DEC’s Ken Olsen Dead At 84
Ken Olsen, cofounder of DEC was found dead on Sunday (pcmag.com)
Ken Olsen, cofounder of DEC died at 84, on Sunday.
Ken Olsen was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and as a child he would much rather read technical manuals than comic books, like kids of his age. Given that his father designed equipment such as a safety pin-machine, Ken would always be interested in finding new things regarding technology. Thus, he studied electrical engineering in the Navy, which he joined in 1994. After the Navy, he enrolled at MIT and in 1950 he received a bachelor’s degree and two years later, a master’s degree in the same field – electrical engineering. So great was his passion for technology, that he decided to work at Lincoln Laboratories until he realized he should start his own company, to work for himself, rather than for others. So, he got finance from American Research and Development Corp. (around $70,000) and along with his former colleague, Harlan Anderson, and his brother, they started a computer company, known by the name Digital Equipment Corp., in 1957.
The company flourished and in its first year of existence, it gained $94,000 that by 1977 had transformed into $1 billion. What at first was a company of only 3 people, by 1977 had become a company of more than 36,000 employees, working for the same cause. Olsen’s company was the second largest in the nation and that is because what they did was to provide minicomputers. These minicomputers were a very good alternative to the hulking mainframes that then dominated the industry and which were not available for anyone that needed them, as they had to be operated by several people. Thus, with the making of these minicomputers, DEC succeeded in creating a great choice for people who were in the businesses and needed such thing. Although they were not as small as laptops are nowadays, what the minicomputers were for the period is what Apple is for us now.
When Olsen’s minicomputers appeared, everyone stood in line and tried to get one. The fact is that they were revolutionary and they were also really cheap, thus major companies could afford buying them for every employee. Mr. Olsen was a rich man by now, but he never showed it. He looked more like an engineer, although he was one of the biggest entrepreneurs of the time. To get a hint at how he liked to live, you must know that he was driving a 1960 Ford Falcon. As he said, he admired its mechanical design, plus the car was really easy to maintain. So, there you have it, a very rich man, not showing it! Around the mid-1980s, Fortune Magazine decided to write an article about Mr. Olsen. He was called, in the article, ‘‘arguably the most successful entrepreneur in the history of American business.’’ And that he was – DEC was bigger than Ford, the year Henry Ford died, it was even bigger than Standard Oil, when Rockefeller stepped aside. DEC was seconding IBM in the industry, but DEC was a lot smaller as a company than IBM. Imagine what would have been if Olsen and co. would have decided to go bigger.
Mr. Olsen stood by his company both in good and bad times and he stepped down in 1992. A few years later, in 1998, the Digital Equipment Corp. was bought by Compaq, now a part of HP. The company, seeing that things were doing great with the minicomputers, decided to release DEC’s VAX machines, powered by the VMS operating system. These VAX machines became nearly ubiquitous and it supported a company that at one point employed over 100,000 people. Things were going great, but every rise has a fall and that’s when DEX tried to regain its prominence as a chipmaker, releasing the Alpha processor back in the 1990s. However, things did not work out so well and as stated above, the company was sold to Compaq in 1998.
Still, Mr. Olsen remains in the mind of people who knew him one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all times. “Ken was brilliant, bold, incredibly lucky, impossibly successful, clearly flawed, and delightfully unique. Of all the companies that stood in opposition to IBM in the ’70s and ’80s, his stood tallest and straightest,” Jonathan Eunice wrote in an email. Furthermore, Ken Olsen’s success is also recognized by other people. “We all remember him as a great leader,” said Gordon Bell, one of the designers of DEC, today a researcher at Microsoft Corp. “I certainly learned a lot and was very honored to work for him.”When you come to think about it, the company was settled in a former woolen mill in Maynard in 1957 and there’s where all the magic happened for a long period of time. In the 1980s interview that Mr. Olsen gave for Fortune Magazine, he said that the walls of the building “are artifacts, like dinosaur bones.”
Mr. Kenneth Harry Olsen was one of the most brilliant minds of the passed century and he was an extraordinary entrepreneur. The news of his death was given by Gordon College in Wenham, for which Mr. Olsen was a longtime trustee and benefactor. However, the cause of death was not made public. For those who pay their last homage to this great man, the memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. on May 14 at Gordon College. If you want more details about this, click here.
