Yesterday was my last full day in Massachusetts after 30 years. I happened to be driving through Maynard, where I saw this sign leaning against a building on the sidewalk — an old Digital Equipment Corporation display advertising “Computer Based Word Processing Systems” featuring “LIST PROCESSING.” I had to stop and take a picture!
The photos of those machines are still crisp. The signs looked like they could’ve been made last week.
DEC was once the second-largest computer company in the world, headquartered right here in Maynard in a converted mill along the Assabet River. I worked in another of their buildings on Powdermill Road many years later when it housed Stratus Technologies. You could still feel the ghosts of minicomputer glory in those hallways. DEC defined an era. Then the world moved on. The company didn’t. Compaq acquired it in 1998, and the name disappeared entirely. But the signs — literal and figurative — are still here, propped up on sidewalks, remarkably well-preserved, advertising technology that predates the internet most people know.
Thirty years is a long time anywhere. Massachusetts gave me a career, a community, and more cold and snow than any reasonable person should endure. But there’s something powerful and ironic about finding a pristine DEC sign in 2026. In some ways, I think that tells you everything you need to know about a place and its relationship with time.
To me, it was a sign.
Hype Cycles 