Slashdot Mirror
Computer Industry Mourns DEC Founder Ken Olsen
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.'"
And now his soul is free...to...agh can't complete joke
Your company allowed me to play my first ever video game, Lunar Lander on the GT40 graphics terminal
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.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
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.
84 or as I prefer to say it, 124.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
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.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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
Intel stole DEC's designs to make the pentium. It's a sad world.
Compaq really killed DEC after the takeover. Such a pity because I used to refurb ex-government PCs, and I can tell you the old Digitals were WAY better than Compaqs, HPs or any other competition. Farewell to Mr Olsen, it is a shame his legacy doesn't live on in his memory.
Rest in peace Ken. Your DEC gear introduced me to computing. It changed my career path and it's enriched my life more than anything else I can think of. I wish I'd had the chance to say so in person. I still have a PDP-11 running RSX-11. I might run it for a little while this afternoon.
Jeff
Sad indeed. The first computer i ever used was a vax running vms (a model 220). I'll never forget the time i was taught how to knock other terminals offline using the phone program, or send ascii art via "facsimile". Best of times. Rest in Peace Ken.
Well -- or not really. We are still catching up in the services virtualization department. Cloud services are coming close (with about 100x..1000x as much useless bloat between the user and the iron, mind you).
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.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
Something obviously got lost in the translation to x86.
My first exposure to computer programming was on a PDP-8. Later, during summers at grad school, I was fortunate to get a job at the DEC plant in Westfield. It was a great place to work, and I was able to buy scrap parts from which I built up a video terminal which I used for several years.
I mourn the passing of the man, as well as the engineering ethos he inspired, even in far flung Reading where I worked.
Im thinking that he would be one of the last folks this would apply to.
Of course there is a problem of the shrinking number of folks that will get the reference also.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
The PDP-11 register architecture and instruction set had an elegance that you just don't see in tech any more.
It's a shame DEC didn't pioneer the PC: no-one would accuse Intel of elegance.
Back in my school days, we used to talk about the mythical VAX in hushed tones, due to its awesomeness (at least we thought so). I never really used one in anger, they were already on their way out by the time I left school and went to university, but the uni still had a VAX cluster (on which we were forced to write COBOL, which soured the experience somewhat).
I actaully have a small VAX now, something I take to vintage computing shows and use as a fileserver for a network of Sinclair Spectrums...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Ken did not seek out fame for his work. He was focused on the company and its products. I believe he had the distinction at the time as the longest reigning founder/CEO of a Fortune 1000 company. Dan is so right about his contributions being taken for granted.
brian
My grad school ran a cluster of VAX 6000s and I was lucky enough to get to work in the IT department. I wrote code for our gopher server. The cluster was so dependable that users never, in 6 years, realized that the parts of the cluster ever went down. Our system uptime was amazing - far better than any Windows cluster I've seen today despite the VMS/VAX cluster technology ending up in Windows NT.
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.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Back in the heyday of the "Massachusetts Miracle" ('80s), road signs bragged: "Route 128, America's Technology Highway". I think it started with Lincoln Labs, and MIT was the big feeder school (Harvard really came into play much later, when Zuckerman came along), but Olsen gave it the big push. Wave after wave of minicomputer and workstation startups sprung up around Route 128 and I-495 (beltways around Boston), often founded or staffed by ex-Digital engineers, starting with Data General. Many achieved substantial success, with annual revenue running into hundreds of millions or more. Lots of them adopted DEC's blueprint for success: a soup-to-nuts system with a proprietary stack of hardware and system software, maintaining backward compatibility with application software in successive generations, all the better to ensure customer lock-in. All developed in one location, or a nearby set of locations, often converted mill buildings. The staff would be mostly guys in their twenties and thirties who worked 60-100 hour weeks trying to get a big score from their stock options, often in competition with a similar venture-funded outfit down the street staffed by friends and former coworkers. The founder would be a legendary engineer's engineer who also had the vision, stamina, and leadership ability to call both the business and technical shots.
At the end of the '80s, the recession clobbered Massachusetts even worse than the rest of the country. Many tech companies went out of business, and savvy customers learned to appreciate vendors that adapted a more open architecture, pioneered by Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley. The "Technology Highway" signs quietly came down. DEC in particular was squeezed by Sun's move into server computing (the client/server paradigm was just taking hold at that time) and by increasingly powerful personal computers running Novell's Netware, IBM's OS/2, or (eventually) Microsoft's Windows NT. The PC revolution had caught Olsen as flat-footed as IBM had once been by DEC. By this time, DEC's autocratic culture had become a liability: as Lotus' non-engineer CEO Jim Manzi once remarked, DEC had a "Ken says" culture. "Unless 'Ken says' something, it doesn't get done", said Manzi. The new generation of competitors was more nimble.
