digital kept the CERN account?

Johnson: Yes, well, first of all, for modules, but I think we probably ended up selling some computers there as well. It was an important place to meet people too. It was a pretty international group. I'd go down to the dining room and meet people down there that later on I followed up from a sales point of view. I sold some of my first machines in Europe. I made a Sales trip after our first tradeshow. I sold a PDP-7 to a technical school in Stockholm, another one in Delft. I sold a PDP-5 to a little—what am I thinking of, not a planetarium, but that kind of thing, in Paris, Meudon. Sold modules in Switzerland, Italy. I basically was the roving Salesperson for the company. The rest of our activities were under this guy who lived in Germany. I said, I didn’t really want to be part of that—run it in his way. I—leave him alone. He never made much of it until we got some new people in there. But .

Hendrie: So you really—yeah, you weren’t acting really as a manager as much as just a roving salesperson?

Johnson: Oh, that wasn’t quite true. I was basically the head of the place . Not by title, but by fact. People looked to me as the leader. When Stan Olsen went over there and he saw that I was really basically the leader of the company that was quietly without portfolio, and I had no official title or responsibility—I was respected and listened to and participating. I was a sort of strategic thinker for the company. I made some sales calls to England, I don't think he'd ever been to England, I went to Sweden, I went to Italy and France and Switzerland. It was a good experience.

Hendrie: Very good. Alright.

Johnson: I sort of started the idea of Digital in Europe.

Hendrie: Would you say that was sort of characteristic of the company, that you could be—that it wasn’t a tightly-structured, top down company that you could go over there without any portfolio and sort of become the de facto leader of what they're doing and what they ought to do?

Johnson: Yes, you pretty much had to show you were the natural leader in a way. Things gravitated to you then, if you took responsibility—

Hendrie: Then?

Johnson: Anything happens. At least that was my perspective on it.

Hendrie: Did Digital tend to hire people that liked to take responsibility and sort of would step up and take responsibility? Do you think that was a characteristic of the people that they hired—

Johnson: Yes, some of—

Hendrie: Or that at least were successful there?

Johnson: Yes, I think people were on the alert for that kind of characteristic, trait. Whether you're natural leaders or—you had to be on your own to do it. That kind of a capability would flow to people that wanted to exercise it. You can make yourself a leader.

Hendrie: Yes, that’s true. As opposed to people who don’t want to take responsibility and like to be told what to do?

Johnson: Well, that was never a huge problem at Digital. A lot of people were eager to take on responsibilities. It was a place where young people and Engineers could do their own thing. It was very helpful—we were going to bring up consultations. I think that was a very imp—I remember this meeting we had in Europe about consultations—somebody was talking about what is the role of a Sales Engineer? The word “Consultative Selling” came up as the style, and the people in Europe were saying “That’s our style. Basically, that’s what we're trying to do here.” That’s Digital’s style. Basically, your job was really help customers be successful, design things in the whole sense of the word. You could be part of their job in a way. I think that was our style, the consultative style. We had to help people—design stuff for them in the first place. BlackboardI sold a lot of times when I was first a roving Salesperson, I'd get on a blackboard with some guy, and we’d pull up a blackboard with all kinds of diagrams and logic designs. Right off the bat we'd [say],“What's the problem? Let's fix it”.

Hendrie: Yes, “Let's work together and see whether we can come up with a design that solves your problem.”

Johnson: Yes, “But it's your problem.”

Hendrie: Yes, “I'm here to show you—to help you.”

Johnson: “Advise you.”

Hendrie: “Advise you, I know a lot about our modules, and we can use—”

Johnson: “My job is not to compete with you, but help you be successful.”

Hendrie: Yes. “And my job is not to—”

Johnson: “Tell you what to do.”

Hendrie: “Tell you what to do or to just convince you directly you ought to buy this.”

Johnson: Right. Oh, no, no, no, that’s not the style.

Hendrie: Not the style.

Johnson: That’s why I thought Consultative Selling was really our style. I like that expression.

Hendrie: Good.

Johnson: “We're here to help you. It's your problem.”

Hendrie: “We're more than happy to—and we have some skills that might help you.”

Johnson: Yes, I think they can see that themselves.

Hendrie: That works pretty well when you're selling to—when they're engineers selling to engineers.

Johnson: And people—

Hendrie: If you have very good people.

Johnson: Right. They want to do it themselves, too.

Hendrie: Yes, of course they do.

Johnson: Nobody wants to be pushed or manipulated into buying something.

Hendrie: Exactly. Alright, I'm just going to pause for a minute.

Hendrie: Alright, let's move on. So how long were you in Europe about, roughly?

Johnson: Nine months.

Hendrie: Then what, you were offered a different job?

Johnson: I was offered to come back and run the North American field offices. In the meantime on the way back we stopped off, had our first child in Los Angeles. She was incubated in Europe.

Hendrie: I see.

Johnson: In fact I think she was—anyway, forget that .

Hendrie: Good. So now you were going to be located in Maynard?

Johnson: Maynard, yes. I had my office in Building Five.

Hendrie: Tell me a little bit about the environment when you got there. How big was the company, sort of what were the—who were the principle people running the company at this point? Was Gordon Bell there yet?

Johnson: That’s a good question. I suspect he was, yes. Yes, he was there. Of course, Ken and Harlan Anderson were still all there. This is before the product line system happened. Who else was there?

Hendrie: Do you remember what year this would've been? Well, yes, your first child was born, so I'll bet you remember what year this happened.

Johnson: I better . 1964.

Hendrie: 1964.

Johnson: Sixty-five, yes.

Hendrie: Digital’s now a lot bigger company, it's doing like $10 [million] or—I don’t remember what the correct number is, but certainly doing $10 or $15 million a year, something like that. Certainly more than just $1 or $2 [million].

