DECcie.

Late summer 1990. The kitchen of our home in Erenkoy. I am holding a rejection letter from the company I want more than any company in the world.

My mother reads it and nods. She is not being cruel. She is being a banker, and bankers read documents for what they say. You did not graduate, she tells me. No degree, no chance. This is normal.

I remember exactly what I answered. No. They will choose me. I am very good and I will be selected. I keep my hope and you will see.

I had evidence of my ability. Five years in machine rooms had given me that. What I had no evidence of was that their system would recognise it. Two other rejections already sat in a drawer, one from a construction giant and one from the computing arm of the biggest holding in the country. I had left university without a diploma. What I had was a certainty I could not put down.

Within days the phone rang again.

You have to understand what the map looked like. In those years IBM was not a company. It was THE company by being #1. The big university nodes of Turkey, Ege, Yildiz, ITU, ODTU, Istanbul, Anadolu, ran on IBM mainframes, System 370 architecture end to end. The map was blue. The country's connection to the world's academic network ran through Ege University and the men who ran it were IBM men to the bone. I called them the pro-IBM guys, and in fairness they had earned it. The EARN network itself ran on IBM's RSCS/NJE protocol suite. Their success was deserved. I still could not stand it.

Bogazici was different, and I was shaped by that difference. Our machine room ran a CDC Cyber when everyone else ran IBM. Bilkent, the other exception, ran something else again. We were the outliers on the map, and I liked being an outlier. It was in my blood all the way. And let me be fair to IBM here, because they earned their place and my quarrel was never really with them. I was anti-IBM because I was young and restless and I wanted the other side of whatever map everyone else was standing on. It was not logical. It was not rational. It was the way anyway. I was anti-IBM before I ever met UNIX. The instinct came first. The philosophy arrived later and found the seat already warm.

Then the brochures started appearing on the centre's tables, sometime around 1989. Digital Equipment Corporation. DEC VAX computers, all shiny, the confident number two circling the empire. I had touched DEC iron once already, a small PDP minicomputer that passed through the centre, but the brochures promised another class of machine entirely. And DEC was already in our building. The university was renovating its whole network and DEC's products stood on the open side of every argument, Ethernet against IBM's token ring, open standards against lock-in. Bogazici chose Ethernet, coaxial cable crawling through the campus. The challenger's wires ran through my university before I ever ran through the challenger's door.

Then the computer centre bought a VAX, and the VAX needed to join the academic network, and the software that connected it was called JNET, and somebody had to administer it. I was the keeper of the machines. It fell to me the way everything fell to me in those years, because I could not stand to see a thing stopped.

After the archaic plumbing of the old mainframe, the VAX was day and night. Speed, reliability, manageability. A small machine that behaved like a serious one. For months I worked side by side with DEC's systems and networking teams, and somewhere in those months a sales manager named Mehmet Demirel started watching the long-haired student who would not go home.

There was an open role at DEC. Nothing glamorous. A localisation expert for All-in-1, their office automation product. I wanted it the way you want a door, not a room.

My director at the computer centre wrote me a reference letter I have never forgotten. A professor from the psychology department whose research I had supported put my name in front of DEC's HR manager. I wrote the first CV of my life on an Apple Macintosh, and I believe I still have it somewhere in my paper archive, one page of a boy translating five years of machine rooms into sentences a company might respect.

I had my interview with a lovely woman named Leyla, Turkish by origin, Australian by upbringing, who ran the hiring with a warm accent and a quick eye. It went well. I felt it went well.

Then the rejection came, and my mother read it in the kitchen, and I said what I said.

I cannot tell you why the phone rang again. I never asked. Within days I was invited back for more interviews, three of them, three completely different examinations of the same boy. Dogan interviewed me with a pen, drawing as I spoke, branches and nodes spreading across his paper. I had never seen anything like it. Interesting drawing, I told myself. It was the first mindmap of my life, and it was drawn about me, by the man deciding my future. I have been drawing my life in maps ever since. Mehlika interviewed me like an elder sister checking whether the new boy would survive the family. And Ozlem, the HR director, ran something closer to a psychological test, at the end of which she looked at my very long hair, my beard, my moustache, and said something careful. I committed on the spot to tidy my hair and beard if chosen.

