Posted on 02/08/2011 5:46:22 AM PST by Red Badger
Obituary Ken Olsen, the founder of minicomputer and client/server company Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) died on Sunday. He was 84 years-old.
Olsen started out a maverick, pioneered and drove the minicomputer and supermini revolutions, and then became a dinosaur. But unlike many other senior DEC executives he remains a much-loved and revered figure based on what he did and even taking into account what he stopped DEC from doing.
His legacy lives on at HP, which bought Compaq, which bought DEC, and at Xiotech, where Steve Sicola's ISE team started at DEC. Ken Olsen was an engineer first and foremost. He was born on 6 February, 1926, the son of Norwegian and Swedish parents, and served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1946. After the war he went to MIT and achieved a BSc and then an MA in electrical engineering.
He gained experience there with transistorised computers and started up DEC with co-founder Harlan Anderson in 1957 at an old mill in Maynard, Massachusetts. IBM was then riding high and Olsen and Anderson were upstart mavericks who thought they could build better and much more affordable computers than IBM's mainframe behemoths which dominated IT at that time.
The two gained $70,000 seed financing from George Doriot's American Research and Development Corporation and set to work. Olsen worked on and received patents for a switch, a line printer buffer and magnetic core memory in the 1960s.
To avoid competitor radar screens, the first computing product was not called a computer. Instead DEC called it a PDP, a Programmable Data Processor. It was an 12-bit machine, and used ribbons of paper tape to control it. The PDP had a colourful front switch panel – the switches could be used to set register values.
It became popular in university labs because it was vastly cheaper than a mainframe, ran real-time programs instead of batch jobs, and didn't need a raised floor, air-conditioned data centre, being just another piece of lab equipment.
1980: DEC, Basic and a roll of tape...
I believe they began as a low-profile supplier of "flip chip" modules; using discrete transistors to implement simple logic functions on small circuit cards of a standard dimension. So for a while, they didn't sell computers; although I presume they had it mind to use those same logic cards, now in volume production, to cobble together computers under their own name. And of course, that's what they soon did, borrowing concepts from MIT one-off computers for machines like the PDP-1, PDP-7, LINC, and (most famously) the PDP-8, the first widely sold minicomputer.
About the time that DEC was introducing minicomputers based on MSI chips (roughly, chips containing on the order of 100-1000 transistors), there was this group engaged in a swiss navy project designing what was to become a major microprocessor. They badly needed some local computational resources.
Their batch and timesharing IBM/RCA/GE beasts just would not do for their purposes. But yet the Corporation's IT suits had a seemingly unbreakable stranglehold on computing power, and nobody anywhere in the company had been able to get a computer approved for department, or even plant-wide use, that was more than a remote batch job terminal or a minicomputer for direct use in production test and support.
The project leaders got creative. They listed the capital investment as "test equipment." In reality, it was a DEC PDP-11/70 with 256K memory, 170 MB removable disks, half-inch tape drive, and a couple dozen CRTs, which they had the, umm, audacity, to plan to put on the engineers' desks. They even specified 1200 baud (!) modems so engineers could work from home (this was a few years before Hayes or even US Robotics).
Well, they got it approved. And the operating system they chose was a commercially-supported version of Unix PWB/ver 6.5. This was the first departmental multi-user and the first Unix system in the Corporation.
That MPU chip would not likely ever have seen the light of day without that DEC computer, and the graphics-based computers of a couple of former west coast garage hackers would not have been what they were or appeared when they did, if ever.
LOL! I cut my programming teeth on a PDP-11 running RSTS/E.
me too. when we got our first VAX, it was quite the thing!
even the DEC VT100 became the system standard
In the early days, DEC built machines with word widths that were multiples of 3.
Without looking up the very earliest models, the ones I am familar with had the following widths in bits:
PDP8/LINC-8: 12 bits
PDP-7/9/15: 18 bits
PDP-6/10/DecSystem10/20: 36 bits
Later, they got with the 8-bit byte / addressable unit program (pioneered, IIRC, by Gene Amdahl at IBM) and built the
PDP-11: 16 bits
VAX: 32 bits
Alpha: 32 bits
By the way, the PDP-8S was a cost and size reduced model of the PDP-8, in that its internal organization was bit-serial. This substantially reduced the number boards/gates/transistors required, at the cost of about a 10X speed penalty. It ran all standard PDP-8 software, however; the programmer’s model was the same as other -8s. I think it was still built with discrete transistor modules. Due to the circuitry reduction stemming from its serial organization, it was the first minicomputer whose main unit fit into a single 10.5” high rack unit.
You are correct that this was still in the days of core memory. I seem to recall that our PDP-8S also had a rack-mountable power supply separate from the main unit, however.
Remember the DEC Writer - they were everywhere with their zip zip unmistakable sound.
I took Fortran at UMass, 1977. I kind of liked it in a soothing way. We had fan fold terminals in the dorms. No monitor. You logged on, wrote your ‘program’, hit run and waited. Unless you wanted really fast times, then you woke up at 2 in the morning.
You could get a job loading punch cards in the computer lab.
I can’t remember but was the book by Tracy Kidder( ? ) The Soul of A New Machine, about DEC?
Along w/ unix is snake oil. ;)
Hey, KO was a unique sort of guy and I liked him. He wasn’t afraid to make bold pronouncements, certainly not your mealy mouthed modern CEO. Yes, he got some things wrong but mostly it was right. He was FAR better than Bob Palmer who had the abilities of a cold bowl of oatmeal.
Some time after he removed from DEC I had a chance to talk w/ him. He still had an office down in Boxborough at one of the old Modular buildings. I dropped in at lunch one day and we had a chat. Glad I did that.
There's a story one of the engineers around here liked to tell.
The software architect for VMS left DEC and went to Microsoft. He engineered a new OS which was a little like VMS.
It was also a three-letter acronym. It was the letters V, M, S, each moved down one position in the alphabet.
Data General. It mentions DEC in a somewhat derogatory way (the competition).
RIP
Amazing products but sucky positioning.
I use to sell their VAX machines.
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About the time that DEC was introducing minicomputers based on MSI chips (roughly, chips containing on the order of 100-1000 transistors), there was this group engaged in a swiss navy project [...]
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Should read
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About the time that DEC was introducing minicomputers based on MSI chips (roughly, chips containing on the order of 100-1000 transistors), there was this group at a major semiconductor house engaged in a swiss navy project [...] "
You sir, have outlived most rocks. LOL
Excellent insight into DEC.
Thanks.
Just re-read your post and I think I recall, probably in error, they were using GAL’s in their later products?
Thanks.
compared to today... I am thankful we moved past that.
Finger Bone? LOL Thanks for the memory.
Yeah, but isn’t it kind of coming back, in a way, with this “cloud computing” idea? That sounds a lot like a dumb terminal talking to other machines “Somewhere Out There”. It isn’t the KO idea, strictly speaking, of a single machine serving a bunch of dumb terminals, unless you extend the idea of a single machine being the “cloud”.
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