Who here has worked for now-dead major computer companies?

[kwassa]

I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation from 1985-1993. DEC had 120,000 employees when I was hired. I was laid off after the first 60,000 or so.

Down the street from our office was a large office for Wang.

[CurtEastPoint]

1. Wang 11 years.

[Betsy Ross]

2. Maybe not a Major computer company

But I worked for Corvus Systems, the first company to put a Winchester disk drive on the market for use with PCs way back around 1980. We could network a 6, 20, or 30 MEGABYTE drive. Weighed about 30 pounds.

I sure remember DEC and Wang! I used a PDP-11 as my first word processor. I published a company newsletter off a dot matrix printer.

[ThoughtCriminal]

3. I was in the consumer software business for 28 years

Not one company that I worked for - including two of my own - is still in business.

[kwassa]

4. I wonder how many companies have come and gone ...

[kcass1954]

5. I worked at Systems Engineering Laboratories from mid-76 thru late 78.

I don't remember how many employees there were, but it was no where near as big as DEC.

I was an admin in Sales Support, working for the hardware team.

My favorite story: We had a new computer coming out, and the ad agency couldn't get a photographer out to take a picture of the new memory board. So I drove to manufacturing, where the plant manager set the board in the back of my car, and I headed to the photographer's office. I still joke about driving around Fort Lauderdale with a $10,000 memory board in the back of my $3,000 Honda.

My dad worked at Documation Inc from 72-78. They made punch-card readers. He left there and worked at Dataproducts (printers) from 78 until he retired in 89.

[HopeHoops]

6. I'm not sure about "major", but all but two are dead now (and I'm not sure about one of them).

[hunter]

7. Burroughs, a part of it that died when it became UniSys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_Corporation

The place was already a ghost town when they hired me.

My boss's motto was "If I can't hear it, it ain't leaking."

He didn't hear much.

Nobody in the place gave a damn about anything anymore.

They were all looking for other jobs and waiting for their pink slips.

[hobbit709]

8. I used to work at Texas Instruments

960, 980 and 990 series computers.

[OriginalGeek]

9. When I lived in Garland

my best friend's dad worked for TI. this would have been early 80s and I think he got laid off near then...the only thing i remember about him is he took us camping one time and let us have Schlitz malt liquor (we were 18 so it was legal then) and that he chain smoked so much I never saw him without a lit cigarette - he would always light a new one off the end of the old one.

[Still Blue in PDX]

10. Didn't work for them, but I used both DEC and Wang, and I have a question.

We still run our old DEC All-in-One program with something called Reflections.

I had been training new employees on that system for about ten years, telling people to press the "Do Key," when it suddely dawned on me that "dookey" was what my sons called poo. Plus, for a couple of functions (so to speak) one would press the Do Key twice, i.e., Do Do.

Was that on purpose?

[Bucky]

11. Not me, but I was briefly employed by a DotCom in 1999-2001 before they crashed.

Money for nothing. They were paying hundreds of writers for self-edited content and had no revenue model. Yet people were just snapping up the stock like it was ever gonna be worth something. When the crash hit, the price dropped to 5 cents a share.

[deek]

12. My father worked for Univac,

Burroughs, DID

[kwassa]

13. My father worked for Burroughs, right out of college.

and then spent over 30 years at GM, during it's best years and gradual decline.