I was chosen. I cut the hair.

Sometime later I learned the truth behind the door. They needed a second UNIX person, and Mehmet Bey needed a UNIX presales man for his team, and the long-haired boy had a reputation. The localisation role had been the door on paper. The UNIX need was the door in truth, and I suspect it is also why the phone rang again. Turkey's UNIX world was a small country then and I had been one of its noisier citizens. The national UNIX user group was young and I volunteered at everything it did. At one of its events the vendors came as sponsors and each brought its own UNIX machine to show off, HP and NCR and the rest of the rival tribes, each speaking its own dialect of the same religion. I connected all of them into one network and built the demos that made them talk to each other, UNIX to UNIX, brand to brand, in front of the whole community. Nobody had asked me to. It was the Bogazici machine room instinct wearing a visitor badge. The empire had its men. The challenger, it turned out, had been watching for one of its own.

no. they will choose me. i am very good and i will be selected.

The office was in Mecidiyekoy, near the football stadium, two floors of a bank building. I walked in and understood immediately that I had left the country I knew. It was the kind of office that makes you feel you work for a space company. Modern, high tech, and in the middle of it a data centre behind a great glass window, a VAXcluster humming inside like an engine room you were allowed to admire but not disturb, demo machines lined up beside it waiting for the next customer. VAXstations running VMS on desks, Ultrix workstations beside them. I had spent my student years breaking into machine rooms. Now I stood in front of one built to be looked at, and my badge opened the door.

The people wore dark suits and carried great degrees. Everyone was older than me. Everyone had graduated from somewhere serious, many more than once, and most had arrived from serious companies before this one. I was the nerd and the dropout of the floor, twenty-two, with a reference letter and a haircut. Nobody, not once, made me feel it.

They gave me a desk with a VT320 terminal on it, amber phosphor, an old friend from the university machine room. They gave me an All-in-1 account, the company's office automation system, mail and calendars and documents in one place, and though the term did not exist yet it became the first productivity system of my life. I have been rebuilding it in every tool I have touched since. They gave me an Ultrix workstation running the X Window System, a machine most of the country had never seen. And they gave me access to something called VTX, the company's internal information service. An information vault, company wide, world wide, effectively infinite. Product knowledge, engineering notes, competitive analysis, the accumulated brain of a hundred thousand people, and all of it one screen away from a boy whose whole childhood hunger had been access. I recognised it instantly for what it was. I have spent my whole life since building vaults like it for myself. I started reading and did not stop for four years. Day and night I uploaded that company into my brain.

We had no PowerPoint. We had transparency projectors and sheets of acetate, and whatever you could not buy you drew by hand. A colour printer was a rumour. All the creativity lived in basic tools, and the basic tools taught you more than the rich ones ever did.

And there were the people. Mehlika, the senior of the team, structured and motherly at once, officially my mentor and unofficially my first angel sister. When I drowned, and a new boy in that ocean of information drowned regularly, she was the one who decided what I needed to know next and made sure I knew it. Nur, knowledgeable and systematic, who could take a mess and hand it back to you as a method. Yaprak, so pure and warm at heart she could seem naive, and underneath it the discipline and structure that made her the heart of the financial services team. Leyla of the funny Turkish and the Australian childhood, powerful under all the jokes, in charge of Turkish localisation, which we all agreed was the best joke in the building. And Suzan, who worked with Leyla on localisation and had grown up in the USA, so the joke had a sequel. Turkish localisation went to whoever had been raised farthest from Turkish :) My angel sisters. That is not a phrase I invented for this page. It is what they were called in my head from the first month. They fed me information when I was stuck, invited me to every lunch so I would never be the new boy eating alone, walked me into rooms I had no rank to enter, introduced me to everyone on every occasion until the whole company knew the dropout by name. And they always protected me like angels whenever my inexperience steered me toward a stupid mistake.