Johnson: Yes, certainly more than one or two people, you mean?

Hendrie: One or $2 million a year in business.

Johnson: Million dollars a year.

Hendrie: Yes, more—and quite a few people.

Johnson: Yes. Eight or nine or ten million. I don't remember exactly.

Hendrie: So tell me a little bit about the environment. How was the company run? Who made the decisions about products and about strategy, how did those things get decided?

Johnson: Well, Ken was always in the picture somehow. He ran what was then—before the Operations Committee, he ran—I don’t remember what we called it, but it was a large group of second-level people who basically were involved in setting the strategy for the company. Ken Olsen’s style probably could be described as that—“We're 15 people, and I've got 16 votes.”

Hendrie: “But I want to hear from everybody.”

Johnson: “But I want to hear from everybody.” Right. So everybody knew who the boss was, but I'm not sure we knew how his thought process worked. But it was a good environment, it was friendly, supportive, competitive but friendly competitive, very little angst in the process, optimistic. Yes, people were good people, enjoyed—always was a good company. A lot of people thought the company was very political, other people didn’t. It depends on what you're looking—where you sit is where you stand or something like that.

Hendrie: What was your opinion at that point?

Johnson: I thought it was flexible enough to work with. I thought they were good people, so they could be trusted pretty much. It was a very trusting company that way. I have a lot of experiences I could talk about, but that’s—I don't know. Yes, relatively normal relationships, open, friendly, a lot of humor.

Hendrie: How were disagreements?

Johnson: Pardon me?

Hendrie: How were disagreements settled?

Johnson: Well, I think Ken was one enforcing disciplines to happen. Routines that forced you to—like you would have to have project review committees where you'd have to say what you were up to, what you're thinking about, trying to coordinate support from other people to keep you informed but also be supportive in helping you do it. That was the general tone. A lot of the emphasis was just on people and whether they're able to do the job or not. I can't really say much more than that. I think the spirit generally was—everybody was satisfactorily competent and would take on responsibility, would pitch in, collaborate. I would say generally a very good environment.

Hendrie: You used the word “Collaborative” about the environment in addition to the one about how you sold.

Johnson: Right, yes.

Hendrie: Was that—?

Johnson: How we sold, yes.

Hendrie: But would you characterize the environment at Digital among the Management team as pretty collaborative?

Johnson: Yes, friendly competition but collaborative. Pretty open. You had to roll with the punches more or less as well.

Hendrie: Do you remember any examples of where you might not—you might be in competition with another group but you would also collaborate or any examples of that just sort of pop into your mind? Stories?

Johnson: I'll think about it, it doesn’t occur to me right off the bat. A zillion stories obviously. I'm afraid I'm flashing out.

Hendrie: That’s okay. Are there any stories you want to share on tape?

Johnson: On tape? That’s a big “If.”

Hendrie: Yes, you can always strike them out when you review the transcript.

Johnson: I'd have to really reflect on that a little bit. If we could get back to that later on, I'd be happy to tell you.

Hendrie: Alright, yes, why don’t we do that? Alright, let's move on. So you're running the field [engineers], the regions [regional managers], and so what is your principle job? What do you do with running the regions? Are you trying to get them to do particular things or is the principle part of the job hiring and firing regional managers? Talk to me a little bit about what you did during this period.

Johnson: Well, I did some firing too, but mostly hiring. The big job was finding the right people, promoting them from within. So it's just a molding of the organization, management structure. So having the principle thoughts in mind about what you needed to do I think was the most important thing to do. That relied a lot on people themselves, how well they would handle the responsibility, establish themselves as respected people. There was an atmosphere of mutual respect, basically. If you got support, you'd get support from people if you did the right thing. That was the big motto of the company, “Do the Right Thing.” Just a lot of freedom, a lot of responsibility. It couldn’t have been better for young people to do that, that was the thing about Digital. It was a good place to come, an exchanging environment—technical environment, where you could take responsibility and have responsibility, be

supported, a very supportive organization that way, and reasonably well-structured. People were always complaining about that, but I think it was pretty good. People would fill in the holes.

Hendrie: When you said people always talked about “Do the Right Thing”, can you elaborate on what that meant and where that came from? Was that Ken’s mantra or—?

Johnson: No, I think that was a Digital mantra more than anything. I don't know where it came from. It had to be a synthesis of a lot of people—thinking, but there was a kind of mutual trust that you would in fact do the right thing. That fills up in a lot of holes.

Hendrie: By “The Right Thing” does that mean do the right thing for Digital as opposed to the right thing for yourself?

Johnson: Well, I think it's the right thing for the customer.

Hendrie: Right thing for the customer, ah, okay.

Johnson: Yes, and for the company, too. It was all tied into the one. I think we really were well-focused there. Our value structure was very healthy. It was really focused on the user. We were part of an industry or, we were helping build something that was valuable. We had to have a lot of honor for it. So that was a nice feeling about Digital. You really could respect what you were doing, respect the company, respect the struggles we're having, trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. Beyond that, I can't think of any clichés .

Hendrie: Yes, but that’s good. That gives a little bit of a flavor about what it was like inside and how the dynamics worked inside the company.

Johnson: Well, the spirit with any setting, management setting or a non-setting or field setting, we're all trying to do the right thing. If we do the right thing, we'll succeed. So we better focus and do it.

Hendrie: Figure out what it is and then do it.

Johnson: Right. That led to a lot of discussions, a lot of controversies, I suppose. But I think it was a very healthy environment.

Hendrie: About this time or maybe a little bit later, there was a lot of strategic discussion in the company about, at least [this is] my understanding, about the issue of whether to focus on the small machines, the PDP-5, maybe the PDP-8 had come out by then, or the big machines, the PDP-6 and taking it on to become a PDP-10? I believe that was an issue that Digital struggled with as to what to do. Talk to me about a little bit of the dynamics as to what were the pros and cons, the arguments on each side, and sort of how did Digital work it's way through that?