...you're not playing with a full DEC!
PDP-10 into eternity!
----
@info ver
Bamboo Forest of the Lost, Eientei TOPS-20 Monitor 7.1(21733)
PANDA TOPS-20 Command processor 7.1(4453)-4
@systat
Tue 8-Feb-2011 07:43:09 Up 1958:51:50!
0+9 Jobs Load av 0.03 0.01 0.01
No operator in attendance
I was fortunate enough to meet the man a few times during my short stay at DEC in the 80's. He was very gracious, intelligent and committed to the company. Ken was on the Ford Motor Company Board of Directors so he came to Detroit fairly often. I remember at one point he gave Henry Ford II a Rainbow PC and one of the guys I worked with had to go install it at the Duce's mansion. Henry gave Ken an Escort station-wagon which he drove for several years. Rest in Peace Ken.
'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.'"
It's true. even open source started on or because of gear DEC gear. BSD in '74 on a PDP, GNU in the 80s because of a PDP model being discontinued, TeX was born on a PDP, X Windows has its roots in project Athena (with which DEC was involved in) and made its first appearance on the MicroVAX, which in turn also introduced Kerberos, and was a huge influence on thin computing, LDAP and even instant messaging.
UNIX was originally developed on/for a DEC PDP-7. VAX gave birth to VMS (VMS in turn has the basis for Windows NT's design). The PDP-11's design is cited as being what influenced Motorolla's 68k, C was written for the sake of taking advantage of the PDP-11's functionality, digital music was born on the PDP-1, The Alpha EV5 was the first microprocessor to employ a large L2 cache, the EV7 was the first to have an on-chip menory controller, .
The magnitude of DEC contributions is indeed taken for granted. Olsen will be missed.
As a former employee of DEC ('79-'95), I can tell you it was a great company to work for. DEC's overall management philosophy was and is still the standard I measure other managers to, and sadly, most can't even compare. Did Ken Olsen make mistakes? Sure he did. He didn't put a lot value in marketing his products, and it cost him dearly. And DEC *was* building PCs before they were in vogue. But again, they weren't marketed (and really weren't aimed at home users), but the Robin, DECmate, Pro350 were all PCs built before their time. RIP Ken.
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.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Back in the late 1960's as an undergraduate Rambling Wreck I took a class that gave me hands on access to a PDP8i. It was my first exposure to assembly programming (I still have the books) and after that I was hooked. I am retired now, after a pretty good 40 year run. But I am still learning new languages and platforms, just because I am STILL hooked. Thanks Mr. Olsen for an interesting life. It has been fun.
I cut my teeth on PDP 11-70s and a Vax 11/780 running BSD back in '83. The Vax had a sky floating point board and custom wire wrapped 32 bit frame buffer called the BB (Big Buffer). Dec hardware running BSD was a great development environment.
i spent 13 years writing about dec in decpro and rstspro magazines.
i often was critical. ken never failed to greet me and was ever gracious.
i think of him rolling out his g4 at bedford.
fare foward, ken
dave mallery
Thank you for giving us a shoulder to stand on.
I played my first game of Dungeons & Dragons at the DEC office in Quad Cities, Iowa.
It was quite the experience for a little kid.
DEC had been working on the Alpha for a number years, from all reports a "world beater" in high performance chip. DEC was sold to Compaq which was bought by HP. HP had a close relationship with Intel, which was working their own high end chip the Itanium. By all reports the Alpha was much better than the Itanium. HP transferred the Alpha technology to Intel in exchange for some deals on chips and marketing. That's the last anyone heard of the Alpha.
Meanwhile the Itanium, dubbed the iTanic, sank. Here an article from VC on the latest developments on the iTanic front: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/05/microsoft_pulls_plug_itanium/
Bummer.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
DEC 10, VAX, PDP, DEC-FORTRAN, DEC-COBOL, "Batch Processing", "Menu Driven Systems", "Modular Programming" once graced my resume. And all because of DEC.
