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.'"

Comments

Windows NT = VMS (sort of)

[Dynamoo]

One unexpected legacy of the DEC years is that Windows NT is very heavily influenced by Digital's VMS OS. When Microsoft wanted to build an enterprise-ready OS, they basically hired DEC's engineers to design it for them (for example Dave Cutler). So even under the hood of Windows 7, some of that core architecture is directly influenced by DEC's work.

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.

Re:Windows NT = VMS (sort of)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

DEC scared IBM in the 80's

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.

Re:DEC scared IBM in the 80's

[Smallpond]

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.

You have forgotten the DEC Rainbow. But that's ok, everyone else has also forgoten the Rainbow.

The biggest little company in the world.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:stolen

[TheRaven64]

Nope, it was the Pentium. They eventually settled, in a deal that included Intel buying DEC's StrongARM division, which was eventually sold again to Marvell. Intel killed the Alpha by promising that Itanium would be faster and cheaper, so UNIX vendors could concentrate on the software and integration and share the CPU R&D cost by letting Intel design and produce the chips (PA-RISC died the same way).

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).

Beginnings have Ends

[Bucc5062]

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.

Inspiration

[eyenot]

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.

And remember, children: If it's not 36 bits...

[Suzuran]

...you're not playing with a full DEC!
PDP-10 into eternity!
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R.I.P. Ken Olsen

[new death barbie]

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.

Olsen's own staff turned on him, and killed DEC.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[DCFusor]

And loved it. It was a fantastic place to work (I had the DC area, then Mid-Atlantic support).
.

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.