Johnson: Well, Ken had a lot to do with it. I mean, he—

Hendrie: I'm sure.

Johnson: The battle at that time, one of the battles anyway, was Control Data, and Control Data versus a brand new, smaller machine. That was the big choice, minicomputers or PDP-6. The PDP-6 posed a problem, do we go in that direction or do we go in the PDP-8 direction?

Hendrie: Well, why didn’t you go in both?

Johnson: Pardon?

Hendrie: Why didn’t you go in both directions?

Johnson: Well, we sort of did. We couldn’t let go of the 36—

Hendrie: You couldn’t let go even after made a decision—

Johnson: The 36 machine—

Hendrie: You couldn’t let go.

Johnson: The more important part was we supported the notion of the PDP-8 and going in that direction. We were good at that, there was a hole there. We had always had the experience with the disc problem we had with the PDP-6. I think Ken came down on the side of leaning that our real opportunity to be different and be a leader is with the small computer thing, with the PDP-8. It turned out that was true. A zillion people wanted to have a little box of logic modules that were programmable that could be assigned to any project at all, replacing a lot of stuff that wasn’t computer-ish at all.

Hendrie: Yeah, that wasn’t maybe [it was] Digital but wasn’t computer-ish.

Johnson: Right. In the early days we'd talk about whatever you could say was the 20,000 dollar solution looking for a problem . That was basically it, we had invented this concept of a programmable box of modules called a PDP-8. If we just offered that for sale, who knows what's going to happen. That was one reason why we went into the OEM [original equipment manufacturer] business, because the OEMs were working with other kinds of equipment to solve a certain kind of a problem. What they really wanted was the programmability of it, and that PDP-8 gave that to them. Then that could be applied to all kinds of different things. If you couldn’t figure out in the application, find an OEM that’s got an application and let him use it.

Hendrie: Let him figure out exactly—

Johnson: Let him figure out what you could—

Hendrie: Learn the application and do a good job of it.

Johnson: Yes, that’s the one reason we were able to so well match the idea of applications and uses. I think that was really significant. I think the OEMs played quite an important role in our company from that point of view, the idea of having a programmable box of modules.

Hendrie: Is that sort of when the Digital started getting into the OEM business?

Johnson: Oh, that was definitely when we got into it. First one that happened, a lot of our PDP-1s were sold to ITT [International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation], I think 27 of the 50 or something like that were sold for data manipulation basically, they were used in embassies and stuff for communications- oriented things, where you had to read coded messages and use the computer to figure out what to do. That was the thing that really got us launched. It was half of our business in the first PDP-1. But we let our customers figure out what to do with it.

Hendrie: Which side of the fence were you on in terms of—what did you think the company ought to do in terms of emphasizing either the PDP-6, the big machines, the big time-sharing machines or the—?

Johnson: Well, this may sound like self-aggrandizement, but I think I was probably leaning—I was able to look at the whole thing, but I think the small computer thing was the most interesting to me.

Hendrie: So your recommendation was—?

Johnson: That’s where I thought the opportunity was, yes.

Hendrie: And you could see it because—

Johnson: And less competition, too.

Hendrie: You could see it because you were closer to the user than probably any of the other Senior Executives?

Johnson: Well, close enough, yes.

Hendrie: Close enough, yes. Do you remember what the views of some of the other parts of the organization were? Harlan Anderson in engineering?

Johnson: Well, Harlan Anderson ended up being the head of the PDP-10, PDP-6, the big machine.

Hendrie: The big machines.

Johnson: Yes. That somewhat reflected Ken’s own personal view. He thought that was too risky idea. I think it depends too much on what we do with that. It was an open field running with the smaller machine. So we could do something with it. CDC [Control Data Corporation] started in that business themselves. I remember I made a visit to CDC.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I thought I could sell them some modules to build their computer with.

Hendrie: Really? I don’t think so.

Johnson: No, I don’t think so either.

Hendrie: You discovered no.

Johnson: No, but I discovered a lot. They had their little CDC, what, 160?

Hendrie: Yes, the CDC-160. It was a very nice machine.

Johnson: It was a nice little machine, but it wasn’t nearly as flexible as the PDP-1.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: Or the 8 for that matter. I’ll never forget that though. What gall I had to even go out there and suggest, but I was in there at the factory, CDC’s factory when they were first starting up. They started in the same month, the same year as we did, CDC. It was ’56, right, November of ’56? Yes.

Hendrie: Mm-hmm.

Johnson: They went one way and we went another.

Hendrie: They built very big machines.

Johnson: Yes, first they did a small one but they used it mostly as a pilot and then testing it. They were sort of semi-seriously offering it on the market, just enough to get them in business, not to stick in the business. You were drowned by the PDP, the big machine.

Hendrie: So how long did you stay as the head of region managers? I think you said that a little bit better...

Johnson: Regional managers.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: Manager of regional managers.

Hendrie: Manager of regional managers, yes.

Johnson: Yes, right. That all changed. I’m just trying to think of what the time was, what caused it. I guess when we changed the product line.

Hendrie: When did you change the product line? You must have been before…

Johnson: I think it was in early spring…

Hendrie: Of what year.

Johnson: Nineteen…

Hendrie: Early spring of the year the PDP-5 came out or the 8 or…

Johnson: I think it was—I came back from Europe in 1964. So probably 1965.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: What was the question, again?

Hendrie: Well, I was saying we were talking about when did you change and stop being the manager of regional managers?

Johnson: When Ken decided to create a product line organization.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: He was stuck with the problem of “what do I do with sales?” And “what do I do with the field?”

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I was offered the job to be the international sales manager. I said, “I don't think I want that job unless I can manage field services for all of the sales.”