Around us sat the whole small country of DEC Turkey. Zuhal, our group's executive assistant, who ran our manager's world with a competence I have measured every executive assistant against since, and who was kind to me from day one, which mattered more than she knew.

And the manager himself. Dogan. From Switzerland, German educated, German in discipline, and a title the office used with real affection: Herr Baser. A remarkable human being. Structured in everything, warm underneath it, demanding in the way that builds people rather than spends them. Our roads joined again years later when he was my manager once more in my AT&T days, and later still, when I was in tough times looking for a job, it was Dogan who carried my name through his network and opened the next door for me. I can never pay that debt. My first manager, and one of the best managers of my whole life. May he rest in peace.

i was the nerd and the dropout of the floor. nobody, not once, made me feel it.

My territory was manufacturing, retail and services, and manufacturing was UNIX country. My team proposed UNIX everywhere it could stand. Which meant my war, from the first month, was the old war. Us against IBM.

The battle I remember is a government manufacturing giant in Ankara. A major tender for new systems, IBM on the other side of the table proposing their AS/400 world, with the RS/6000 already in their bag. Their IT department was full of management trainees from ODTU, very smart, very young, all theory and no scars. So I flew to Ankara again and again and I taught. Open systems. UNIX. Why a machine that speaks everyone's language beats a machine that speaks only its maker's. The dropout stood at the board and trained the graduates, and I loved every minute of it.

They designed their own benchmark methodology, including but not limited to pure tests written in C and databases simulating real world workloads, and they wanted to watch the tests run with their own eyes. There was no practical way to send results over a network, and they would not have trusted remote results anyway. So I prepared the environments, tuned everything that could be tuned, ran the benchmarks around the clock in Istanbul on our proposed DECsystems, then flew to Ankara to run them again live in front of the committee, run after run, requirement after requirement.

One night after testing I reached the airport too late for any sane boarding. This was another century and the plane was waiting with its doors open. I ran across the tarmac to the aircraft, up the stairs, they shut the door behind me and started the engines. We rolled before I found my seat.

We won. We beat the empire on results and on professionalism in every response. A government tender has many tough and strict rules and the whole machine of DEC Turkey moved together. It was total teamwork, and it was one of the proudest wins of my life. Somewhere in my archive there is a photograph of me with Taner, the commander of our Ankara front, taken right after we won, two men grinning like boys.

Here is the part I could not have known. Those young trainees I trained scattered as the years passed, and many of them landed at Oracle. Sixteen years later I joined Oracle and found them there, senior now, scarred now, my colleagues and to this day my friends. Nothing you give a smart young person is ever lost. It just changes buildings.

nothing you give a smart young person is ever lost. it just changes buildings.

Not every assignment came dressed as an honour. We sold Uniplex, an office automation package running on our Ultrix systems, to a bank in Ankara, and someone decided I would go there and deliver two weeks of training to their IT organisation. I had never delivered a training in my life. Not on Uniplex, not on anything. I protested to my manager with everything I had. I lost. I went to Ankara angry.

It became one of the best things I did in those years. The training worked, the bank was happy, and I trained one of their own people as a trainer so the knowledge would keep walking after I left. I enjoyed working with that bank for years afterwards.

There is one more thing I owe that visit. Since my university years I had owned one winter coat, an army-issued khaki with a large belt, so old and worn and torn that no one with a choice would have worn it. I wore it over my business suit because I was not earning enough for a new one. One of our own people in DEC Ankara, his name is Makul, saw it, went home, and brought me his own winter jacket, at least for the duration of my visit. Maybe to protect me from Ankara's harsh winter. Maybe to save me from shame in front of a respected customer. He never said which. To this day I do not forget it, and I appreciate him still, for saving me and keeping me warm through those cold days with his own coat.

