I was surprised to find out this morning that it seems Ed De Castro has passed on September 6 this year. I can't see any reference to this in cctalk, so I'll try to give a short summary of Ed's accomplishments. Many here would know that Ed worked for DEC and was project manager in charge of developing the PDP-8. He left DEC to found DG in the late 60's and was the original designer of their Nova system, introduced to the marketplace when he was 29. Ed was obviously a highly talented engineer, but it was the founding of DG that I would imagine was his most outstanding accomplishment. DG wasn't the first disruptive new entrant in the computing marketplace in that period, or the largest for example with DEC and HP preceding them. In order to stand out, DG used every trick in the marketing/advertising book that they could think of. It seems that DG may have been the first disruptive tech startup to also display a very high level of cheeky confidence as being central to their brand. I get the impression that DG staff took up this spirit and ran with it, at times even faster than management might have liked them to. DG also sounds like a company that required high performance - everyone there knew what the expectations were. Somehow a generally quiet, matter of fact engineer like Ed created a 'pirate ship' that people absolutely thrived in. Perhaps it could even be said that DG were the template, in terms of culture, for what we imagine tech startups to be striving for even today. There are numerous videos on YouTube that give a sense of this, including regarding the Talking Propeller Heads, the inhouse DG rock/comedy band. Looking also at early Apple advertisements, for example, I was struck personally with the similarity in tone and style to DG's advertisements.
This quote from http://www.teamfoster.com/billteamfostercom sums up the company well: "The company was a puzzle. It broke all the rules and yet was extremely successful. It had the reputation of being the "bad boy" of the computer industry -- heck, of any industry. And it enjoyed this reputation. DG became a public company less than two years after it was founded and shattered records in making it to the Fortune 500. Too bad Harvard never wrote a case study. It would have been groundbreaking! But if they did Harvard would have had to admit that EVERYTHING they taught about how to run a business could be wrong…" Also this quote from https://www.ithistory.org/honor-roll/mr-edson-ed-de-castro: "Steve Wozniak, Apple's future co-founder, (in high school at the time) was said to be enchanted with the Nova's elegantly designed architecture, and had photos of the machine taped on his bedroom wall." And of course most of us know of Tracy Kidder's Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine. These are just some short thoughts from someone who never worked at DG. Hopefully some others here with deeper experience can comment also. Vale Ed De Castro
