Mentec

» see mentec.ie as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Mentec International was founded in Ireland in 1978 by Michael Peirce, who ran it as chief executive and then as chairman until the year it was sold. It began in monitoring and control software, which in 1978 meant industrial systems, and it grew into a significant Digital Equipment reseller and OEM in Ireland. The New York Times mentioned it in 1988 in a piece about Irish austerity policy, as an example of the kind of firm the policy was supposed to produce.

The part worth a grave is what happened after DEC lost interest in its own past. The PDP-11 was finished as a product line by the late 1980s and still running in thousands of installations that could not be moved. Plant control and laboratory instrumentation were the usual cases, along with anything else where the software had been written once and had to keep working for twenty years. Mentec built the hardware those sites upgraded to, and in 1994 it bought the operating systems outright.

The PDP-11 was finishing as a product around the time I was born, and its afterlife was conducted in industrial basements, so I met it the way most engineers my age did: through SIMH, on a laptop, running an operating system whose licensing I had never thought about. The free hobbyist license that made that possible came from this company. I had no idea for years that there was an Irish address behind it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the boards ~

When the DEC J-11 chipset became available in 1982, Mentec started designing its own PDP-11 single-board computer. The M70 was developed over the next two years, a quad Q-bus module with on-board ECC memory and four serial lines. The M80 and M90 followed as refinements, and the M100 was the last of the J-11 designs, running the chipset at 19.66 MHz with up to four megabytes on board.

Then they stopped using DEC's chips. The M11 was a microcoded implementation of the PDP-11 instruction set written from scratch around a pair of Texas Instruments ALUs and a microsequencer, with an Intel i960 sitting beside it to load the microcode and handle floating point. The M1 took that implementation and turned it into an Atmel ASIC. A small Irish company had, by that point, rebuilt Digital's processor from scratch and then cast its own version into silicon, for customers who mostly wanted their 1979 software to keep running at a slightly higher clock speed.

~ what dec handed over ~

In March 1994 ownership of the RSX-11 family, RSX-11M and RSX-11M Plus among them, passed from Digital to Mentec Inc., the American subsidiary, as part of a broader agreement announced that June. RSTS/E came under Mentec's wing as well. These were not dead systems, exactly. RSX-11 was influential enough that its design shows up in VMS and from there in Windows NT, and there were sites that had no intention of migrating off it.

Mentec then did the thing it is actually remembered for. In 1997 it joined DEC in granting a free non-commercial license for RSTS 9.6 and earlier, and in May 1998 it granted the same for RSX-11M up to version 4.3 and RSX-11M Plus up to 3.0, on the SIMH emulator. Every hobbyist PDP-11 running today rests on those two grants. Whether new commercial licenses can still be bought is unclear, because the software was reportedly sold on to a limited company called XX2247 LLC and the trail stops there.

~ the newsgroup noticed first ~

On 30 November 2006 Stanley F. Quayle posted to comp.os.vms: "www.mentec-inc.com, the link to the US Mentec site, is gone. They've apparently closed their US office." He added a line that has aged into something else since: "Maybe this is a sign that PDP-11 is *really* gone..." Within the hour another poster confirmed that mentec-inc.com was serving an under-construction page while mentec.com returned a server error. That is how the company that had held the PDP-11 operating systems for twelve years announced its exit, by letting a web server stop.

Two weeks later the other half went properly. Silicon Republic reported on 12 December 2006 and the Irish Times the following morning that Calyx, run by its founder Maurice Healy, was buying Mentec's Irish and British operations for 16 million euro: 9.75 million in cash and 2.25 million in shares up front, with a further 3 million in cash and 1 million in shares due the following June. Mentec had turned over 20.1 million euro in 2005 on EBITDA of 1.5 million. Calyx shares closed down 16 cent at 1.24 euro on the news.

John Whistler, back on the newsgroup on 14 December, supplied the epitaph for the technical side: the Irish company, he wrote, had not supported PDP-11s since the late 1990s. Calyx is still trading at calyx.ie, where the word Mentec does not appear on the homepage. mentec.ie no longer resolves. mentec.com now redirects to Unit4, whose Agresso software Mentec used to resell, and which is a different company from the one buried here. mentec-inc.com answers with a 944-byte page that tries to send you to 127.0.0.1.

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