Computer Industry Mourns DEC Founder Ken Olsen 172
alphadogg writes "Kenneth Olsen, the computer industry pioneer who co-founded and led minicomputer king Digital Equipment Corp. for 35 years, died at the age of 84 on Sunday in Indianapolis. As DEC's leader, Olsen oversaw the company's epic battles vs. IBM and its mainframes for the hearts and business of IT shops – a fight DEC eventually lost as the era of fast, cheap and networked PCs took hold in the 1980s and 1990s. During its heyday, DEC's PDPs, VAXes and DECnet network technology became staples in many organizations, and today's IT industry remains filled with companies whose founders once worked at DEC or with its gear. Digital was acquired in 1998 by Compaq. Dan Bricklin, co-creator of the VisiCalc spreadsheet and DEC alum, tweeted: 'Ken Olsen is in the elite club of tech founders w/Gates & Jobs, and set the stage for them. What he did we take for granted today.'"
Olsen's own staff turned on him, and killed DEC. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ken Olsen was an engineer's engineer, and he built a company that was based on innovative engineering and run by engineers.
DEC had 64-bit computing, virtual memory and virtual address extension, and dozens of other things we take for granted today literally twenty years before the competition! I worked routinely on inexpensive 64-bit machines in the 1980s, machines that simultaneously ran TCP/IP, SPX/IPX, LAT, and DECnet on the same wires, supporting 400 end users and huge databases with less processing power than you find on an nVidia card nowadays.
Sadly, the marketing and professional management people at DEC turned on Olsen, and engineered a financial crisis that allowed his ouster. Admittedly, those people were treated badly by Olsen, who viewed salesmen as a necessary evil and never really hid his opinion that business people were less valuable that the engineers and programmers. However, the salesforce rebellion was self-defeating, because from there the company entered a death spiral, as the bean counters' failure to maintain Olsen's unique corporate culture drove the top brains away to Microsoft (see wikipedia's entry on Cutler), Intel, Sun and Oracle.
After the disastrous Microsoft settlement, and the equally disastrous tech giveaway to Intel, DEC lost software and hardware primacy, and without Olsen at the helm the ship ran aground. A sad end to a mighty force for innovation; parted out to the highest bidder.
Goodbye, Ken. You were a good man, and it was an honor to have known you; I'll never forget you.
Worked for DEC, badge #48818 (Score:5, Insightful)
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My Dad bought me a used PDP-8S, then a "straight 8" which were my first computers, a good bit before these newfangled microchips, and this is what I learned programming on, while also engineering my own peripherals. In fact, I wound up cancelling a charter subscription to Byte because they kept dissing the things, which at the time were a ton faster and better than any microchip. They were actually pretty nice machines, with a read-modify-write able to happen in one core cycle, and later when Silconix attempted a chip version, they were never able to get it as fast as the original, with that nifty Diode-Capacitor-Diode logic (which could create things like and gates where both the inputs didn't have to be there simultaneously as long as they were close enough).
I met Kenny, and he was a righteous dude, actually. The occasion was I was up in Mass taking a course on some new hardware, and talking in the company lunchroom to some Aussies at the table, who turned out to be buyers from some big retail outfit, and we were discussing the merits of this or that DEC product. At the time, the VAX was new, untested, a little flakey, and not as fast as a PDP-11/70 (particularly if the latter was maxed out) but cost more, so I steered them that way -- which would have (did) cost DEC some revenue, but they were nice guys, and it was the correct choice for them in their situation.
Kenny was standing behind me the whole time -- he'd come to the lunchroom to invite them to private talks in his office. Talk about my heart dropping into my gut -- this was my first really good job, and I'd just dissed the company's new flagship product to a very important customer, while the CEO was standing behind me.
Kenny grinned and shook my hand, and complimented me for being an honest guy, saying that was what DEC was all about, thanked me for helping promote that image! Soon after, *I* was promoted to Mid Atlantic support, one of the better jobs DEC had (free everything, expenses, flights on helicopters, full authority to make field-expedient decisions, all very nice).
That job was the basis of my career from then on. At that point I knew everyone big enough to be in computers at all (including the then-new ARPA and that crazy arpanet thing, node in Arlington) -- crap-tons of good contacts, and I never actually had to look for work ever again after that. From one beltway bandit to the next, to starting and running my own company with a nice customer list, that was what started it all.
We'll miss you Kenny, and my heartfelt condolences to the rest of the family. You weren't always right, but you were always good -- and that counts for more in my book.