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: My principle reason was I knew we had a huge problem here building an organization to handle the whole world and handle both sides of the picture, service and sales as customer base system. That’s when I put my foot down. There was a fundamental schism in my relationship with Jack Shields, too. The important point—and Ken Olsen had a problem with that, too. He was sort of balancing—I’m not sure that he really respected the role of sales. Later on, I’m sure he did, but after a long time.

Hendrie: Yes. It wasn’t in his nature to respect someone else.

Johnson: No, no. He always had a deep respect for it and fear actually of technical stuff and the service organization. I think Jack Shields was one reason why he had a concern because he had a strong hold over his own organization. But he had an even stronger attitude towards sales. So anyway, that’s…

Hendrie: Yes. So you’re discussing why you turned down being head of sales.

Johnson: Yes, but he turned around and he went to Ken with it and he said, “Okay, he can run the whole thing.” So I became the head of sales and service. So Jack Shields worked for me and later on I started a software support organization as well. So they had a full compliment of services. I had a comfortable role, personally to build with, to make decisions on, hire people for, build organizations, build regions. It was a very important part of my life that made my job doable.

Hendrie: Rather than having a totally split service.

Johnson: That would have been a headache. I mean we had plenty of offices with troubles—conflicts between the service manager and the sales manager. I was always sensitive to that. I knew I was dealing with that problem all of the time. We had a difficult sales—service manager in Scandinavia, for instance.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I think I had a real problem with Jack for a while after that because he had this ornery attitude he wanted to take over himself, I suppose. He made life too uncomfortable for the Swedish manager. We had a face down about that one. He was a strange guy. But we needed a more harmonious sales/service relationship and we got that by carving out roles and responsibilities that people could do.

Hendrie: It needed to be harmonious because that’s what the customer saw.

Johnson: Absolutely.

Hendrie: And that served no purpose.

Johnson: Absolutely. If you didn’t have sales people putting the service people in the right light you’d have a big problem and vice versa.

Hendrie: Yes, so you couldn’t have competitive organizations?

Johnson: Oh no. No. Or you’d have team problems up the ying-yang.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: No, no. I didn’t think we could anyway.

Hendrie: All right.

Johnson: I think it worked well, the point is.

Hendrie: Now you said you turned down being the sales manager for Europe, so then they turned around made you sales manager for North America or the world?

Johnson: No, no, no. For the world.

Hendrie: For the world, all right.

Johnson: That’s what I’m talking about.

Hendrie: Yes, I know but they offered you just Europe.

Johnson: No, they didn’t.

Hendrie: Oh, they didn’t, I’m sorry.

Johnson: They offered me sales in the world.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: They wanted the world split into two parts, sales and service. I said no way, I’ve got to run service, too.

Hendrie: Got it. I’m sorry, I thought it was about Europe. All right, I misunderstood what you said.

Johnson: Right.

Hendrie: Okay. That helps.

Johnson: That was a big move on my part.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: That set the level playing field for everybody.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: It worked. It worked great.

Hendrie: Very good. So now you had you been part of the operations committee? Or is this when the operations committee was formed?

Johnson: That’s basically when it was formed.

Hendrie: When they reorganized the product lines?

Johnson: Yes, it must have been some form like that before that because I remember being in those committee meetings when we were making those decisions about big product or little product. I think the operations committee, the new operations committee was basically more like a bank. That’s when we set up the product line systems and we set it up in such a way—the model was Alfred Sloan’s thing at General Motors. But where each group had their own customers, defined a lot of definitional work going on, who belongs to what camp and that sort of thing. So chopping and slicing. But that was a very important phase. We set that right notions in place. We were able to have a comfortable growth path.

Hendrie: How did you deal with the customers, then, if there was somebody who was behind modules and also wanted to buy PDP-8s?

Johnson: Well, that was the problem. We specialized our salespeople.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: More and more that changed over time but the point is if you wanted to buy modules PDP largely worked with the module salesman. If you wanted to buy a PDP-8 more with a small computer salesman, or maybe they’re the same person. Or if you wanted to buy a big machine, you’d talk to a big machine person. But a whole different organized customers in those categories, whether they’re customers for small computers, big computers, memory testers. They could be specialists. The memory tester—there were memory tester salespeople, for instance.

Hendrie: Oh, really? Out in the field, yes, in various places where one was needed.

Johnson: Yes. We were flexible in matching the world to our system but we could do that. It was reasonable.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: Yes. We went from there to the whole system of account management. You know that was another big thing that we did. Account management became a very important part of what we were trying to do.

Hendrie: Yes, but you didn’t do that for quite a while, did you?

Johnson: Well, a couple of years.

Hendrie: In a couple of years after the…

Johnson: That grew.

Hendrie: Okay. Yes.

Johnson: I remember sitting in the back of an airplane one day and I was looking over things and I realized that a high percentage of our salespeople were focused on selling a number of things. I forget where that led me, but I realized that we should really figure out how to map our customers to our products and reorganize the sales process. That’s when we started the program of account management. We realized somebody should be organizing what the account strategy is and matching what we have to it.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: That made that a responsibility of people in the field to do the planning. That’s when planning became important.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: We had to structure things better.

Hendrie: So you then would have people who had a specific account. And they then would work with…

Johnson: Yes. Sometimes the account manager had a lot of people from different product guys working under him.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: He had a problem of coordinating the account. So we had a company over here that’s broken up in a lot to pieces. We’ve got to map that to the needs of the customer.

Hendrie: Right.

Johnson: Try go figure out what to do. That’s what I’m talking about.

Hendrie: Yes, I understand.

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: Talk to me some more about the issue of mapping the sales force after it became product line oriented to also solving the problem of—you couldn't have a whole bunch of salesmen independently calling on the same account without somebody knowing what’s going on.

Johnson: Coordinating.

