PDP-11 Ball Point Pen

[ainterne]

Many years ago I was awarded the pen below by DEC. At the time I was advised to "keep it safe" as it would be valuable because there was a very limited number made with the emblem for special awards only. I certainly can't however, qualify if that advice was accurate.

Among other things I stored from those times I found the pen recently and it got me thinking about it. I have over the years seen the pen and not thought to much about it. This time I started thinking that it may be interesting to find out about the pen's history, and of course
if indeed it had any value.

The only markings are the PDP-11 in the picture, but also I noticed this time that around the gold band in the middle of the pen it does say "Parker Made in USA"..

I wondered if anyone knows anything about the pen or has any reference material regarding it? Perhaps even knows or could point me in the direction of someone that would know........ Perhaps its worth nothing and that's fine, out of curiosity I would like to find out more about it.




Thanks Phil.....

[gbryal]

I don't know anything about the pen, but my guess is the value is more in terms of its interest to computer historians who collect pieces like these. History you must have had a hand in to be awarded such a pen.

[ainterne]

I don't know anything about the pen, but my guess is the value is more in terms of its interest to computer historians who collect pieces like these. History you must have had a hand in to be awarded such a pen.

Thanks.... yes I have a hand in many things in the industry... Actually I have a small collection of items I have been awarded from IMB Pen clips,ties, signed books, you name it... The pen has always been the one that I know little about but remember vividly the word shared about the pens importance, it's strange to me, that the memory is so vivid. I was awarded it in the Uk but for work much later in the development. I wasn't involved early on and therefore don't know much about its origin. Time flew past so fast in those days and somehow awards seemed so unimportant, all thinking was focused on the next challenge. I dropped a note to a couple of museums and historians as you suggested.. Hopefully I can get some info on it.

Thanks...Phil.

[welch]

Looks like an Insignia ballpoint. Richard Binder might be interested, or might, at least, get misty-eyed.

Richard worked at DEC when the PDP-11 was a main product. How do I know? Chatting as he fixed a nib on a Parker-61...tricky job. My first programming job was to write 8080 assembly language in 1981, when our target machine was too small to have a an assembler and our 5 1/4 inch floppies could not hold enough source code. We cross-compiled on a PDP8A using an editor called TECO. Richard had used TECO. Said he stayed with DEC through all the sell-offs, mergers, and sell-outs until the last. By then, he was making "a competence" fixing old fountain pens.

As I was about to move from my unintentionally non-profit first company (13 consecutive years as a start-up) to GE, we got a PDP-11. I remember the documentation -- red three-ring binders -- that took up an entire wall in our back room...which had once been the biggest dance hall in Bergen County, NJ. Documented everything except how to find whatever simple thing you needed to know.

I never got anything as classy as that pen. At GE, we got Cross pen and pencil sets for doing a good job or just for giving a senior manager's presentation to an outfit like NASDAQ. I have thrown out the advertising ballpoints that used to draw me to trade shows. Used to get flimsy pens and pencils for an expensive project, a programmer-killer project, called Global Straight-though Trade Association (GSTPA: 1999 - 2002). Cost nearly $200 million USD, not counting the staff that my company, SWIFT (see swift.com) gave to the project. Whenever our majority partners pulled something shady, such as tell the customers that their development had been delayed because of a network problem one of the 16 redundant servers we had given them and I had installed, then I would walk to the center of the work floor, flourish as GSTPA ballpoint (worth about 10 cents) and break it.

Baseball caps were useful, although I once nearly got into a talk-fight because I was wearing a Redhat Linux red hat and a couple of stupidly drunk "city boys" and a "city girl" walked right behind me shouting insults at Manchester United. I gather that ManU had lost a game. They had just come out of a pub near the spot where several streets cross near the Bank of England. I snarled some [expletives deleted] about people dogging Linux. They had to translate my New York-ese and they had no idea what Redhat or Linux might be. Drunks are all the same.

