Ken Olsen, DEC Founder, dies

DEC Alumni | Michael Heiser

[rahbert]

Dear Digital Family of Friends:

It is with great regret that I inform you that our beloved CEO Ken Olsen passed away, yesterday in Indiana, with his immediate family all around him. Ken had been in ill health for the last few months and was in Hospice care. Sad time for their family now, but Ken and Alliki had a wonderful life. It's sad to know that they both have now passed.

More information will follow in the Boston Globe obituary sometime this week. I do believe there will be a Memorial Service (open to the public) to celebrate Ken's amazing life sometime mid May at Gordon College. Am sure to keep you all posted when that will transpire. I have also notified the DEC Alumni (Peter Koch) and the DEC Connection (Ava Schutzman) web personnel to keep you all informed.

regards, Mike DEC Alumni group founder/manager

[upchuck]

The days of programming on PDP-11s running RSTS, RSTS/e, RSX and RT11 (1978-1985) were some of the best of my life.

Toggling the front panel switches on an 11/45 to get it to boot (the tape reader had died) gave a real sense of accomplishment.

Long live the MicroVAX :)

RIP Ken, you were truly a pioneer.

[Snapping Turtle]

I’m still using a DECMate II and love how it works. I still have a service contract!

[ByteMercenary]

... funny no one has mentioned the ‘DIBOL’ programming language which is still around today. Masochists!

[ByteMercenary]

... funny no one has mentioned the ‘DIBOL’ programming language which is still around today. Masochists!

[Vroomfondel]

I’m still using a DECMate II and love how it works.

Do you have the CP/M coprocessor? DECmate II + CP/M coprocessor is my favorite CP/M machine of all time.

[The Cajun]

First computers worked on PDP 11/05, then PDP 11/34 and then a cluster of 3 VAX minicomputers.
Company then went to PC's in 96-98, no more VMS, yipeeee!
Will admit DEC was state of the art, way back when.

[Nick Danger]

I think the programmers of that time were superior to today’s programmers, because they did so much with so little.

• Every program contains at least one bug
• Any program can be shortened by at least one instruction
• Therefore, by induction, any program can be reduced to a single instruction that does not work

[Alas Babylon!]

Toggling the front panel switches on an 11/45 to get it to boot..

7 7 7 7 6 (3 up, 3 up, 3 up, 3 up, first 2 up). I still remember!

[rahbert]

we stand of the shoulders of giants...

[Myrddin]

I’m sure you recall that incrementing each letter
of VMS yields WNT aka Windows NT.

[goldbux]

I worked with LISP code running on a DEC PDP-10 at the Stanford AI Lab in 1970-71. No hard disk; had to reboot frequently from paper tape. Had our own operating system written in SAIL (Stanford AI Language). Very early, primitive precursors to Windows, TCP/IP protocol, & natural-language programming. It was a fascinating experience.

I never met Ken Olsen, but we competed with him vigorously at Data General for 8 years (1976-83). RIP Ken; you were a real pioneer.

Today's cell phones have much more computing power than we had available to run early hospital information systems.

[Noumenon]

You know, I had completely forgotten about that. I was on the SQL Server dev team at the time. Part of my job was smoothing over some of the finger-pointing from both sides. Those were heady days.

[printhead]

I hope I’m correctly attributing this line to Ken Olson. “Unix is snake oil”.

[chimera]

I seem to recall that for its time the Unibus architecture was pretty innovative. I “grew up” after the 370s on DEC minis, the 11/05 and 11/34, and was always told to think of the bus, not the processors boards, as the “heart” of the machine.

[kalee]

ping

[The Comedian]

Gawd, I should have known you were a bit twiddler as well.

I had a Micro-VAX in my living room in West Palm Beach in the mid 80's. A professor friend from the university wanted to get rid of the ancient artifact so that he could requisition another.

When I powered that baby up, then entire block's lights would dim. It was a thing of beauty. Like a piece of Krell technology.

Today is a good day to die.
I didn't say for whom.

[surfer]

Haven’t seen Ken since the 80’s. Maynard was quite the facility back in the day when RSTS/E and VMS rocked.

[taildragger]

RIP...

Cut my teeth on Cad Stations that ran of their CPU's, we eventually upgraded to a 785, man that thing was powerful and reliable. I used to know all the commands. They had a big tech pressence in the State of Massachuetts. Many folks in Mass that followed them made a fortune on their stock. Dang shame they went away....

[Just mythoughts]

Awe. A prayer of comfort for his family and friends. And a special thanksgiving prayer for he certainly gave many an opportunity to earn a ‘living’... He sure seems to fit the idea of recording many a good works to take home with him.

[Myrddin]

Some of my co-workers had an ongoing contract to port the Hewlett-Packet Software Process Control Daemon to other targets. That allowed a Softbench IDE to cross compile on a foreign target. HP Europe came to use in early 1993 asking for an SPCD port to Windows NT. The MS C++ compiler was a barely functional 1.0 release. NT didn't understand fork/exec semantics. SPCD wasn't written for threading. It required some "creative" work to solve the problem. It required a week for me to port it. The product went straight to Germany. The support from the compiler team at MS was first class.