Hendrie: Coordinating, yes.

Johnson: Usually you coordinated through a plan. There were elements, groups that make up that plan.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: It’s just an organized way to make the account happy.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: If it’s a diversified account you’ve got a lot different people going around. You have to figure that out. Somebody is responsible for that. Whoever is going to be the coordinator to do that with. That’s usually the account manager’s show.

Hendrie: Very good. Talk to me about how you proceeded. What happened next in your career? Let’s move on to the next phases at Digital. How would you characterize what was the next—you did that for quite a while. What was the next inflection point in your career?

Johnson: Well, managers probably change their perspective, that’s all, looking at the competition and understanding dealing with the policy issues of governments. We joined the Computer Business Equipment Manufacturers Association.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I was a delegate to that committee. Again I wasn’t a mover and a shaker, I suppose. I was a good listener.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I thought the role of that company was a relationship management thing. It turned out to be a good learning experience, too, because I got to be at the same committee with people from Control Data and from IBM.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: And discuss a lot of different issues. It was a basic—that was an important part of my career.

Hendrie: Good.

Johnson: It was of least interest to Ken.

Hendrie: Of lease interest.

Johnson: Yes. He didn’t want to worry about anybody else. He wants to worry about us, but I think somebody’s got to worry about everybody else. So I took that job, too.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I was able to think about how to deal with some of the international issues from the OEM’s point of view.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: How to coordinate that stuff. That turned out to be useful, I think.

Hendrie: Then we got into the whole—we developed some very important tools; the DEC-100 sales thing. We had a program. You could earn credits for how you did as a sales person against your goals. DEC was always a goals oriented person. I took that literally. Everybody had their own plan, performance plan. They’d sit down with the managers. They’d all deal with your goals, not only your job goals but your personal goals, your relationship with your teammates. Where did you need improvement, where did you need change, where do you need help? That was a very powerful thing it turned out to be all by itself. To be in the DEC-100 almost everybody that made their goals got the DEC-100. But that became an important thing to the salespeople.

Hendrie: It was an objective they could strive for.

Johnson: Right. Yes.

Hendrie: In the same sense as salespeople around the world have some sort of …

Johnson: Something like that.

Hendrie: Something like that. Yes, there’s a …

Johnson: I thought these were reasonable and realistic kind of things.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: Based on your performance. Each sales person had to have a job plan, for the year, for instance, approved by their manager. Not only did it have to do with how many of this or that you’re going to sell, but what you’re relationships are going to be like with the customer, with your helpers, service people, overall how would you be ranked by your manager as a citizen in the group doing their share.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: So it built up a collaborative environment to work within and it made sense.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: You had to work on those kinds of foundations.

Hendrie: Yes, so there were regular goals that you were measured on but they talked not just about how many dollars you sold.

Johnson: No, definitely. You personally. They were personal goals, how you could improve your relationships with your fellow teammates.

Hendrie: You could get credit for that.

Johnson: You could get credit for that. If you did a good job you got a plus on your grade sheet.

Hendrie: That helped you get to the DEC-100.

Johnson: Yes. That’s true.

Hendrie: All right.

Johnson: To get promoted, too, I think.

Hendrie: It helps you get promoted too. Now, were there economic goals, too? I mean, there were economic goals on these goals, too, how many you’re going to sell or how many dollars worth of something?

Johnson: Yes, we did a lot of that kind of soul searching. We did a lot of things by plan and account strategies. Yes.

Hendrie: DEC was very unusual that it didn’t have commissions salespeople.

Johnson: That’s true.

Hendrie: I’m thinking there might have been some argument that this whole setting goals and yearly plans provided an alternative motivational mechanism versus the commission scheme. Maybe you could talk about why DEC didn’t have commissions and kept that for so many years, when everybody else did.

Johnson: Well, I was very comfortable with the whole idea and I think as a rule people were. There was always disturbance in the field organization about making money by directly by commission. Being part of the team and fitting into the structure was so important, I think, and it worked. One of our big arguments is that it just worked. It made the life of the manager’s simpler.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I thought that was an important feature. We had interesting examples of—first of all, the emphasis we were placing on the international world it was very much supported by a straight salary thing. The commissions were not a big idea originally in Europe and people were engineers by background. The whole background issue was an important role in this whole thing. It was flexible and it made sense. What was I going to say about that? I was thinking of an example, we had a little bit of a rebellion in the UK [United Kingdom].

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: We hired some salespeople for the PDP-10, and interestingly enough the big computer people were the ones that were pushing the most for commission because they looked at big numbers and they saw some glory in that.

Hendrie: Right.

Johnson: It turned out England ended up buying into our way of doing things as opposed to the ways of the people they worked for before. That the emphasis became on what your role was in the company offices. People started to resist, even, things that smacked of individual rewards. Being part of the team was really what was important. I think we did manage that very, very well. We had some unique—the people placed an honest regard for doing that. I’ve tended to support my thinking about that in traveling around the world, too. I found examples at Japan, for instance, the direct salary as opposed to commission.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: That was a very important thing. People don’t want to be forced into making decisions that violate their desire to do the right thing. Money is not the way to do it. I think that I should be able to wax more eloquent on this kind of subject than anything.

Hendrie: No, that’s good. I understand.

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: I want to take a short break, just for a minute, okay.

Johnson: Mm-hmm.

Hendrie: I wonder whether you could tell us now a little bit about any significant events in your career at DEC as some time passed while you’re running sales? Then I would like you to maybe talk about some of your earliest feelings as DEC began to change which it certainly, in your book, you point out how it did. I think most people who have written about DEC have said it started to change. I’m particularly interested in the change in the way DEC did things and made decisions and the whole—the whole sort of philosophical underpinnings of how DEC worked during it’s great years. Anyway, so that was a long—that wasn’t even a question.

Johnson: Yes, it was.

