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 the 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 could not find any surviving systems that were that old, but we did stumble across several interesting items. Keith found a NonStop 1 front switch panel, and we had 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 cups, 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; his time was 2 hours and 244 minutes, as I recall. I did have a few items: an old Tandem screwdriver set and 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 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 that it was a tiny special keepsake 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 two supervisors up and no envelopes on the horizon. I offered to give them the $30 and have them mail it, but that was against the regulations. 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 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. Some Swiss army knives were 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 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, but his name was spelled wrong (Lee). I awarded it to him on the spot. Then, there were many shirts and giveaways on display. I brought some of my old Cyclone pins, and there were many chips in plastic showing NonStop CPUs over the years. Several people asked about the NonStop fragments from the exploding data center demo HP did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMCHpUtJnEI. HP collected a lot of the fragments and cast them in plastic as giveaways. I once 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 that set up the demo for this. They said that 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. All the others were just getting an OS prompt back. Now, OpenVMS is a fantastic system and OS, so who knows for sure? That was the story I heard and reported.

All in all, it was 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.