In the eighties I was a UNIX admin and database programmer and relied on DIGI International for terminal banks which plugged into the UNIX machine and allowed dumb terminals from companies like Wyse to be connected. For those of you who may not know, UNIX is the grandfather of Linux and back then you could run a company of 16 users on 1 MB of RAM and 50-100MB worth of hard disk!

Hard disks cost about $5,000 at the time – or about $11,000 today!

Getting back to DIGI – they are one of the few companies which was able to evolve and stay on the leading edge of the tech curve. they are now major players in the IoT and their solutions even help NASA.

My colleague Ken Briodagh has more but I didn’t want the opportunity for me to wish them Happy 30th Birthday to go by. Its an achievement – especially in the tech space to survive and thrive for multiple decades.

We should collectively acknowledge their accomplishments.

Sidebar:

It’s interesting – back in the days of UNIX, we used to read only magazines since there was no web and a piece like this could have a sidebar which isn’t 100% related to the main topic. Such is the case with what you are reading here.

I got to wondering how challenging it is for a company like IBM or HP to see their market share go to Amazon’s cloud. After all, this is the company which sells toilet paper and sex toys, yet virtually all Fortune Class companies are using it to some degree to power their organizations. Lesson: Tech innovation is rampant and if you don’t innovate, you die.