Hendrie: It was a very long one.

Johnson: It’s got sub questions.

Hendrie: Yes, sub questions. I’ll just turn it over to you. Answer in any order or however you care.

Johnson: Oh gees. Well, I think I’d have to go back and review in my own mind, try to be clearer about what I feel were the significant periods and what the changes were, what they could have been, et cetera. That’s going to take a little bit of work on my part to think about that.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: What were the key changes in my mind that ended up producing the result that happened is one way to have looked at it. It’s always helpful to go back and say what were the real positive things that could have happened, but did—what should we have continued to do.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: And not—what was our hope for the company in what year did the company go under, 1978? No, no that’s not true.

Hendrie: Nineteen-nineties I think is when it kind of…

Johnson: Nineteen ninety-six.

Hendrie: Is that right? I don’t remember the exact date.

Johnson: Well, I tend to think of 1982 being a key point. I’m going to have to think some more about that one. I’ve been thinking about it too long all ready. I’ll try to put it in a more useful way for future companies because I think that’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? Looking for some templates.

Hendrie: Well, yes, and in some sense just looking for your candid observations as to what seemed to change.

Johnson: Well, that’s a good way of looking at it because everybody has their own take on it.

Hendrie: Absolutely.

Johnson: That could be very complex because as the organization grew, it grew to have more complexity to it.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: More different parties, new people.

Hendrie: More moving parts, more parties.

Johnson: It could be more political, even.

Hendrie: Really? Yes.

Johnson: With new people coming in, obviously, importing old ideas from other companies. Or what they would integrate into it to create a better company, in a way.

Hendrie: Okay. When did sort of new people start coming into the company?

Johnson: New people?

Hendrie: Yes. When did Ken start hiring people that were not …

Johnson: Digital.

Hendrie: Not Digital. People that hadn’t grown up and were imbued with Digital’s culture and how they did things, the Digital way if there was Digital way.

Johnson: Yes. I think a lot of that had to do when you change the super structure.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: It means you don’t have the same people running things any more.

Hendrie: Okay. Talk to me about that.

Johnson: Well, I think, to me that was more in the 19—I’ll have to really think about that. That’s more of an introspective look than I’ve taken as usual. But I can see what I can do to comment about that.

Hendrie: Now, in terms of your career, at some point in your book you clearly started to have some uneasy relationships with Ken in terms of what he wanted to do and what you thought was the right thing in your judgment. Can you comment on that? What were the disagreements? I mean, where did he want to go versus where you wanted to go?

Johnson: Well, I don’t think I had a serious underpinning idea of what the company should try to do.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: It became more of a question of how you did it, I suppose, and how you viewed the world you were left with.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I started losing some level of confidence with Ken and the super structure and the people that were involved with it, so that mix was changing a little bit sometimes to a surprising degree.

Hendrie: Really?

Johnson: I think I mentioned it became an egotistical kind of a thing. Humility was gone. I pointed that out in my book, I think, in several places.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: We basically lost the flavor of Digital.

Hendrie: Which had a lot of humility in it.

Johnson: It had a lot of humility in it. Yes. As I point [out] in one case I reacted to some statements that he made publicly about the company. Kind of more egotistical kind of thing that I had ever heard before. To me that’s always a sign of insecurity not security.

Hendrie: Yes. Exactly.

Johnson: It was surprising to me, that’s all.

Hendrie: Can you just recount one of the ones that was in your book for the tape so we get the continuity, the thread on the transcript?

Johnson: On the what?

Hendrie: Could you recount one of those incidences? You did it in the book but just so it’s on the tape it flows through what we’re recording here.

Johnson: I’m not sure what you’re referring to now.

Hendrie: You had mentioned there were a couple of things you referred to in the book about where Ken had made some remarks you thought were…

Johnson: Surprisingly egotistical.

Hendrie: Yes. Yes.

Johnson: I can remember the page even.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: Boastful. I mean to me it was primarily a shock because humility had been more the norm, I think, than later on.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: Now, we’ve made it, the question is who made it? It stopped being a “we” kind of a thing, but a “me” kind of a thing.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: But I’d have to go back and think about that.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: Maybe I’m running out of steam here.

Hendrie: Yes, well, that’s all right. You’re allowed to. That happens.

Johnson: It became a clash, somehow a philosophical clash in the company. I’ve tended to attribute that more to Ken—Jack Shields role and his play but that’s probably too parochial on my part.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: That’s what I have to think about. I think we were better off when we were humble and always striving to improve and fix ourselves. It’s when the world started closing in. It usually centers around the boss’s sayings, things to do. That gets tricky.

Hendrie: Now, Ken was allegedly often was not direct in what he said but talked in parables and…

Johnson: Chairman Mao stuff?

Hendrie: Yes, a little bit. Chairman Mao stuff, okay.

Johnson: Chairman Ken.

Hendrie: Chairman Ken.

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: Was he always that way? Or did that grow on him as the company…

Johnson: No. I think it was just an interesting part of his character.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I think you could say it’s almost Christian-like in a way, parables—speaking in parables trying to—the story of trying to figure out a better way to say it. I think it bordered on being sometimes seen as a little bit odd. Too obscure.

Hendrie: Yes. It wasn’t clear enough for people.

Johnson: It wasn’t clear enough for people, yes.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: What are you trying to do? How are [you] trying to change people?

Hendrie: Yes, what do you really mean by that? What do you want? What should I take from this and what should I do?

Johnson: That’s exactly, right, yes. A lot of people are asking themselves that question, scratching their heads. Of course, people were used to the parables but sometimes it pays to be more direct and say what I am really worried about. Being open about it.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I think that’s a winner, a better winning way. That was a period where a number of us were estranged, you might say. We found it peculiar. Instead, the great wide leader you’re looking to had more fallibility. I don’t know what more to say about it, actually.