While you can criticize Windows all you want for the baroque Win32 API and it's assorted GUI and userland tools, there's no denying that the kernel itself is quite robust. In fourteen years (since NT 4.0), I've never seen a Windows machine crash that wasn't due to faulty hardware or bad third party drivers, a lord knows I've seen, used and setup a LOT of Windows boxen. For the amount of features and hardware it supports, I think it is an achievement that deserves more respect than it gets.
That's where I recognize the DEC engineering talent.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
Something obviously got lost in the translation to x86.
Mr Cutler's departure was not seen as a bad thing by everyone inside Digital. He did not always agree with the need for backwards compatibility and the need for old applications and peripherals to remains working despite upgrading the OS.
You've obviously not flown on a russian made Tupolev plane... I flew in many of these in China in the 80's (before china started buying real planes from boeing), and let me tell you I'm glad to be alive...
Although I'm a boeing fan, I'll fly on Airbus. But give me a brazilian embraer or a canadair/bombardier over any russian made plane
By the time Vaxen were on their way out, most schools I knew converted them over to run BSD-Unix...
Using them to read net-news and coding for them was just fine (and sure beat COBOL on VMS). People even ran emacs on it (although I'm a VI guy myself)...
I worked for DEC from 1977 till 1980. I left for warmer pastures (took a job in Florida) it would be a few more years before DEC would hit hard times. I think their biggest mistake was in not building a PC like machine. The Rainbow was just a "me too" machine, and not very well marketed. They could have boxed up their 11/70 on a chip (JAWS) into a killer machine that would have blown the AT away, and later on the VLSI VAX as well, but desktop versions of these super-minis never saw the light of day. Their upper and lower end rotted out from them leaving their networking and storage products as the only crown jewels (which Compaq purchased them for).
The Mill was a wild place to work. With multiple buildings on a hillside interconnected by bridges you could walk out of the 3rd floor on one building and into the 2nd floor on the next. They were constantly reworking the 100 year old brick structures. One weekend they were sandblasting 100 years of grime from the walls in our building and forgot to tell the lab personal about the plans. If we had known the computers would have been shut down and wrapped in plastic to protect them. We came back on Monday to find the disk drives choked with blasting sand and brick dust with all the heads crashed! It was a good thing everything had just been backed up onto magtape!
The millpond was referred to as an old computer graveyard. Rumor had it that someone had tossed a PDP8 and an old PDP1 out the window into the pond years ago. Maybe someday the pond will be drained and the old computers will emerge from the mucky bottom.
Ken Olsen might have been CEO but he never drove a fancy car. He came to work in an old VW Beetle while I was working there. Several times someone got called to the security office for taking Ken's parking spot by accident!
I was way, way behind in 10th grade math, so my Dad hired a local college professor to tutor me. This was in 1972. The professor set me up with an account on the college's time-sharing hookup to Long Island University's DEC PDP-8. I spent many a night over at the college sitting at the ASR-33 teletype working on programs I dreamed up in Dartmouth BASIC. When I wanted to make a long program listing, I'd get it started, then run around the outside of the building a couple of times while it chugged away at 10 CPS. When I got home I'd unroll the listing onto the living room floor and lie down and debug/improve the program by making notes in the margins.
Thanks Dad, and thanks Dr. Melter.
.
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.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I remember at work (1980s) of a kneehigh DEC machine with a plexiglass pyramid on top, as if this machine had mystical powers. Most likely pyramid was to prevent people from stacking paperwork on top which could eventually smother the DEC causing it to overheat.
Ironic to see this article after another, "Sony Lawyers Expand Dragnet, Targeting Anybody Posting PS3 Hack." Illustrates back in 20th century made their fortunes building more powerful machines in order to make good money. Now it seems they want to make their fortunes sueing the hell out of the masses.
mfwright@batnet.com
DEC made mid-size computers that individual labs or departments could afford, thus being independent of suffocating central corporate or university computing centesr. And UNIX was the favorite operating system of DEC PDP-11s and Vaxen because it was easier to use and modifiable. It was a very similar hacker's environment as Linux would became later for personal computers.
DEC was ten great years of my life. Ken built a company from nothing into something huge, then ran it into the ground. Technological highlights like networking (including a mobile pre-cursor to WiFi), StrongARM, and Alpha; marketing tragedies like "Unix is snake oil" and an unswerving allegiance to VMS. Let's not remember him for funding the VAX 9000.
Ken built an international engineering-driven culture of people that firmly believed in "doing right for the customer" and would go out of their way to get it done. You could pick up the phone and dial strangers for help and more often than not they would come through without politics or me-first posturing - an attitude that came straight from the top. I really miss it.
