Celebrating 50 years of NonStop / Tandem

This year is a very special year for all Tandemites. Yes, I use the word “Tandem” this year because we take our heritage seriously and look forward to the NonStop product evolutions coming soon. While looking at this 2023-2024 year, the NonStop product is going to move forward with a newer Intel platform and has embraced the native converged legacy alongside of the newer options for deployment as virtualized instances. As I said, “embraced” the converged and efficient delivery of NonStop computing for the existing users, and for new users that have not experienced the value of the single system image, resilient execute platform.

My personal history with Tandem started in 1981. I was a young engineer with several years of systems software development on another wonder platform. That’s not so much of interest. But what struck me most as I came over to this Tandem system was how unique the technology was, and how unique the customer, partner, and vendor culture was, and how intertwined it was.  A few years later I began working at Tandem. It was then that I was finally able to see why this computer company was different. The people there were for the most part, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful… (boy scout joke). And yes, they were “reverent” to Tandem culture too.   It was the same thing I felt as a customer/user of Tandem systems. This was not surprising to see; but was undoubtedly unique to this company. I just knew it.

This past year, I have aggressively scoured for memorabilia and history about Tandem Computers. I knew quite a bit from the inside-out about the technology and I knew a lot of the people and the lore of the company origins, having worked with some of the original cast. I have uncovered many fascinating documents and items. As many of you know, Tandem was (ironically?) founded by Jimmy after he had been rejected by executive management on a business plan to create a special vertically positioned compute product (division) inside of HP.

In all of the trove of items I have harvested, I found one thing particularly amazing. I was able to peruse the HP business plan of Jimmy’s proposed product (group). This was the formal proposal that was rejected by the product executives above Jimmy at HP. This product (group) would focus on the needs of financial services. The vision was that financial services was about to be transformed by computing.  Banks and stock exchanges are partially computerized, but mostly, banking and funds management was a capture, batch, post, settle compute processing model. The vision was that the industry was likely to move toward transaction-based services. Those services would require a differentiated product that had very specific features and interoperability needs.

As I read though this document, I realized many things. The work was very aggressive, well-reasoned, and detailed.   The eventual Tandem product was also aggressive, well-reasoned, and detailed.  The first Tandem 16 systems were designed and well received into that market. It was only a very little while before that vision spread beyond just financial services and into the IT industry.  It was a vision. It was a large risk to split off and found a new company based solely on this vision.  I am thankful that the risk was taken.

Some few of you know me and know that I drive a lot of demonstrations of NonStop at annual TBC. The intent of these is to always push forward with how NonStop could and/or should be used. Forward, forward, forward. I look at technology mostly with an eye toward possibility, not fear. However, if you know me even more well, you know that I am very interested in 20^th century history. What you might call near-generational history. Three decades in particular that are most interesting for technology are 1920-1930 (or stretch 1919-1936), post WWII 1950-1960, and the 1970-1980 post IC gold rush.

My friend, Darrel VanDyke  (I hope he considers me to be a friend) wrote a nice book called “Fire in the Mind” that demonstrates this gold rush of the 1970’s.  Even if you just leaf through this book with your thumb, you get the idea of how wild it was to ride the compute rush. Check it out if you haven’t seen it before.  Justin Simonds and I are doing a fun session about this long and winding Tandem road. I bet there are some turns in the road you haven’t seen or heard of before.  For me, the history, the Tandem origins, and the potential to take Tandem technology forward, make for a very special time to celebrate a great milestone of 50 years of Tandem (1974-2024).

I encourage you to join us for some celebrating, and some very interesting history this year at NonStopTBC – TBC by the Sea 2024.   Some of the items I have harvested and some special memories from some very special guests will be shared as we look forward to the next years of NonStop.

See you in Monterey in September!