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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.'"
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
Yes I have a DEC 3000 alpha server here. One of these days I want to find out if it really will make a good boat anchor. One thing I remember about the PDP 11/84s is that the electronics vastly outlasted the rubber padding inside the top cover of the CPU box. The rubber turned to dust and fell on to the backplane. This was okay until you re-seated a card, then the dust fell into the slots and you had to vacuum the whole thing out.
I have fond memories of lying prone under an 11/84 with a wire wrap tool in my hand trying to get the interrupt logic correct for a CSCI card. Of course I pulled out the leg extensions on the rack first. I'm not suicidal or anything.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Steve Jobs is Eldon Tyrell. Steve Wozniak is JF Sebastian.
I really hope that's not a reference to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. I think a lot of people would take offence at Woz being described as intellectually subnormal (a 'chickenhead' in the book's parlance).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
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.
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Ah, you're referring to Blade Runner. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, JF and Tyrell don't know each other. JF is a truck driver for a fake animal repair company, who accidentally kills a real cat because the owner calls him out thinking he's a real vet (the repair company vans look like vets' vans so the owner's neighbours won't know that the animal is fake) and he can't tell that it's real so he plugs it into the recharge socket and electrocutes it. Driving a truck is about the only job that someone with his low intellect can do, and he manages to mess that up in a way that's expensive to his employers. He can't emigrate to Mars, because chickenheads can't get a visa. He empathises with the androids because he's treated in a similar way to them by normal humans. They don't empathise with him, because they're not capable of doing so.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Compaq really killed DEC after the takeover.
We'll see what's left over from Sun in a few years, after Larry Ellison is finished with it. After the Compaq takeover, I met some former DEC employees, who were then Compaq employees, in a hotel on a business trip. After a few drinks, they had some blunt advice: "If your company gets taken over by another company, quit as soon as you can, and get a job somewhere else. Takeovers always end in tears."
I am still scratching my head over how DEC ended that way: from being the heavyweight champion in the Unix server business, to being taken over by a PC company. Maybe I'll have to Google for a good book with insightful analysis. Or if any folks here can recommend anything, I'm all ears.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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
...you're not playing with a full DEC!
PDP-10 into eternity!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
.
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!
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.
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;-)