Post by Dave on Feb 8, 2011 11:51:08 GMT -5
Ken Olsen Dead at 84; 5 Facts About the Digital Equipment Corp. Co-Founder
Feb 8, 2011 – 10:38 AM
It's a sad day in the techie world.
Ken Olsen, whose role in the company Digital Equipment Corp. helped bring computers to the masses, has died at the age of 84.
Even if you haven't heard his name before, his work is what allows you to be using a personal computer at this very moment.
How? Surge Desk shares five facts about the computing pioneer.
1. Whiz kid
As a child, Olsen "read technical manuals rather than comic books," says a Boston Globe obituary. When he entered the U.S. Navy in 1944, he began studying electrical engineering. He later went on to get bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from MIT.
2. Founding DEC
Olsen co-founded DEC with his brother and a business partner in 1957, working out of an old mill. Their plan: to create and sell digital circuits. Their first computer, released in 1959, was the PDP-1, which sold for more than $100,000. They manufactured only about 50 PDP-1s, but the machine laid the groundwork for their blockbuster product.
3. Early success
When Olsen entered the computer field, computers were enormous, room-size machines that required special training to use. In 1965, Olsen and DEC began selling the smaller PDP-8, which cost $18,000. They sold more than 50,000 units, a huge number for the time.
4. "Bigger than Ford"
In the 1980s, Digital's success under Olsen continued, leading to a Fortune magazine profile that, according to the Boston Globe, declared, "Adjusting for inflation ... Digital was bigger than Ford Motor Co. at the death of its founder, Henry Ford, and also larger than US Steel when Andrew Carnegie sold his company or Standard Oil when John D. Rockefeller stepped aside."
However, the company soon faltered. Olsen would remain at the helm until 1992. Six years later, Compaq bought Digital.
5. Famous words
Olsen may be known to many for a seemingly short-sighted comment he made in 1977: "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." The idea that a computer would be unnecessary for an individual was seen as one of the reasons Digital began to see less success in the late '80s and early '90s, as home computer use took off.
However, Olsen later said, "[That interpretation of my comment] is, of course, ridiculous because the business we were in was making PCs, and almost from the start I had them at home and my wife played Scrabble with time-sharing machines, and my sixth-grade son was networking the MIT computers and the DEC computers together, hopefully without doing mischief, using the computers I had at home. Home computers were a natural continuum of the 'personal computers' that people had at work, in the laboratory, in the military."
Rather, as the urban-myth-debunking site Snopes indicates, Olsen's misinterpreted comment referred to "powerful central computers that controlled every aspect of home life."
www.aolnews.com/2011/02/08/ken-olsen-dead-at-84-5-facts-about-the-digital-equipment-corp/
