DEC founder Ken Olsen is dead

The Register ^ | Chris Mellor

[mylife]

I never ran DEC equipment.

Used to run and maintain the old Sperry/Univac AN/-UYK20

[41Thunder]

"Alpha: 32 bits" Erasmus: Correction: Alpha was a 64 Bit RISC processor.

[mmercier]

I do not know anything about a DEC founder who was shot.

I did meet an engineer from Littleton who later cut his wife's head off in the front yard after a fight over spaghetti.

I worked mostly in Andover stoking a production line making chips and TAB devices that are still state of the art 20 years out. We were stamping out 500+ gold lead chips like oreos for a while. Then all shut down, and we went away.

Then went to Maynard new products prototype group as a buyer of chips. There I worked with guys with 3 digit badges... I was in the 170K badge range when hired.

Quit when I saw the writing on the wall.

[Sunnyvale CA Eng.]

...A PDP-1 came into the OEM in Woburn. It went to the Computer Museum in Boston.

Here's a link to a PDP-1 restoration that was done at the Computer History Museum out here on the left coast:

http://pdp-1.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/

Here's a video from '89 featuring Ken Olsen about the history of the company up to that point that I found to be interesing:

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102639844 - video link at the bottom of the page.

[ladyjane]

Way at the beginning of DEC one of the founders supposedly was shot. IIRC he was sitting at his kitchen table. It’s all very vague and few people talked about it. I think I’ll ask some old timers.

[mmercier]

Harlan Anderson, the co founder of DEC with Ken Olsen is alive and well today. He lives in Connecticut.

According to Wikipkedia.

[ladyjane]

It wasn’t either of them. It was one of the first 10 or so employees. I don’t remember the story other than people were reluctant to talk about it and there was some mystery about it. All I remember is that it happened in his kitchen or at his kitchen table - and that could be wrong too.