[clue] [News] [Obit] An old lion of the computer industry has passed...

dennisjperkins at comcast.net dennisjperkins at comcast.net
Thu Feb 10 14:45:51 MST 2011


I saw it. I never worked with DEC equipment but I know people who just loved it. 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lorin Ricker" <Lorin at RickerNet.us> 
To: "CLUE's mailing list" <clue at cluedenver.org> 
Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 2:04:17 PM 
Subject: [clue] [News] [Obit] An old lion of the computer industry has passed... 

I don't know if you've seen this news: Ken Olsen, founder of Digital 
Equipment Corporation (DEC to all of us who knew and loved it), passed 
away this last Sunday, Feb. 6th, 2011, at age 84. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/09/ken-olsen-obituary 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Olsen 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/technology/business-computing/08olsen.html 

http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2011/02/07/daily16-Ken-Olsen-co-founder-of-DEC-died-at-84.html 

Some of you younger folks may not recognize his name -- that's a shame, 
because he founded the second wave or generation of computing, inventing 
the inevitable evolution from mainframes to minicomputers... which 
defined and led to where we are now. Indeed, today the DEC Alpha 
computer system is listed as a supported platform for Linux (Debian, 
Gentoo, RH). I'd be surprised if Linux hasn't run on the VAX and PDP-11 
platforms, too. 

Others of us grew up with Alphas, VAXen, and the whole PDP family, from 
the venerable PDP-11 -- upon which C was invented, and Unix evolved (it 
actually debuted on a PDP-7) -- and the ever astounding PDP-10 and 
DECSystem-20 (successors to the PDP-6), and especially the first-ever 
RISC machine, the PDP-8 (with exactly 8... count 'em... 8 instructions), 
the first real minicomputer, at a cost of <$10K... a big deal in those days! 

Remember sitting at your first Teletype connected to a PDP-6, almost 
certainly at an early university computer center, puzzling out your 
first BASIC program? Remember toggling in the bootstrap program on the 
PDP-8's front-panel switches to get it to boot from DECtape? Remember 
why DECtape was unique? Ever have a spool of DECtape accidentally jump 
off its hub while seeking, only to skitter away across the computer room 
floor? 

Remember when RAM was core, and came in units of 18-bit, 12-bit or 
36-bit words? Remember when we all pretty much decided that 16-bits 
were "not enough"? Where were you in the Unix vs. VMS wars? Do you 
remember RT-11, RSTS/E, RSX-11M, TOPS-10 and TOPS-20? Remember what a 
Flip-Chip was? How about a LINC? What did "PDP" stand for? Remember 
sitting down at your first VT100, or even your first VT52? How about 
TECO?... your first "real" text editor? PIP? Switches? Command line 
recall & completion? Clusters? RAID? Virtual memory? 64-bit RISC 
architecture? DEC spanned all of this, and so much more. Arguably, 
things we take for granted in Linux, like multitasking, time-sharing, 
process management, virtual memory management and protection, threads, 
multiprocessor architectures, relational databases, X11/GUI, and so much 
more, came of age under DEC's vast product development efforts. 

Did you send your first "email" more than 30 years ago?... You likely 
did so on some kind of DEC computer system, right? And the notion of 
"copying a file" via DECnet from, say, a PDP-11 to a VAX, or to TOPS-10, 
wasn't a big deal, right? And dec.com was only the fifth(!) Internet 
domain name registered in the world; it held Class-A IP address block 
16.0.0.0/8. 

Mr. Olsen was responsible, directly, for all of this. He was one of the 
original hardware engineers -- soft-spoken, understated, often 
misunderstood, and as founder/CEO of Digital (DEC!), he was certainly 
misquoted and misrepresented even more often! But he was a pioneer, a 
leader for over 35 years, founding the number two computer company in 
the world, taking on IBM on its own turf, while simultaneously forging 
new directions for the entire industry. 

At peak, DEC employed over 120,000 people worldwide -- a huge, and 
hugely talented, group of engineers, researchers, technologists, 
process/fab experts, software gurus, and the folks who supported them. 
Any trip to visit DEC in Maynard (and surrounding towns) was 
impressively memorable. Who knows how many people outside of DEC 
proper, whether customers, users, engineers and others, were 
productively affected by their association with DEC... 

For those of us who knew Ken Olsen only from a distance, as customers, 
engineers, coders, hackers, early computer enthusiasts, and fellow 
infantry in the pitched battles between VMS and Unix, minicomputers and 
PCs, he was admired, even revered, as one of the true old lions, a 
visionary in the business. 

Truly, one of the great ones. With the passing of this old lion, an era 
is surely gone. RIP. 

best regards, 
-- Lorin 

Lorin Ricker 
enthusiast, engineer, entrepreneur 
Linux, VMS, DEC (the good old days) 
Pascal, SQL, DCL, bash, Ruby, Python, et al 
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