The architecture lives on at http://simh.trailing-edge.com/
You can't fight in here - this is the war room!
Warning: Long Winded, and more about personal catharsis than insightful commentary. My mom worked at DEC and the DEC portions of Compaq and HP for a little over 20 years. She was one of the first women to be a field engineer in the company and she always made it a point to let everyone know that at DEC she was treated like an Engineer, not a pair of tits that knew how to program. Growing up, there was always a terminal and a few microcomputers in the house. My very first e-mail address was a digital! address and the highlight of many a day was getting to log in on the VT220 for my allotted hour to check messages, play ADVENT, and dick around in my little shell account. It seemed like my mom was always at work, and because she was a single mother I spent maybe 30 hours a week in the office with her, raiding the supply closet for mechanical pencils and post-it notes, and playing directly on the console. One time, I e-mailed her boss complaining that she wasn't home enough and if I was going to be in the office so much they needed to put some better games on Skippy (the host name of the VAX where the handful of games were kept). I knew his first name was Ken, and went to do a wildcard search for last names in the directory, but ended up mailing every Ken in the company, including Ken Olsen. When she started getting replies to the effect of "Why the hell is your kid mailing me and Ken Olsen about your working hours, and why the hell does he have access in the first place" she rightly freaked out and started looking for another job. About a week after that, I'm in the office, banned from touching anything even remotely resembling a computer, when ...the call... came. Ken Olsen himself called my mom, talked to her for about 30 minutes. Then he asked to speak with me. I remember he sounded like my grandfather, very gentle and kind, but with that air of wisdom and authority. He asked me why I mailed, how many hours I spent in the office, and some general questions about Star Wars and computers. He told me that I needed to be careful when e-mailing and that he hoped I would remember to be a careful programmer, comment my code, and be extra nice to my mother.
The end result is that she got a week off of work, paid, and the next time I got to log in to Skippy there were about two dozen new games.
So many memories of that place.
My mom passed away about 6 years ago, still working for HP. She was giving a presentation, and what I heard is that she complained of a pain in her chest but finished her Powerpoint, took her seat, and left. I only bring this up, because her funeral had several enormous flower arrangements, with one coming from HP. After the funeral, as I was taking them down, I noticed that someone had tucked a vase in to the arrangement. It was maroon with the familiar DIGITAL logo and it held a faded blue silk rose printed with the IBM logo. The vase was a give-away that DEC used to tweak IBM trade show folks. As you walked in to a conference IBM people would stand at the door giving away blue silk IBM roses, the DEC people would stand right behind them and hand you a DIGITAL vase.
Rest in peace.
I just sold off my Rainbow 100 last year, to a collector who marveled at the fact that it was still working.....and it had both MS-DOS 1.0 and CPM disks.
Learned to program on Ultrix, which of course ran on VAX hardware....it was good for its time, and as much as VMS was good, I think a real focus on *nix would have catapulted DEC into the stratosphere.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
VMS would not be rocksolid if anyone could install it on their dads VAX, put together of parts purchased on a yard sale, thats what NT have to run on.
I never met him, but I always admired the way he put values ahead of pure profit.
As a Field Grunt in Field Service I always was told to do what's right for the customer. In these days of call centers, untrained support personnel reading from scripts, software that requires a paid support contract to fix security defects in the releases... or to upgrade firmware which used to be free for buying the hardware (Oracle, HP).
We're in a world which views the customer as a consumer and pushes profit ahead of everything else.
VAX/VMS was a solid well supported product and Vaxclusters were revolutionary.
Ken Olsen made mistakes... but he never forgot he was an engineer first. Here's to the techie's techie who valued more than just the bottom line.
He missed the Unix boat and was late to the "Open Systems" camp -- but the folks at DEC put an awful lot of source stuff up for download on decwrl and market-20 on their dime before there were web browsers and download.com.
Here's to AltaVista, DECnet and BasicPlus. Here's to distributed computing to the desktop.
They just cease processing with a Failed UniBus Address Register (FUBAR) = 17777777
Any company that wrote it's training manuals with variables of $FOO and $BAR was my kind of company
- TTL
P.S. I still dream in TECO. Not that wussy VTEDIT full screen stuff... but writing programs in TECO and executing in MUNG. My therapist says I have closure issues;-)
Anyone ever got that message, on their VT100 term?
