DEC's Hudson fab 3784

A long time ago, and several employers ago, I worked in a semiconductor-related company. This was about the time the Hudson fab was spinning out of control (it was later sold to Intel, shortly before Digital completely lost the will to live and sold itself to Compaq). We hired one of the senior managers of the Hudson fab for our company, as a "director of product planning" (I kid you not). He was completely useless. We nicknamed him "pudding between the ears".

If he is typical of other people there, it is easy to understand that Digital never got the Hudson 6 fab to work right. Unfortunately, it enough to hire this clown, they then allowed him to continue being a clown for many years.

An even more boneheaded move was hiring one of the big-wigs from AT&T's semiconductor fab, and making him into a VP. Because of the high cost of real-estate in silicon valley, the company gave him a $1M mortgage, interest free (this was in 1995 or so, when a million was still real money in silicon valley real estate). This character only lasted for several months; unfortunately, his only skill was writing employment contracts, and my employer had to simply forgive his mortgage. The joke around the company was that the situation is like a divorce: You find somebody you don't like, and buy them a house.

Disclaimer: Other than this clown from HLO (the Hudson fab), and the unsanitary story of the last few years of Digital's rest spiral und Palmer, I have been a long-time admirer of Digital, a long-time customer, I still own two VAXes and run VMS on them, one of my great regrets is never having worked at Digital, and I consider Digital (pre-Palmer) to be the greatest computer company ever.

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