And I discovered Ankara itself. The state teams had their own culture, different from Istanbul's speed and noise. More patience in the room. More courtesy between colleagues. More respect inside their own ranks, and more humanity. I have compared the two cities all my career and Ankara's teams always held that quiet advantage, and my respect for them is full to this day. The assignment you resist is sometimes the one that builds you. I have retold myself that lesson many times, and I have resisted many assignments since anyway.

One memory from those years has no lesson in it, only weight. Around 1993 we hired two people, a young woman and a young man, younger even than me. A short while later something moved in the corporation, somewhere far above our floor, worldwide, and they were let go. Nothing our management could do. I watched it happen and I was sorry in a way I did not have words for yet. It was the first time I saw the dark side of corporate life, the reality underneath the space-company glass. The corporation is a machine. Even the best one. I would learn that again, from closer up, more than once in the decades ahead. That day I only learned that it existed.

My first trip abroad in my life was Paris, sent by DEC for training. First passport stamp, first visa, first everything. I was the boy who had never crossed a border, and a corporation bought the ticket. I delivered my part well. My presentation craft was already becoming a weapon, and in the age before slides I made animations out of transparency sheets, layering acetates one over another on the projector so a diagram could build and move in front of the room. You could not download anything then. You made it, or it did not exist. Today the tools are infinite and almost free. Sometimes I miss how scarcity forced us to invent.

And Paris held family. My uncle, the philosopher of our house library, the man whose French books I grew up staring at without reading, lived there with his wife and their twin babies. On the first business trip of my life I sat in his home, the family's anarchist hosting the family's new company man, and neither of us knew which of us had escaped.

Geneva came later, in 1993, and it became a habit of my life. The occasion was the DEC and Microsoft Windows NT Alpha Software Developers Forum, because by then the Alpha machines were mine locally and the new operating system on them was becoming mine too. The forum itself has faded the way meetings do. The trip I remember completely.

I landed at Geneva airport with no car reservation and no credit card, because in those years I had none. A passport and a thick fold of Swiss franc cash. I did not even need a car for Geneva. I needed it because that same week DECUS, the DEC User Society, was gathering down the lake in Montreux and I wanted to drive to it. One trip, two birds. The AVIS desk asked for the card. I put the cash on the counter instead. The agent studied my passport and told me her own country was a neighbour of mine. She consulted her manager and handed me the keys to an Opel Vectra fastback, which in those years carried the prestige of a Mercedes. In the streets of Geneva the radio played What's Up by 4 Non Blondes. To this day, whenever I hear that song, I feel a happiness no other song has ever given me. Then I drove along Lac Leman past Lausanne to Montreux, water on my right the whole way.

I fell for Geneva permanently on that trip and the city never gave me a reason to take it back. I returned dozens of times over the decades and it always received me the same way. The water jet standing over the lake. Cafe de Paris. The friendly restaurants up on the hills. The train station, the chestnuts, and a city you can cross entirely on foot, which for a lifelong walker is the highest compliment a city can earn. The airport had two exits then, a Swiss door and a French door, and I learned the French door early, Ferney-Voltaire on the other side of it, and once I drove down to Annecy just because the map said it was lovely, and the map was right.

A world that still ran on trust and face. You could run across a tarmac to a waiting plane. You could rent a car with cash, a passport and a neighbour's trust.

By then I was no longer only the second UNIX man. I was the local owner of the Alpha machines, the fastest RISC processors in the world at that hour, and I had become one of the first people in the country to hold the Windows NT beta developer kit, and not on an ordinary PC. NT running on the Alpha chip, the new operating system on the new silicon, the future twice over on one desk. I paid for my own training on it, and I will come back to that. I knew our OSF/1 UNIX deeply. And I knew VMS well through Pathworks, the software that stitched PCs seamlessly into servers, the desktop world and the data centre world shaking hands. Three operating systems lived in one head. I did not know it yet, but one of them was a door.

you made it, or it did not exist.

