Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, died on Super Bowl Sunday. Coders of a certain age have been reminiscing about their first times with a PDP-8 and getting a PDP-11 to really sing. Me too. I wasted millions of ratepayers’ dollars at AT&T Bell Labs on VAX 11/780s. Woo-hoo. DEC was a great company. But Ken Olsen made a classic mistake. He idolized IBM. Wanted to be them. DEC was the same vertically oriented company as IBM. They designed chips, wrapped plastic around them, wrote operating systems, wrote applications, and then marketed, sold and serviced their minicomputers....
