Obituary – Ken Olsen, the founder of minicomputer company Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) died last Sunday. He was 84 years old. Another pioneer lost to the world.
Years ago I worked exclusively on DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) mini computers. In my opinion the best systems out there on a price performance basis at the time. I installed about a hundred DEC systems, first PDP and then, its successor, VAX in my time. They were the real time competitor to the batch mainframe which was seen as the only real computer in those days.
The founder of DEC was Ken Olsen, an inventor and another strong business character. He wasn’t perfect as he made mistakes near the end when DEC was bought out by Compaq but he gave the world systems that allowed people like me to build business and development systems which were resilient, scalable and at minimal cost.
I still have several VAXStations and a MicroVAX in my store room, the CISC processors made obsolete when the RISC Alpha chips became the primary platform. They would still work if I plugged some SCSI disks in though I suspect the MicroVAX 3400 DSSI disks are next to impossible to get.
I salute Ken Olsen. Working with his inventions made me the person I am today. The world is again short of another badly needed innovator.
All your cronies are dying away. Think you have years to go though.
I wrote my thesis and did the computations on a Vax 11/780, with 320 megs of disk storage for 32 people! The good old days.
James,
Not quite at that stage yet.
Timothy,
The big boy at the time. Brings back good memories.
DEC VAX ! VMS! I wrote many applications on Digital using VMS and Starbase ( a totally non-relational databse) in 1989 and 1990. Back in those far-off days there was a multplicity of operating systems and hardware, all equally good and looking to have a future. Can anyone remember ICL Quattro ? A UK made PC with a UK designed multi-user (well, 4 only) OS, that was sort of based on CPM, I seem to remember. Now in the modern world we have Linux and its variants. Unix, Dos/windows and thats yer lot as far as small and mid-range systems go. Plus the big systems of Cray and IBM, are there any other mainframe providors anymore ?
Malcolm,
I remember Starbase but never used it. I was into RDB and then Oracle.
I remember ICL as well. Another great british failure. We seem to have a monopoly on screwing things up. Don’t remember the Quattro though although I do remember the Audi version. Must be something in that.
I don’t think there are that many mainframes now. It’s all supercomputers or grid computing.