Here is how much I believed in that third operating system. I paid for my own training on it. Course fees, flights, hotel, my own leave days, my own money, once all the way to London for a Windows NT hardware developers course. It was not cheap at all. Nobody sent me. I sent me. I had bought my own ticket to a frontier, and frontiers have a way of noticing who paid their own fare.

Ozlem, our former HR director, had left DEC to open her own headhunting firm. One day she called me to her office and said a name. Microsoft. They needed a systems engineer for Windows NT and the servers around it, and there might not have been five hands in the country that had actually touched NT. I interviewed with her and then with a director representing the country management, a foreigner whose nationality I no longer remember. The offer was a lot of money, far beyond my DEC salary. I accepted immediately.

Then, back at DEC, Emre called me to his office. Emre was the most respected consultant in the company, one of the men who had built DEC Turkey itself, by then running its PC business. I walked in with no clue. He told me he knew I had accepted a position at Microsoft. I was shocked. I had told nobody at DEC. Then he told me how he knew. He was becoming Microsoft Turkey's country manager. Microsoft was taking three of us from DEC in one reach: Emre to run the country, another Leyla to run technical solutions, and me to be the sole systems engineer of the core server product. A dream team, lifted whole from the challenger's office.

And then I did the thing I still turn over in my hands thirty years later. My mentor in the sales team heard I was leaving and became protective. The truth was that DEC had been treating me as the junior I officially was. Modest salary, thin fringe benefits next to what the other consultants enjoyed, the grade table blind to what I actually carried. He promised to fix all of it at once if I stayed, and he did. Salary, benefits, level, prestige, everything, approved overnight. The company that could not promote me promoted me in a week, for the oldest reason in the world.

I weighed it the way a frightened man weighs. DEC was the leader of everything I could see, the enterprise, the networks, the operating systems, the services, the credibility in every serious machine room in the country. It was always IBM, DEC, Oracle, Sybase. Microsoft in Turkey was tiny, and in the enterprise world it was nobody, a Windows 3.1 company wrestling Novell for the office network, offering a database the market called a Sybase clone. Who respects Microsoft in a serious machine room anyway, said 1994, out loud, everywhere.

I named it fear only later. Then, I called it respect, and some of it was respect. I stayed. And I called Ozlem and took back my yes.

She was furious, and she was right to be. I had given a commitment and broken it. Whatever position it put her in, the deeper damage was mine, and I would love to tell you I never did it again. I cannot. I am not a man of perfect word. I can only tell you what breaking one costs.

The year that followed was a good year, which is the confusing part of wrong turns. I moved up into Digital Consulting as a senior member under Murat, and the work went deeper than presales ever could. Rapid application development. Message queuing systems, DECmessageQ, the information bus, machines publishing messages for other machines to consume, an idea far ahead of its hour whose descendants sit beneath event-driven systems everywhere today. Factory floors and SCADA control systems. A great project in the tobacco industry. And a place on the team wiring a car maker's factory floor into its business systems, DEC's automation on one side and the ERP on the other, and the ERP ran, life being a comedian, on IBM's AS/400. The anti-IBM boy, integrating with the empire, expertly. I was the king of development and integration and, as always, of UNIX and Alpha. The company's Services Excellence awards found my desk three years running, 1992, 1993, 1994, which is its own quiet answer to the grade table.

But I always missed it. The frontier I had said no to sat in my chest for a year. Emre did not give up. Before the year was out he offered again, and this time I said yes and kept the yes, and at the end of 1994 I walked out of the space company for the tiny one.

I had two farewells from DEC in one year, the almost one and the real one, and the real one was sadder. I do not remember the exact goodbye. I remember the mixture. Sadness, excitement, fear, and the sting of being late, because the pure NT role I had been offered first had moved on in the meantime, and I was arriving at the frontier one year after my own invitation.

i named it fear only later. then, i called it respect.

