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In Memory of DEC Founder Ken Olsen

I Never Met the Man, But He Was a Big Influence on My LIfe & Industry

There was no reason for news of Ken Olsen's death to hit me hard. I never worked for the man; heck, I never even met him. But he was a big influence on my life and industry.

Ken wasn't some charismatic guy that people would crowd into convention centers to see. But he was the original dragon-slayer, the Man who slew the myth of IBM invincibility. The world has never been the same.

Long before Steve Jobs announced the Macintosh on Super Bowl Sunday 1984, portraying IBM as Big Brother in the process, Ken Olsen became IBM's little brother in the important business of business computing.

His company's creation of the minicomputer, in 1964, brought the world of IT to places it had never visited before. Suddenly, you didn't have to be a Fortune 500 company to own a computer. Suddenly, you could think of transaction procession, and use terminals to distribute access, rather than waiting for the priests of batch-oriented mainframes to answer your prayers.

Speaking personally, I note that the PDP minicomputer family was, among many things, at the forefront of the first publishing revolution in half a millennium, when newspapers and magazines moved away from lead type into a new, digital world.

I fondly remember our first PDP-11 systems, with their macho 20-megabyte hard drives, air-conditioned "offices" (even in San Francisco), and mnemonic formatting codes.

Later, working in New England, I was reminded by DEC's status as the largest employer in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire whenever I was going back and forth from our divisional office in Peterborough, NH and corporate headquarters in Boston, along good old Route 3.

Driving past Data General, Apollo (and later HP), Wang, and others along the way also reminded one of DEC's influence in the business.

Additionally, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then no doubt Ken Olsen was flattered as he saw IBM become a major competitor in the miniconmputer industry that he had invented.

Ken Olsen is often referenced for what he couldn't or wouldn't understand fully, whether Unix or the PC. He should be remembered for what he did understand fully, and that was how to take on a corporate monopoly and produce a great company that understood what the world needed at the time. How many of us will be able to make that claim when our time comes?

Condolences to his family and to all those who were close to him during his long, productive life.

More Stories By Roger Strukhoff

Roger Strukhoff holds a BA from Knox College, Certificate in Technical Communications from UC-Berkeley, and MBA from CSU-Hayward. He won a 2009 "Stevie" American Business Award for producing the best publication in its category. He is a former Publisher at IDG and Guest Lecturer at MIT. He splits most of his time between Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia, but can also be found at www.twitter.com/strukhoff

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