Ken Olsen, DEC Founder, dies

DEC Alumni | Michael Heiser

[rahbert]

Dear Digital Family of Friends:

It is with great regret that I inform you that our beloved CEO Ken Olsen passed away, yesterday in Indiana, with his immediate family all around him. Ken had been in ill health for the last few months and was in Hospice care. Sad time for their family now, but Ken and Alliki had a wonderful life. It's sad to know that they both have now passed.

More information will follow in the Boston Globe obituary sometime this week. I do believe there will be a Memorial Service (open to the public) to celebrate Ken's amazing life sometime mid May at Gordon College. Am sure to keep you all posted when that will transpire. I have also notified the DEC Alumni (Peter Koch) and the DEC Connection (Ava Schutzman) web personnel to keep you all informed.

regards, Mike DEC Alumni group founder/manager

[Diogenesis]

“There is no reason anyone would
want a computer in their home.”

[Ken Olson, Chairman and founder
Digital Equipment Corp., 1977]

[Frantzie]

He was a good guy and at one time - Digital was the company leading the way.

[NonValueAdded]

memories

[HiTech RedNeck]

Gone to that great batch job in the sky.

[AFreeBird]

The first system I ever dialed into was a CompuServe DEC-10.

RIP Ken and DEC

[rahbert]

Legend has it that a DEC-20 (along with several PDPs and VAXen) reside at the bottom of the Mill pond in Maynard.

[nhwingut]

I was a systems programmer back in the late 80s, Ken Olsen and DEC were king (before Microsoft).

RIP.

[Noumenon]

All hail VMS and its journaling file system. The end of an era.

Win NT owed a lot of its internals to the DEC alumni who came to work at MS.

[Vroomfondel]

All hail VMS and its journaling file system.

I'll second that.

I've been using VMS since 1981. The first DEC machine I used was an -11/780 running VMS. After that, I encountered PDP-8s and PDP-11s. I'm still using VMS, but on Alphas and Itania these days.

[MrDem]

Here’s to all those who can punch in the bootstrap code of a PDP like Horowitz playing a Steinway piano.

[Calvin Locke]

In b-school, the accounting prof worked at DEC. He brought in some
old ledgers of how accounting was done, pre-computer, and said
he pulled from the trash some of the old DEC books. One was
for expenses, early 1960s, and it had an expense reimbursement
to Olsen for a $.50 cab ride.

[Nick Danger]

Never knew the guy. I was the 7,269th Fair Bastard.

[fieldmarshaldj]

RIP.

[Steely Tom]

The first “real” computer I ever had single-user control over was the DEC PDP-12. It was an exciting experience, made the more so by the beautiful physical design of the machine. Science fiction made real.

Thank you Mr. Olsen.

By the way, it might interest some here to know that Ken Olsen was one of the first people to have the idea of making a complex electronic system out of “plug-in” modules, bigger than a single tube, but smaller than the end product. He had the idea before, say, Tektronix did.

If you look at the giant AN-FSQ7 computer (the militarized version of the MIT Whirlwind, on which Ken Olsen worked as a graduate student in the post-WWII period), you will see that it has no connectors between the tube level and the rack level. In many cases, the racks themselves were not connectorized, but were, rather, connected by great, thick wiring harnesses. I believe that one reason for this was that, at that time, there were no “mass-con” or other types of mass-termination connectors. As for “ribbon cable,” forget it.

[colorado tanker]

1977. That year the Commodore, Apple II and Tandy PC’s were introduced.

[The Antiyuppie]

I think the programmers of that time were superior to today’s programmers, because they did so much with so little. It’s hard to believe that the PDP-8 was a multiuser computer with disk...and 32,768 words of memory, and the early models didn’t have a single integrated circuit. DEC “blew it” over and over again, probably because they just couldn’t deal with new paradigms. Had they and the other minicomputer companies been able to leave their comfort zone, the focus of technology might still be in the Northeast.

[Revolting cat!]

All hail VMS and it multi-version file system (RMS). Whatta concept, huh?

All hail clustering (recently being discovered by the likes of Sun.) Whatta concept!

All hail background batch processing!

All hail DCL!

[sima_yi]

The first computer I was ever allowed to program was a PDP8i. I remember having to toggle in the program (using the rocker switches on the front panel, in binary) to load the bootstrap tape, in order to load the operating system tape.

Our I/O device was a teletype (KSR-33, if my memory serves me) Then, our professor got a grant and bought a high-speed paper tape reader. We thought we were cooking!

One of the graduate students said that he could forsee the time when a rich guy might buy a computer to play with, rather than a sports car or a yacht. (This was in the very early seventies.) We thought he was nuts.

RIP, Ken, you done good.

[Revolting cat!]

I worked at one of the first commercial sites that implemented Digital’s clustering technology in 1982 or 3.