DEC's Ken Olsen: 1926-2011
"They were the Apple of their day" -- Dan ("VisiCalc") Bricklin
Source: Fortune Archive
From the Oct. 27, 1986 Fortune cover story that named Olsen America's Most Successful Entrepreneur:
THOUGH he has not yet become a household name, Kenneth Harry Olsen is arguably the most successful entrepreneur in the history of American business.
In 29 years he has taken Digital Equipment Corp. from nothing to $7.6 billion in annual revenues. DEC today is bigger, even adjusting for inflation, than Ford Motor Co. when death claimed Henry Ford, than U.S. Steel when Andrew Carnegie sold out, than Standard Oil when John D. Rockefeller stepped aside.
Olsen, 60, belongs to the lucky generation of entrepreneurs who experienced hard knocks as kids during the Depression and benefited as businessmen from the surge in prosperity that followed World War II. A few, like Teledyne's Henry Singleton and Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, have done better for their shareholders or made themselves richer than Olsen (see box, page 29). But none has created as mighty or important an industrial enterprise as DEC. And on that basis FORTUNE considers him the greatest success.
Aimed at engineers and scientists, DEC's minicomputers changed the way people compute. Before DEC, all computers were big mainframes housed in special centers, mollycoddled by experts, and used to process large batches of data; DEC's small, rugged, inexpensive machines let individuals apply computing to an endless variety of everyday tasks. DEC laid the groundwork for the personal computer revolution, and many of the revolutionaries discovered the technology's possibilities on DEC products. -- By Peter Petre. Research Associate Alan Farnham
You can read the full story here, with apologies for the formatting.
On a personal note, the first computer I owned was Apple's (AAPL) Apple II, but the first computer I used was a DEC PDP 10. I loved them both.
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What's wrong with this country? We used to have visionaries, generals, people who made something from nothing, people who made the right and strategic decisions.
And now we have a bunch of accidental CEOs like Ballmer, Bartz, Whitman, and whatever-HP-CEO-flavor-of-the-month. They ride on the coattails of their predecessors, but yet still screw up even ridiculously easy challenges. Instead of looking beyond the next quarter, they resort to vapid tricks and stratagems for which they expect to be applauded for.
It's like all the genius of this generation is concentrated in one man, Steve Jobs. But even he can't make up for the whole fold.
Now we know how old everyone is, by what DEC they used. I remember a PDP 11 in highschool with one of those noisy terminals without a screen. We'd write our simple game apps in Basic Plus, like Battleship.
I remember a professor bring his PDP-8 into class so we could write machine language programs. The input 'device' was eight toggle switches on the front, the output was eight LEDs.
I'm sorry to read this.
I spent a lot of time working with DEC products, RSX-11 and VMS, and the hardware to run said software.
The thing I appreciated most about DEC was the quality of their documentation. Microsoft may have adopted a lot of ideas from VMS for Windows NT, but they sure as hell didn't copy the quality of documentation.
Not QUITE the Apple of his day -- while Ken was a great engineer, and manager of engineers, Ken was no social visionary. He became rather infamous for saying around 1980 that there was no good reason for anyone to have a computer in their home.
Back in the day, I worked for MCI. VMS based systems used for nearly everything there (not quite everything). Today is a sad, sad day in computing.