I don’t think I have a tendency to dwell on the past. Yet an employer that I thought I had parted company with years ago always seems to be popping up in my thoughts. The company is Convex Computer Corporation, the pioneer of “affordable supercomputing,” where I worked from 1992 to 1995. Convex as an institution is gone, but much to my amazement, its culture is very much alive. I’d like to pay a tribute both to the demise of the institution, and to the unique spirit that lives on.

Convex is dead

What happened to the institution? After outliving practically every other competitor in the market that they created, Convex ran out of money and sought a merger with Hewlett-Packard, which was completed officially in December 1995. Cultural changes were inevitable, but mercifully, most of the changes came slowly. The first big shock for me was when management removed all Convex paraphernalia and pictures from past events from the walls in the hallways. They laid them all out in the company meeting room and told us to take what we wanted, and served ice cream to “celebrate.”

I consider the next big milestone to be the end of the Friday parties, which happened after I left what was then Hewlett-Packard. Convex had a long-standing tradition of bringing beer kegs into the main breakroom on Friday afternoons, along with other drinks and snacks. I vividly remember the one time my wife attended. She stood there, shocked, and said something like “My God, they’re all geeks!” I did some of my most inspired test tool development after the Friday parties. I’m told that the last Friday party was Friday, the 13th of April, 2001, canceled for the sake of cost-cutting.

Then on September 23, 2002, I got a disturbing announcement stating that the entire software development lab I had worked for was shut down. There are still a few ex-Convex employees working for H-P at the old Convex site in Richardson, Texas, and definitely a number of Convex folks who have relocated to other H-P locations. But it’s hard to find much of the Convex legacy that’s left at H-P.

Long live Convex

Nowadays, Convex lives on in the people who were there. As I wrote this, I received an April Fool’s joke in an email on the “ex-convex” mailing list. April Fool’s jokes are a prominent component of the hacker culture, and the Convex culture has a lot in common with hacker culture.

I got a blast from the past when a political discussion recently broke out on the ex-convex list. It was a full-scale, flame-throwing, no holds barred debate. It was old friends, who saw no need to tread lightly. It was the same sort of discussion that used to take place on the internal Usenet newsgroups at Convex, and several people were amused to see that the group was still up to the task.

I didn’t realize how many Convex connections I’d maintained until I sat down to write about them. I recently sent congratulations to Ron, a former manager of mine, who decided to retire rather than try to find another job after the shutdown. I worked on a project with Prathibha and Hema, testers I had worked with at Convex and who landed contracting positions with one of my clients. Matthew, another ex-Con (the affectionate shorthand for an ex-Convex employee), is an employee on that same project. I spent a week at a training course last year with Daryl, who was my first team lead when I started at Convex. I worked on a writing project with ex-Cons Eric and Martin. I met Mark at a local networking event. I touched based with Orion and Darrell when passing through San Francisco last month. I met Prasad and his wife for a social visit when they came through town last December. I consulted with Peter about writing this article. That’s just a sampling.

I don’t try to seek out my former Convex employees any more than anyone else in my network. But they’re still a core part of my network more than three years after I left H-P, and seven years after Convex officially went kaput. Countless times, I’ve heard ex-Cons say that Convex is still their favorite work experience, even after they worked several different places since then.

I asked Jason Eckhardt recently why Convex was his favorite job. He started as a co-op student, writing software tests for the compilers. He says,

I grew a little bored and decided to not only find the defects, but then go isolate the assembly code that caused the wrong answer. Then I thought I could accelerate the codegen effort by just fixing the compiler bugs instead of merely finding them…. I don’t know any other place where I could have gone from junior co-op to compiler developer (on one of the world’s most advanced compilers, no less) in such a short time and with amazing support from my supervisors and peers–including the ‘compiler guys’ who were remarkably tolerant of me getting into ‘their’ code before they even knew me.

He also mentioned a supportive manager, a highly cohesive and friendly team, a tremendous amount of technical growth, and the freedom to spend the time to research the right solution to a problem. Individually, none of these things are terribly unusual to see in a company, but perhaps they’re not often seen all in one place.

Was Convex my favorite job? Actually, my all-time favorite job was as a temporary laborer with the Moving and Hauling department at the University of North Texas. You want a sense of accomplishment? Move 300-pound desks upended on a dolly single-handedly down three flights of stairs. I felt a real, concrete sense of accomplishment from that. But as far as bit-twiddling goes, Convex ranks right up there. After all, I haven’t talked to anyone from Moving and Hauling since I left that assignment. If they were to shut down the Moving and Hauling department, I doubt I’d shed a tear. Plus Moving and Hauling didn’t have any supercomputers for me to play with. So I save a special place in my memories for Convex.

Originally published in the Tejas Software Consulting Newsletter, v3 #2, April/May 2003