11-PDP EHT EDISNI DEPPART MA I, PLEH
Even being behind iron curtain all along, we knew and had due respect for Digital, and Ken as the main man there. Have started myself with Assembler and soon C on PDP-11 clone - yep, that was, what we had there for us at the time. And then VAX-11 with VMS: what an architecture to respect. Much of influence, fundamental example of attitude to computing engineering. Humane in engineering - that's what it was about. Magic, only real man can do.
I don't care about world being spoiled by soon-to-follow commodity of computing, cheapness of it, that undermined very arena for Digital products. For real engineer it is hardly avoidable to remember outstanding quality of that - real - engineering as opposed to competing on cheapness. As long, as I remain professional in this industry, my preferences are set by this company, built by this man.
12 bit words if I remember used OCTAL not HEX also if I recall. Then the PDP-8's and PDP-11's, Especially the 11's were super machines, so much so there was a HEATHKIT version... sigh...what a COOL time!
best editor evah! and VMS was best dev. environment ever: what he said about mix&match. and don't 4get layered logicals: made builds (almost;-) painless;-) and back in the mid-late '80s, i telecommuted via dialup, coding for the yuk43 (iirc: the navy's hardened version of the VAX, it had beveled corners & lifting lugs to fit it thru sub hatches;-)
and of course the russkies chose the VAX to knock off;-)
Something obviously got lost in the translation to x86.
KESU. The four-tier address/command relationship responsible for VAX/VMS' armour-plated security. Intel couldn't support it, thus x86 user mode programs were writing to places they well nigh shouldn't. Welcome to the world of buffer overrun exploits.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
It's not too late to resurrect VMS
"VMS (Virtual Memory System) operating system is available only on VAX, Alpha and Itanium processors, and in spite of its undeniable qualities, its future seems uncertain. FreeVMS project tends to coding an operating system under GPL lincense according to VMS system specifications."
http://www.freevms.net/
CPU Wars
I was with DEC from 1979-1985, I think (I'm sure about the 1985 end, the other is close), first in field software support, then in LCG Software Engineering in Marlboro. Badge 91974, cost center 341 :-). Though I did some VAX support, mostly I was a TOPS-20 guy. Command and filename completion come from there, and that's where I first met and married Emacs (RMS's ITS Teco implementation, running under the Incompatibility package on TOPS-20). I think it was also the only system ever sold as a pre-configured ARPAnet system, just install it and go.
The VAX and VMS were weird. There were bits in the hardware designed by people who still thought memory was terribly expensive (and which cost a lot of performance, or at least made pipelined versions very hard to build), but lots of things in the software assuming memory was plentiful. There were good original things, and then there were things markedly inferior to what the company had done in other products for years (*cough* virtual memory *cough*). Cutler came out of RSX-11M, and I was a RSTS guy in that generation, so we were fated to never really agree. I laughed at the joke that Cutler leaving DEC for Microsoft raised the average IQ of both companies.
DEC had been making single-user computers for ages; lots of the PDP-8s were used that way, and a good many 11s. Plus they were the leader in time-sharing, which is "single-user" computing in many senses. But to try to fight for the PC market, they had to go down in price and commit to the lower margin -- which would kill them if the market didn't take off spectacularly. And it wasn't that obvious, at first, that it would. Hindsight is much clearer. Companies are almost never good at undercutting their own premiere products; they nearly always let somebody outside take care of that for them, and then try to react when it's too late.
I've still got a DEC (Minneapolis office) mug on my desk at work.
One word I would hate to read in my own obituary: "elite".
Strange how the passing of time changes history. My recollection of the 80s does include a marvelous VMS OS but only 32 bit VAXen, the Alpha project was slow to develop and didn't hit the streets until the 90s were well underway. Cutler leaving for MS, the result of PRISMs cancellation seemed more an artifact of our inability to resolve the CISC/RISC, VMS vs Ultrix ad naseum debates. I loved working for DEC, named my youngest son, Miles Maynard, but we lacked a clear vision at the time KO was forced out. Literally made me sick to hear the news at the time and of course, subsequent decisions by the board did little to inspire improved confidence.
Ken Olsen quite literally set the stage for the engineer as a significant force in society, or maybe he reinvented the renissance. Either way, he was a source of personal inpiration for me and his passing represents a landmark in the history of computing.
His tenure as the spiritual and technical leader for the Massachsetts Miracle always reminded of the often mangled quote by Fiorello LaGuardia, "I don't make many mistakes, but when I do, they're real beauts".