Hendrie: Okay. Well, I remember, sometimes he was very direct. It was like a parable but it was very direct. I remember hearing the story of he became concerned that the instructions for unpacking and bringing up a computer weren’t clear and him having a bunch of machines shipped to a warehouse or someplace and having the product line managers go and have to unpack it, read the instructions for how to put it together and set it up and do it.

Johnson: That’s more in the nature—you look at what kind of a job you did.

Hendrie: Exactly. You could argue that’s sort of like a parable.

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: It’s also very direct, you know what to do after you go through that, you’d be better fix it.

Johnson: Yes, absolutely. That’s a good parable.

Hendrie: That’s a good parable as opposed to…

Johnson: An obscure parable.

Hendrie: An obscure parable.

Johnson: Too abstract.

Hendrie: Too abstract.

Johnson: He did his best thing when he forced people to look at the nuts and bolts of what you were trying to do. Not impose his own point of view.

Hendrie: Just make them look at it.

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: And come to their own conclusions.

Johnson: Yes, come to your own conclusion.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: That’s an issue of trust, too, isn’t it?

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: Respecting your own managers?

Hendrie: Saying they’ll do the right thing if you point them in the right direction.

Johnson: Yes, but if they don’t then you’d be prepared to do something about it.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I don’t think that was usually the case but…

Hendrie: So maybe trust is something that wasn’t as strong.

Johnson: When I thought about writing my book, trust was one word I focused on a lot, trusting people to do the right thing.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: Or just trusting people, period.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: That means getting out of yourself a little bit and looking at a higher set of values, the company itself, what role it was playing.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: It’s when you start slipping into this omnipotent role. You’re kidding everybody including yourself.

Hendrie: You were still there when Ken and Gordon had their—I guess, Ken’s trust in Gordon dissipated, as I’ve heard it, and he eventually decided to leave.

Johnson: Gordon did?

Hendrie: Gordon Bell.

Johnson: He decided to leave.

Hendrie: Well, who knows exactly what happened, but he left.

Johnson: Yes, right.

Hendrie: There were allegedly strained relations before he left.

Johnson: Right.

Hendrie: Were you there? Did you observe that?

Johnson: I really wasn’t there.

Hendrie: Okay. That came after…

Johnson: That came after I had left. A couple of years after I left, I think.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I’m sure I would have had a comment to make about the whole thing.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I think that was always kind of a strange relationship, Ken and Gordon. Ken was sending funny messages to Gordon, I think. I’m not quite sure how to put this.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I think the whole Gordon/Ken relationship is a thing all by itself and I don’t know enough about it either. But I think maybe a question of envy and respect.

Hendrie: Two poles of the same feeling.

Johnson: Same feeling, right.

Hendrie: Yes, exactly.

Johnson: Right. I think Ken basically had an envy of Gordon because of his intellect and when it comes to technical. There was kind of a jealousy there, too.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I mean what Ken wanted to be seen as.

Hendrie: As a great engineer and visionary in the technical world.

Johnson: Yes. Basically, yes, right. Whether there was any conflicts with what his real responsibilities were.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I think if I were Gordon I would have been a little bit upset every once in a while, too. I’ve tended to look up to Gordon in terms of his role in the company, what he’s done for the company, what he did. I think he went off and exaggerated himself sometimes, too.

Hendrie: You were commenting about Gordon’s attitude about inputs from the field.

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: Yes. And maybe how they influence, possibly the PDP-11 or other things?

Johnson: Well, we considered a lot of changes to the PDP-11 in the early part of the life of the 11. Gordon was wrestling with the competitive features and how it was the reaction. I remember having a conversation with him outside of Building Five and it was about six o’clock in the evening and we were

talking about the field reaction to some of the things. I was trying to make the point, I say, “I’m getting very strong concerns about something from the field,” I can’t remember exactly what it was.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: But he listened very, very carefully and he understood what I was trying to say. I think he made some changes. They were subtle but vital. I was very impressed by his open attitude to the whole thing. He was wrestling with a big problem here, but he was sensitive to field opinion, and critical of some people in the company, at the same time, who were pushing the wrong ideas. So that’s why I got the impression that he was very open to ideas, feedback as a good designer should be.

Hendrie: Yes, absolutely. Good designers should be objective [and] make the customer as happy as possible.

Johnson: Happy, right.

Hendrie: Not themselves as happy as possible.

Johnson: No, that’s true. Well, that’s a fault that a lot of engineers have, I’m afraid.

Hendrie: Yes, I’ve noticed in my career.

Johnson: Yes. You really get some very funny inputs from the—that was particularly true when were looking at the small computer world and trying to figure out what to do. I really got the impression when I worked after sales—what is the marketing job—that there were very strong opinions coming out of the engineering organization about their product, but never really in the context of the whole display we offer the customer. Somehow engineers get too parochial and not enough involved with the mission of the company or what we’re trying to do with our customer.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: So it’s their own pet idea that they like to sponsor.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: That’s illogical, but that’s a reality, I think.

Hendrie: That’s reality.

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: A little bit of human nature, there.

Johnson: Right, a little bit. Some of it pretty powerful, too, though.

Hendrie: What would you like to comment on about the rest of your career to sort of wrap this up? What are we leaving out here?

Johnson: What are we leaving out?

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: What do you think we’re leaving out?

Hendrie: I don’t know. You know what you did and what your career was better than I do.

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: Though I know a few things about it.

Johnson: We left out—I thought you were talking about Digital.

Hendrie: Yes. Well, we are talking about Digital, yes. We can keep it at Digital.

Johnson: Yes. I think that’s for sure what’s important to you, isn’t it?

