Ken Olsen, a pioneer of digital technology, died Sunday. Olsen, 84, cofounded and headed Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), which developed one of the first commercial computers and helped usher in a new, post-mainframe world.
In a letter to Gordon College, which announced his death and where Olsen had been a trustee, Microsoft cofounder and Chairman Bill Gates said Olsen was “a major influence in my life, and his influence is still important at Microsoft through all the engineers who trained at Digital.”
PDP, VAX Series
Gates recalled that his interest in computers began when he was 13 and started using a DEC computer. The first software created by Gates and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen was developed on a DEC PDP-10. The PDP and VAX series of computers from DEC are legends in computer history.
Olsen cofounded DEC in 1957 with $70,000 in seed money after receiving his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At M.I.T., he worked on the development of core memory, which later became RAM memory. DEC was the first successful computer company started with venture-capital money.
His company grew to 125,000 employees, peaking at $14 billion in sales, before Compaq bought it in 1998 for nearly $10 billion. For a time, DEC was the second-largest computer company in the world, after IBM.
DEC pioneered the development of refrigerator-sized minicomputers, which were sold to large corporations and researchers as powerful alternatives to room-sized mainframes from companies like IBM. The minicomputer went through a boom period, forming the basis of the Route 128 tech corridor outside Boston as competitors, including Data General and Wang Laboratories, also emerged.
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But DEC missed the sea change in the industry — the rise of the personal computer. Olsen has been quoted as saying at one point that “the personal computer will fall flat…