One of the things I ran across yesterday was a notice that Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corp ("DEC") had passed away on Sunday. He single handedly started what became the mini-computer revolution; when all of that period’s computers were housed in dedicated rooms with raised floors, miles of cabling, mag tapes, and 5 MB disk drives the size of ginormous washing machines, the little minis DEC came out were the "cute and cuddly" alternatives to the Big Iron of the day (IBM, and the "7 dwarfs: Sperry Univac, Honeywell, and the rest of I can’t remember).
I was there in the early 80s and had decided that I wanted to do more than just program for living, even thought I had literally gotten my start in high school on one of these babies (after the Olympus 101 desktop calculating machine) – a PDP – 8e:
BASIC, FOCAL, FORTRAN, and assembler. I carried around REAMS of rolled yellow paper from the Teletype terminals and tightly wound coils of "low speed" paper tape that served as that time’s thumbdrive (heck, that PDP had 16K of RAM – and it was REAL MAGNETIC CORE MEMORY!). Playing with that front panel was fun – other than the math teacher, I was the only one in the building that knew the sequence settings for the cold boot (which then was the Loader for the high speed paper tape reader for the Loader for the disk).
However, DEC died before he did – a multiplicity of errors but chief among them, IMHO, was dissing the nascent PC movement. A larger mistake was the non-recognition that it had really become a software company that also sold hardware (instead of maintaining it the other way around) – a loss of vision of what was really "value added". And speaking of the latter, the hubris of that old joke "Take a VAX up to 10,000 and I bet I can sell it before it hits the ground".
He lived up here in my hamlet on the shores of the Big Lake; kept an single engine plane at the local airport. I bumped into him once about a decade after Compaq bought it (and HP after that) – I thanked him for a wonderful 4 1/2 years (it really was a great experience, clueless managers and marketeers aside).
Godspeed.
(H/T: The Register)