[ainterne]

Looks like an Insignia ballpoint. Richard Binder might be interested, or might, at least, get misty-eyed.

Richard worked at DEC when the PDP-11 was a main product. How do I know? Chatting as he fixed a nib on a Parker-61...tricky job. My first programming job was to write 8080 assembly language in 1981, when our target machine was too small to have a an assembler and our 5 1/4 inch floppies could not hold enough source code. We cross-compiled on a PDP8A using an editor called TECO. Richard had used TECO. Said he stayed with DEC through all the sell-offs, mergers, and sell-outs until the last. By then, he was making "a competence" fixing old fountain pens.

As I was about to move from my unintentionally non-profit first company (13 consecutive years as a start-up) to GE, we got a PDP-11. I remember the documentation -- red three-ring binders -- that took up an entire wall in our back room...which had once been the biggest dance hall in Bergen County, NJ. Documented everything except how to find whatever simple thing you needed to know.

I never got anything as classy as that pen. At GE, we got Cross pen and pencil sets for doing a good job or just for giving a senior manager's presentation to an outfit like NASDAQ. I have thrown out the advertising ballpoints that used to draw me to trade shows. Used to get flimsy pens and pencils for an expensive project, a programmer-killer project, called Global Straight-though Trade Association (GSTPA: 1999 - 2002). Cost nearly $200 million USD, not counting the staff that my company, SWIFT (see swift.com) gave to the project. Whenever our majority partners pulled something shady, such as tell the customers that their development had been delayed because of a network problem one of the 16 redundant servers we had given them and I had installed, then I would walk to the center of the work floor, flourish as GSTPA ballpoint (worth about 10 cents) and break it.

Baseball caps were useful, although I once nearly got into a talk-fight because I was wearing a Redhat Linux red hat and a couple of stupidly drunk "city boys" and a "city girl" walked right behind me shouting insults at Manchester United. I gather that ManU had lost a game. They had just come out of a pub near the spot where several streets cross near the Bank of England. I snarled some [expletives deleted] about people dogging Linux. They had to translate my New York-ese and they had no idea what Redhat or Linux might be. Drunks are all the same.

Thanks very much for the info. It's funny how small the world becomes on the net.. Thank you for the info about Richard, I will have to run the pen past him and see what he says. It sounds like you are well and truly embedded into the industry and have a wealth of information to share. '
The last time I was working in London was in 1994/5 when Barings went down.. I had a bunch of my team working on a Sat morningand received a call to say they had been walked of the floors. Next think I knew the news broke about Nick Leeson and that was that. Funny how things work, I went to Ford for a one day contract and am still there 20 years later.
I moved from London to Michigan as part of the job. I spent some time in Nuremberg sorting out some Vax problems, Nuremberg I consider one of the nicest places.

Thanks again for the info.... I do appreciate it.

[akapulko2020]

Oh what an incredibly geeky reminder of my BSc in Computer Engineering ..

[welch]

Thanks very much for the info. It's funny how small the world becomes on the net.. Thank you for the info about Richard, I will have to run the pen past him and see what he says. It sounds like you are well and truly embedded into the industry and have a wealth of information to share. '
The last time I was working in London was in 1994/5 when Barings went down.. I had a bunch of my team working on a Sat morning[/COLOR][/SIZE]and received a call to say they had been walked of the floors. Next think I knew the news broke about Nick Leeson and that was that. Funny how things work, I went to Ford for a one day contract and am still there 20 years later.
I moved from London to Michigan as part of the job. I spent some time in Nuremberg sorting out some Vax problems, Nuremberg I consider one of the nicest places.

Thanks again for the info.... I do appreciate it.