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: Yes. I mean I’ve obviously had a long career after that, too. I was unhappy for a long time, not happy in the job anymore and went through a lot of stages and feelings. I gravitated into relationships with venture capital people. I did a lot of personal investing. I never joined a venture capital organization. I had opportunities. I probably didn’t do myself much good in some cases. I even once was a venture capitalist for a while, yes. [It was] a startup and I decided that was not for me. I didn’t like my teammate.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: So I’ve thought about a lot of things to do with my life and my career but I’ve stayed with venture capital work and working with little companies. Some have grown into bigger companies. I’ve had quite a bit of fun, actually. I’ve made a lot of friends, relationships, even made some money in some places.

Hendrie: That’s good. That’s always good.

Johnson: Yes.

Hendrie: Maybe you could just tell me a little bit about your after-DEC career and the venture capital. Some of the interesting stories of things you went and did, things that worked or things that didn’t work. Just that would be interesting.

Johnson: Well, some of that I’d really have to dig back and try to figure out what to say about it. I’ve tried to stay in the field, get to know people, get to know what’s going on. I’ve thought about other kinds of careers to do. I missed the opportunity to run something like that, but I should have done something about that years ago. Had my chances to run companies, for instance.

Hendrie: Did people ever approach you while you were at Digital to try to lure you away?

Johnson: Nobody tried to lure me away that I can think of.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: Not while I was at Digital. I never encouraged that either. I don’t think so anyway. I’ve had venture capital people come to me, for instance, wanting me to be president of an electronics company, or it was starting a computer business. I never could see the fit. That probably happened to me five or six times in my career.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: I’ve thought of teaching. I’ve thought of consulting to some degree but that doesn’t do it for me. Although I’ve been a consultant informally, I suppose, for lots of people. Certainly in connection with companies; I was on the board of Mass Soft [Massachusetts Software Council].

Hendrie: Oh really?

Johnson: Yes. For a long time. In fact, I was the first investor in Mass Soft. I encouraged those people to start their company.

Hendrie: Excellent. Well, they did very well.

Johnson: They should have done very well. They did pretty well as it was, but they—is that me?

Hendrie: I don’t know.

Johnson: Hi, Ed. Ed Juferian, do you know him?

Hendrie: No, I don’t know him.

Johnson: He was in personnel at Digital.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: He was the right hand man for one of my regional managers, Ron Smart.

Hendrie: Yes, I knew Ron Smart. He was on the board of the Computer History Museum for a while.

Johnson: That’s true, he was, yes.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I remember that, yes.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: When I started running the field I was like a three-man group, Ron Smart, my secretary and me.

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: We had the little office in Building Five. Great people. Ron Smart and I were like that.

Hendrie: Very good.

Johnson: Very close together. He would pick up and do anything. A PhD would do anything. That was a pretty good find right there.

Hendrie: That is a very good find. That’s almost an oxymoron, a PhD will do anything.

Johnson: Yes, absolutely. Yes, there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do. He believed in getting his hands dirty. Unfortunately, I don’t think he was the greatest leader especially within the company in terms of getting support from people for running GIA. But he was a great guy and as long as he worked for me as my assistant, he really helped me a lot.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I owe him a lot. Just like I owe my first secretary a lot. Anyway…

Hendrie: Okay.

Johnson: Do you want to get into—am I right on the path?

Hendrie: Yes, you’re fine.

Johnson: I don’t know if you want to talk about people or roles or functions. I’ll have to think about what was important to me in my job vis-à-vis Digital over the years and the later years, especially. It starts getting into relationship issues, I suppose.

Hendrie: Yes. Do you feel that was probably the real reason that—the biggest reason why you eventually left being the head of field sales, that it was relationship issues just got…

Johnson: Definitely. I think it was relationship issues and Ken was involved with that stuff.

Hendrie: Yes, well, I’m sure Ken was a big part of it.

Johnson: Yes. Basically, he made choices that I thought were inappropriate.

Hendrie: In terms of…

Johnson: But the one that grieves me the most I shouldn’t even express it…

Hendrie: Yes, you can. You can say this.

Johnson: Well, I feel like my contribution was very big to the company.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I don’t think that was really very well understood. I was basically undermined both by Ken to some degree, but also some people involved in the company. Splits that were allowed to fester for a long time. Maybe I should have done something about it a long time before that so I take a lot of responsibility too. As I say in my book, he talked later on about my coming back on the board at Digital.

Hendrie: Yes.

Johnson: I say in the book I thought he should have—I would have loved to be in that position to try to help shape how we continue to prosper.

Hendrie: How you move forward, yes.

Johnson: Right, right. I had less allegiance to a few individuals than maybe he did. That would have been the struggle, but I think I was on the right track.

Hendrie: Because your long-term judgments were correct.

Johnson: My long-term judgments were correct. Not that I’m a brilliant technical guy either, but I knew customers. Most people in the company thought of me as Mr. Customer. I represented the interest of the customer.

Hendrie: That was your job.

Johnson: That was my job.

Hendrie: Right.

Johnson: That’s what I think.

Hendrie: Exactly.

Johnson: When people are contesting to that role you’ve got a problem. You’ve got to count on your boss to make the right decisions but maybe I didn’t help myself enough. Who knows? Life is a struggle.

Hendrie: All right.

Johnson: But I can go back and look at the whole picture, the respect a lot of people had for the company I still do remember very fondly.

Hendrie: Yes, remember it as a wonderful company.

Johnson: As a wonderful company.

Hendrie: Wow.

Johnson: What happened? People are still scratching their heads at about what happened.

Hendrie: That’s right.

Johnson: Yes. That’s life.

Hendrie: Very good. Well, shall we wrap up now?

Johnson: Yes, I’d like to. I think I’m running out of steam.

Hendrie: Good. All right, well you’ve done very well. Thank you very much for your time and doing this oral history interview for the Computer History Museum. Thank you very much.

Johnson: You’re most welcome. I’m delighted.

END OF INTERVIEW