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.'"
Windows NT = VMS (sort of) (Score:4, Interesting)
I do wonder what would have happened if DEC hadn't been taken over by the dead hand of Compaq. After all, IBM still sell plenty of big iron systems and there's a definite need these days for highly reliable and secure systems - of the type DEC made - for eCommerce applications.
Rest In Peace, Mr Olsen (Score:2, Interesting)
I didn't had that much the priviledge of meeting your personnally, I only have a few memories of your very common car lost 'somwhere' on the parking lot at ZK-01 and you, just looking for it. Or spending a much-than-expected time you spent with the FS engineers setting up the systems for DECville in Cannes. Or even you fixing the washing machine of your neighbour's mother which neighbour was a DEC employee who almost had a stroke when she saw her CEO kneeled in soapy water in her basement. Obviously, you made some mistakes; refusing to consider the growing PC market, and also disregarding the Unix market. Well, the only individuals who do not make mistakes are those who do nothing. You've been a great engineer, a great boss, a great man. Have a nice flight in the wild blue. At least I can say that I had to real bosses in my life : you and Seymour. The last point you share is quite not the one I like most.
DEC scared IBM in the 80's (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember reading an article in The Economist about DEC and their VAXes in the 80's. The point was the a VAX was cheap enough that a low level executive could approve the expenditure. An IBM mainframe purchase would require approval at the top executive level of the company. IBM responded by bringing out a mini-mainframe called the 9370 as a "VAX killer," but it was a flop. The minicomputer was killed by PCs. However, IBM still makes a lot of money with their mainframes, with folks who have tons of data, and need high availability: like banks and insurance companies.
For DEC they could have gone downscale to PCs, but the profit margins are too low: it's a commodity item. IBM doesn't build PCs anymore; they sold their PC business to Lenovo. Or they could have gone upscale, to compete with IBM mainframes. In the 90's, big Sun servers were causing IBM some grief. But we all see what happened to Sun.
I like to have choice. So the more vendors that are out there, the better. When I look at the passenger airplane industry, there are only two choices: Airbus or Boeing. I would welcome more competition, from say, Japan or Russia. Russia!?!?! Well, their Soyuz is the only way to get into space now, so they could probably be able to build good passenger airplanes.
The biggest little company in the world. (Score:5, Interesting)
Happy days,
We had the easynet, Dec's internal network, and we did Notes conferencing. I remember trying to explain to people about sitting stateside, dealing with my UK email and getting blank looks. Then we had a notes conference called 'the house' where each topic was someone's room. It felt pioneering back then in the 80's.
You could ask for help on the net, and get help. Then they grew too fast and brought in middle managers who blocked innovation.
We built some great things, global systems with cluster failover, self healing networks, global sync waves, bleeding edge leading edge database technology, all on VMS which was truly elegant.
That's when I really learnt how to build stuff.
Ken used to have a stuffed beaver in his office (now now) chewing a tree, the tree represented IBM.
I remember him acknowledging his biggest commercial mistake, which was when Bell Labs offered him Unix for free if he would only support it.
Goodbye Ken
Beginnings have Ends (Score:4, Interesting)
When I went off to college I thought I'd grow up to be a physicist. I loved the science, but half way through the first semester I was discovering that physics was not working for me. Struggling with calculus I was directed to a room filled with what I thought were tv screens. They were monitors hooked to a PDP 11/45 which had just been installed at the school, replacing the IBM mainframe.
In that moment, sitting in front of that terminal and working my first program, I fell in love with computers. I loved how I could imagine something, then create it. Working on the PDP introduced me to the mini world, programming, and my career. While never knowing the man, the mind that conceived and created the DEC PDP family will be one I certainly honor and respect.
Re:Windows NT = VMS (sort of) (Score:4, Interesting)
They didn't just "hire DEC engineers". David was one of the architects of VMS, and there were serious lawsuits about the theft of copyrighted material and trade secrets, which were settled out of court. (Why do you think NT ran on Alpha chips for a long time?)
DEC thought they were better off continuing to innovate instead of trying to bring down Microsoft's law-breaking new monopoly in court. But meanwhile Intel was stealing the Alpha CPU technologies for the Pentium chip: between the loss of both of those leading edge technologies, and their less effective but still cost-effective re-unication by the thieves in the "Wintel" architectures, DEC had little left to work with.
DEC made a lot of fabulous technologies which I found useful in the lab and in industry, but they weren't good at protecting their best assets from intellectual theft, and they refused to embrace the open source approach of various UNIX and later Linux technologies, and it left them without a large enough market to continue to build such wonderful hardware.
Inspiration (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm super inspired by the math. He was 31 when he founded his company. All we ever seem to hear about are the impossible situations of being born into wealth, stalking through the ivy league, founding a government funded start-up by age 18, (having the 'rents boot the bill for) article of incorporation at age 20 and being (due to the misled, ignorant millions) in charge of some pointless "dot-com" by 23-25. Here we have an innovator who saw an inroad at a certain date -- he could have been in his 40's or 50's when it happened but he got "lucky" -- and followed it, carried through with his idea using determination and resolve, saw his vision fulfilled and had the fun he predicted he would in elbowing aside giants like IBM. It could happen to anybody! The economy doesn't need to be in the shitter. Anybody can go back to college, re-socialize, swing and actually hit the ball, sometimes out of the park. That's something that will never, ever, ever be heard of again in a country that allows itself to lapse into one (1) complete generation of Gimme-Jobber clones. We're mere fractions away from being in that exact, dire situation, and right now is probably our last chance at a strong economy with our independence intact. We have to do like Ken Olson, stop trying to "look for a job", stop trying to compete-by-rote (dislodge the 24/7 vee-dee-yo holo-game controller implant) and relearn to socialize and do sound business with integrity and grit. Our country is turning into a bunch of antisocial, passive-aggressive fucktards with chips on their shoulders and not even the brains to know what the fuck they're such douchebags for in the first place, with tarnished, discount-antique-store, silver spoons up their asses. A bunch of whiney fucking nobodies looking up to Hollywoodization as the key to all knowledge, more film-reel upstairs than just plain real.
R.I.P. Ken Olsen (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked at DEC for over a decade, in the 70's and early 80's and was there when he was forced out. The company was very much built around his charisma -- he was a big man, unassuming, but very charismatic -- and even in remote field offices, every new employee would soon know who the president of the company was, and hear a few stories about how he embarrassed one of the local sales reps by speaking too bluntly to a customer. Unless you were in sales, these were considered proof the President was a good guy, one of "us".
Once I had the good fortune to be able to visit the Mill, in Maynard, Mass, with a few others on training. On Friday when the class let out early, we wandered the complex (it was a campus of interconnected buildings), visiting the clock tower, and asking people where Ken Olsen's offices were.
Well, we found the executive offices, and tentatively asked one of the secretaries, which was Ken's. She pointed it out, and then, to our horror, picked up the phone and asked if he would come out and meet us. Son of a bitch, he did. He took the time to come out and shake our hands and speak to us lowly field employees, and he seemed as interested in meeting us as we were to meet the man himself.
When he left, it wasn't the same company. DEC had some serious marketing challenges at the time, granted, but I don't think many appreciate the technology it had. VMS in the 80s was a better operating system than any flavor of Unix, today. You could write programs with modules in C, Fortran, Cobol, Basic, or just about any other language, mix and match, and the architecture supported that. VMSclusters in the 80's were far easier to configure and run, and more functional than any Unix cluster I've seen today. The Alpha architecture had legs for twenty years, maybe more.
I was sorry to hear about your passing Ken, and I know heaven has a place for you.