NonStop Trends & wins

The 2024 Bootcamp was based around the 50 year anniversary of NonStop. This is when Jimmy officially started Tandem. Keith Moore, Dave Jones and I had been collecting items for this anniversary. It actually started at Discover year before last, when Cray was featuring an old Cray II on the Discover floor. It was quite a hit, and Keith and I started trying to track down an old NonStop I or II. Unfortunately, we were unable to find any surviving systems that old, but we did stumble across several interesting items. Keith found a NonStop 1 front switch panel and we did have that on display. Keith also tracked down some old memory boards and several of the old chips used on the early systems. The Museum also had a number of two-handled mugs, including both Jimmy and Bob Marshall’s cup, which we found on eBay. There was a cup I once had – the 1987 LA Marathon – which Tandem sponsored, and the system provided timing for the race. I also had the jacket from that event for a long time. Sigh. Anyway, I recall the race because Jimmy was going to run in it, but we heard he had messed up his ankle earlier that week. Jimmy came and ran anyway, even though injured. We had special timing for him and his time was 2 hours 244 minutes as I recall. I did have a few items, an old Tandem screwdriver set, a rosewood pen set (Rosewood was the code name for the VLX and we got pen sets after the release). I also had a very small Swiss army knife that was sent with every Integrity S2 system as the “installation and maintenance kit”. Now, this knife is tiny about an inch and a half and I have carried it many times through many TSA security sites in many airports. This time there was a problem. I was stopped and told the knife couldn’t go through. I explained it was a special keepsake, tiny and that I had never been stopped before. You all know how that played out. I was told I could ship it back to myself for $30, to which I quickly agreed. Then they discovered they had none of the special envelopes to ship it. I was stuck there for about 40 minutes (lucky I always arrive early for flights). I was 2 supervisors up and no envelopes on the horizon. I offered to give them the $30 and have them mail it but that was against regulation. Finally, the head supervisor took my info and said she’d mail it to me. I was pulling out my wallet, but she said no, this was completely unofficial and against the rules and that she was ‘just going to do it’ knowing it was a special memento for me. So I have not named the airport or the supervisor but a huge THANK YOU for getting my Tandem knife back to me. There were some Swiss army knives there – even the huge ones that seemed to have 50 blade options.

The museum also sported some of the early patents, in fact Joel Bartlett was there and brought his. Joel told us that the Mackie Diagram, which was famous and on the early double-handled mugs and was the basis for every Tandem intro presentation was actually made up by Ken Robesky not Dave Mackie, who certainly, made it famous. I’m very glad to finally give Ken the recognition for that wonderful piece of material. The Tandem journals brought back a flood of memories for employees and customers alike. Phil Ly dropped in and found an old journal he was in with his name spelled wrong (Lee). I awarded it to him on the spot. Then there were the many shirts and giveaways that were on display. I brought some of my old Cyclone pins and there were many chips in plastic showing NonStop CPUs over the years. One item that several people asked about was the NonStop fragments from the exploding datacenter demo HP did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMCHpUtJnEI. HP collected a lot of the fragments and cast them in plastic as giveaways. At one time I had several of the commemorative pieces but lost them over the years. The question still comes up about VMS beating NonStop coming back up. Open VMS was up in 13.71 seconds and NonStop was live in 33.96 seconds. At the time, I spoke to the team who set up the demo about this. They said, of the 5 systems tested in the explosion, NonStop was the only one running actual work. We were running our debit/credit benchmark at 500tps, and our recovery was the full recovery of the application. Al the others were just getting an OS prompt back. Now OpenVMS was a fantastic system and OS so who knows for sure but that was the story I heard and so report.

All in all, a fantastic TBC and the museum a big hit which demonstrated how beloved Tandem was as a company and how loyal the employees were to the culture. Go Tandem. Go NonStop.