<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000'>I saw it. I never worked with DEC equipment but I know people who just loved it.<br><br>----- Original Message -----<br>From: "Lorin Ricker" <Lorin@RickerNet.us><br>To: "CLUE's mailing list" <clue@cluedenver.org><br>Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 2:04:17 PM<br>Subject: [clue] [News] [Obit] An old lion of the computer industry has passed...<br><br>I don't know if you've seen this news: Ken Olsen, founder of Digital <br>Equipment Corporation (DEC to all of us who knew and loved it), passed <br>away this last Sunday, Feb. 6th, 2011, at age 84.<br><br>http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/feb/09/ken-olsen-obituary<br><br>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Olsen<br><br>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/technology/business-computing/08olsen.html<br><br>http://www.masshightech.com/stories/2011/02/07/daily16-Ken-Olsen-co-founder-of-DEC-died-at-84.html<br><br>Some of you younger folks may not recognize his name -- that's a shame, <br>because he founded the second wave or generation of computing, inventing <br>the inevitable evolution from mainframes to minicomputers... which <br>defined and led to where we are now. Indeed, today the DEC Alpha <br>computer system is listed as a supported platform for Linux (Debian, <br>Gentoo, RH). I'd be surprised if Linux hasn't run on the VAX and PDP-11 <br>platforms, too.<br><br>Others of us grew up with Alphas, VAXen, and the whole PDP family, from <br>the venerable PDP-11 -- upon which C was invented, and Unix evolved (it <br>actually debuted on a PDP-7) -- and the ever astounding PDP-10 and <br>DECSystem-20 (successors to the PDP-6), and especially the first-ever <br>RISC machine, the PDP-8 (with exactly 8... count 'em... 8 instructions), <br>the first real minicomputer, at a cost of <$10K... a big deal in those days!<br><br>Remember sitting at your first Teletype connected to a PDP-6, almost <br>certainly at an early university computer center, puzzling out your <br>first BASIC program? Remember toggling in the bootstrap program on the <br>PDP-8's front-panel switches to get it to boot from DECtape? Remember <br>why DECtape was unique? Ever have a spool of DECtape accidentally jump <br>off its hub while seeking, only to skitter away across the computer room <br>floor?<br><br>Remember when RAM was core, and came in units of 18-bit, 12-bit or <br>36-bit words? Remember when we all pretty much decided that 16-bits <br>were "not enough"? Where were you in the Unix vs. VMS wars? Do you <br>remember RT-11, RSTS/E, RSX-11M, TOPS-10 and TOPS-20? Remember what a <br>Flip-Chip was? How about a LINC? What did "PDP" stand for? Remember <br>sitting down at your first VT100, or even your first VT52? How about <br>TECO?... your first "real" text editor? PIP? Switches? Command line <br>recall & completion? Clusters? RAID? Virtual memory? 64-bit RISC <br>architecture? DEC spanned all of this, and so much more. Arguably, <br>things we take for granted in Linux, like multitasking, time-sharing, <br>process management, virtual memory management and protection, threads, <br>multiprocessor architectures, relational databases, X11/GUI, and so much <br>more, came of age under DEC's vast product development efforts.<br><br>Did you send your first "email" more than 30 years ago?... You likely <br>did so on some kind of DEC computer system, right? And the notion of <br>"copying a file" via DECnet from, say, a PDP-11 to a VAX, or to TOPS-10, <br>wasn't a big deal, right? And dec.com was only the fifth(!) Internet <br>domain name registered in the world; it held Class-A IP address block <br>16.0.0.0/8.<br><br>Mr. Olsen was responsible, directly, for all of this. He was one of the <br>original hardware engineers -- soft-spoken, understated, often <br>misunderstood, and as founder/CEO of Digital (DEC!), he was certainly <br>misquoted and misrepresented even more often! But he was a pioneer, a <br>leader for over 35 years, founding the number two computer company in <br>the world, taking on IBM on its own turf, while simultaneously forging <br>new directions for the entire industry.<br><br>At peak, DEC employed over 120,000 people worldwide -- a huge, and <br>hugely talented, group of engineers, researchers, technologists, <br>process/fab experts, software gurus, and the folks who supported them. <br>Any trip to visit DEC in Maynard (and surrounding towns) was <br>impressively memorable. Who knows how many people outside of DEC <br>proper, whether customers, users, engineers and others, were <br>productively affected by their association with DEC...<br><br>For those of us who knew Ken Olsen only from a distance, as customers, <br>engineers, coders, hackers, early computer enthusiasts, and fellow <br>infantry in the pitched battles between VMS and Unix, minicomputers and <br>PCs, he was admired, even revered, as one of the true old lions, a <br>visionary in the business.<br><br>Truly, one of the great ones. With the passing of this old lion, an era <br>is surely gone. RIP.<br><br>best regards,<br> -- Lorin<br><br> Lorin Ricker<br> enthusiast, engineer, entrepreneur<br> Linux, VMS, DEC (the good old days)<br> Pascal, SQL, DCL, bash, Ruby, Python, et al<br>_______________________________________________<br>clue mailing list<br>clue@cluedenver.org<br>http://cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue<br></div></body></html>