[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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