I should be honest about the other reason I left, because I promised these pages honesty. From inside the shiniest office in the country, I could feel the empire failing. Reorganisations, layoffs, products disbanded, and above all the great bet missed. The company kept insisting on VMS while NT, running beautifully on DEC's own Alpha, thundered toward everything, and it was watching the Intel wave rise without reaching for a board. DEC Turkey was thriving, because the teams were extraordinary. The corporation was dying, because the strategy was not. Great teams cannot save a bad map. I have watched that law repeat for thirty years, from every side of it. I saw it first through a glass data centre window in Mecidiyekoy.

So I left for three reasons, in this order. I saw Microsoft rising. I saw DEC falling. And I was young and restless and the money was simply great. Later I regretted refusing the first offer. Later still I regretted leaving Microsoft too early. But that is another day, another topic.

Here is what the leaving could not touch. Five years after I walked out, I walked back in. The name on the door said Compaq by then, soon it would say HP, but the people were my people and the machines were my machines, and I stayed seven more years. I count those eleven years as one company. It turns out, I did not resign from DEC in 1994. I just left like a naughty boy and came home when I was done. I have done this once more during my time in Oracle. In a working life of many companies I count two as the best in the world. The first is the one this page wears, amber, like the terminal they gave a dropout in 1990, and my Compaq and HP years belong to it, remember I count them as one. The second wears red, Oracle, and that is a matter for another day.

We had a word for ourselves, the people of that company. DECcie. It did not mean employee. It meant something closer to citizen. The citizenship survived the company, survives it still, in reunions and messages and in what we all became. If Bogazici and a professor saved my life in the years before 1990, DEC ignited it, and kept reigniting it for decades after the logo left the building.

My sons, here is the DEC lesson, and it is not one word. I worked very hard, day and night, and I never stopped being hungry, and I asked for more. I learned from everyone above me and around me, elders, managers, directors, the room itself. I was brave enough and humble at the same time, and both mattered. I owned the products as if they were mine and only I could keep them alive. And I learned the thing that separates a technician from everything I later became: the machine is never the point. The value is the point. Show a human being what a thing is worth to them. That skill carried me for four decades.

In four years I had three managers, in this order: Herr Baser, Mehmet Bey and dear Murat. Three managers, three great ones, each guiding me and showing me the way. Some people work a whole career without meeting one manager like that. I was given three before I turned twenty-seven, and my full respect and thanks stand here for each of them.

A note added later. On 9 July 2026 I learned that dear Murat, who took me into consulting, passed away two years ago. I am shocked and deeply saddened. He will be missed. May he rest in peace.

Dogan, Mehlika, Nur, Yaprak, Leyla, Suzan, Zuhal. Mehmet Bey and his super team, Ates the smartest and funniest of us, Sevki who taught me manufacturing and fought to keep me, Taner the commander with the warm heart. Murat, who took me into consulting. Emre and Ozlem, who opened the next door. Semih Bey who ran the country. Makul and his jacket. The Ankara teams, and among them Hakan, a great friend, a mentor and years later my manager in the Compaq and HP days. And more than a hundred people whose names I cannot fit on a page but whose fingerprints are on everything I have built since. Many of them are retired now. I am sure they have respawned somewhere, on full active duty, mentoring the new juniors. People like that never finish.

I was twenty-two and they let me in without a diploma.

I have been trying to be worth it ever since.

Ferhat Dilman spent four decades in enterprise technology at Digital, Compaq, HP, Microsoft and Oracle. He writes at dilman.tech. This is transmission #004 of the life thread, a memoir written for his sons.

These pages are built from his own words. Ferhat drafts first. Claude (Anthropic) interviews him one question at a time, assembles each page from his own sentences, checks what can be checked and cuts what runs long. The memories, the people and the judgments are his alone.

And these are recollections, not records. He writes them decades after the fact. Where memory fails he says so on the page instead of filling the gap. The rest stands as he remembers it.