Ken Olsen R.I.P.

Ken Olsen, the co-founder and ex-CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) died on 6 February 2011 in Indianapolis. He was 84.

The company founded by Olsen — who built custom radios in his teen years before stints in the Navy and at MIT, graduating with a Master's in electrical engineering — was a hacker favorite, as detailed in the Jargon File entry quoted below, both for its easy-to-program (for a hacker) minicomputers and for its epic struggle in the small- to medium-business marketplace against IBM, the Evil Empire of computing during the 1960's through early 1980's.

Before the killer micro revolution of the late 1980s, hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering timesharing machines. The first of the group of cultures described by this lexicon nucleated around the PDP-1. Subsequently, the PDP-6, PDP-10, PDP-20, PDP-11 and VAX were all foci of large and important hackerdoms, and DEC machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine population. DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era (roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace microcomputers and Unix early cost it heavily in profits and prestige after silicon got cheap.

Nevertheless, the microprocessor design tradition owes a major debt to the PDP-11 instruction set, and every one of the major general-purpose microcomputer OSs so far (CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, OS/2, Windows NT) was either genetically descended from a DEC OS, or incubated on DEC hardware, or both. Accordingly, DEC was for many years still regarded with a certain wry affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC machines.

DEC could have shared in the microcomputer and Internet revolutions, if not for Olsen's short-sightedness: It was his habit, late in life, of embracing new technologies past the point when his company could capitalize on them.

• Olsen's failure to embrace U◊◊◊ in full was brought on by his attempt to push the inferior operating systems that came with the PDP and VAX series. Later, though, he encouraged a BSD-based clone called Ultrix.
• Olsen's failing to understand personal computers, as shown in this 1977 quote (There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home, thinking of minicomputers automating the house), was made obvious by the DEC Rainbow, for which DEC sells you pre-formatted floppies because the Rainbow's drive could not format disks — on purpose.

Such slowness in embracing new technology got DEC owned, first by its old rival IBM when the fully functional Personal Computer was introduced in 1981; then by Microsoft, Novell and an array of Unix companies in the operating system market. Olsen lost his CEO job in 1992 when it became evident to his underlings that the minicomputer market was dying, and that the personal computer market was out of reach as long as Olsen was running the show. Ironically, the underlings could do no better: DEC was absorbed in 1998 by Compaq, which in turn was absorbed by Hewlett-Packard in 2002.

Despite his shortcomings, Ken Olsen had an important role:

• in the development of hackerdom by providing it with its minicomputers;
• in the development of the microcomputers and their operating systems, for DEC computers were used in their creation; and
• in the growth of the nascent Internet, many of whose nodes were run by DEC computers.

For all these Ken Olsen should be honored.