I remember the Barings crash so well. At GE Information Services, we had a credit risk management system that had evolved from a system GE West Germany had done for a bank (Dresdner??) in the early '80s. It had been re-written several times by the mid-90s, and part of the sales pitch always pointed to Barings...our system kept a bank from being over-exposed to any one trading partner. Advised on the last sale, a big one to Industrial Bank of Japan...then went to SWIFT. After being invited to retire, worked for a SWIFT-partner, and then for SiriusXM Satellite Radio, in the supply-chain management group. I probably have specs for the Ford-Sirius interface.

Keep at it!

I started at GE sitting two cubicles from a guy who had been an engineer on Grumman's Lunar Excursion Module for the Apollo project. Met someone who had designed and written one of the first packet-switch networks, using a GE mini-computer for tasks that would now be done by a Cisco router. He "took a package", worked at a "dot-com" in the late '90s, and retired rich. He's now a guide at some part of the Smithsonian. So: an engineer who designed one of the first (maybe THE first) global networks is now a guide at a museum; GE replaced him with a person who had studied networking from texts based on texts based on work from the original engineer.

[ainterne]

Thanks very much for the info. It's funny how small the world becomes on the net.. Thank you for the info about Richard, I will have to run the pen past him and see what he says. It sounds like you are well and truly embedded into the industry and have a wealth of information to share. '
The last time I was working in London was in 1994/5 when Barings went down.. I had a bunch of my team working on a Sat morning[/COLOR][/SIZE]and received a call to say they had been walked of the floors. Next think I knew the news broke about Nick Leeson and that was that. Funny how things work, I went to Ford for a one day contract and am still there 20 years later.
I moved from London to Michigan as part of the job. I spent some time in Nuremberg sorting out some Vax problems, Nuremberg I consider one of the nicest places.

Thanks again for the info.... I do appreciate it.

I remember the Barings crash so well. At GE Information Services, we had a credit risk management system that had evolved from a system GE West Germany had done for a bank (Dresdner??) in the early '80s. It had been re-written several times by the mid-90s, and part of the sales pitch always pointed to Barings...our system kept a bank from being over-exposed to any one trading partner. Advised on the last sale, a big one to Industrial Bank of Japan...then went to SWIFT. After being invited to retire, worked for a SWIFT-partner, and then for SiriusXM Satellite Radio, in the supply-chain management group. I probably have specs for the Ford-Sirius interface.

Keep at it!

I started at GE sitting two cubicles from a guy who had been an engineer on Grumman's Lunar Excursion Module for the Apollo project. Met someone who had designed and written one of the first packet-switch networks, using a GE mini-computer for tasks that would now be done by a Cisco router. He "took a package", worked at a "dot-com" in the late '90s, and retired rich. He's now a guide at some part of the Smithsonian. So: an engineer who designed one of the first (maybe THE first) global networks is now a guide at a museum; GE replaced him with a person who had studied networking from texts based on texts based on work from the original engineer.

Thank you for sharing that. Its amazing the stories that pop up just based on an needing to know about a ballpoint pen:-) ....

Thinking about it now, its the only company ever that I worked for where I used to do 80 hours a week and each morning couldn't wait to get into work again. There was so much variety and things to do that I could never get bored in that place. I remember the very first day I got there, they took me up to the dealer floor and walked me in. There was young woman in a mini skirt, she was sat with one foot up on the adjoining desk. She had a big cigar in her hand and was on the phone dealing and shouting at the top of her voice. I though wow, this place is alive. The pure enthusiasm of the people working there was like a drug. The top dealer every month would have the right to sit where ever they wanted on the dealer floor. The whole office was re-arranged every month to accommodate who ever won top dealer. She wanted to be first to be seen as people came off the elevator and so everyone knew she was top dog.

They used to make so much money when the going was good. I remember the whole floor getting 26inch Eizo monitors one day. Remember each dealer had 4+ monitors. The next day the 27inch models came out and they switched the whole lot out again. What every they wanted while they made money was what they got. So the day I was called and told the doors had been closed was a pretty sad day. I remember that we had just started putting in Cisco kit into Barings en masse. While it was open it was one fun place to work.