RIP, Ken Olsen (DEC founder)

[chadbag]

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/02/08/dec_founder_olsen_dead/


This probably does not mean much to most of you but it may mean something to some of you.

And for all of you, Ken was the guy who brought computing out the the batch mainframe world and put it in the interactive lab/office world with a terminal on your desk. Later on, this idea of a "personal" computer (small mini computer in the office instead of IT run mainframe off somewhere you submitted jobs to) was transformed into the "PC" idea. Unfortunately Ken missed that but many consider him the great grandfather of the idea of a "PC" that you had personal access to.

(With this current "cloud" push I wonder if we are not going backwards to the mainframe idea?)

[chadbag]

one more on this


The Associated Press: Computer pioneer Ken Olsen dies at age 84


http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5i68S2FVL70ft7c8zWPc4H0RzYfMQ?docId=25ef37ecd6214f1cbace3af7afdaf36c

[HES]

A brilliant man and his passing is sad. As for the move to cloud based computing being kind of like going back to the main frame -esque world, yes it is. Major IT companies have been pushing cloud based computing since at least the early 90s. Why? because with a move back to that centralized environment there is the possibility to increase their revenue streams. Will they charge for CPU time like they used to? Probably not. But there are other ways to increase revenue by getting people to rely on not only centralized applications, but centralized data storage. That is one of my biggest gripes with Google and why I try not to use a lot of their products (though I do have an android powered phone).

[500grains]

The PDP/11 haunts me still. :cool:

RIP

[chadbag]

The PDP/11 haunts me still. :cool:

RIP

My first job out of HS (summer job -- two summers in a row) was as a night operator at DEC at the ZKO facility in Nashua NH. I would go around with a cart of mag tapes (the big round ones you see in the movies) and stick them on and run back up procedures.

By then most of the machines there were VAX types but I did backup one or two PDP/11 machines. One night there was a problem with the backup and I had to look up in the manual to get some help. The examples in the manual and been produced on that very machine!

Another night I logged in to one PDP/11 and there was a system note that that machine was being decommissioned and being sent to the computer museum. It went directly from production use to the museum. Was a funny feeling to work on it.

Anyway, KO as he was affectionately called had a great influence on me and my family. My dad got a job with DEC when I was 10 years old and we moved from Phoenix to this place called Massachusetts, where I grew up on almost 3 acres of woodland and lived in a small town (bedroom town). I spent countless hours with my dad at "The Mill" -- he was working on a Masters degree at night and I played "Dungeon", "Adventure", and "Empire" for countless hours, first on PDP and then VAX machines. It got me interested in computers and later on my dad bought a PDT11/150 "workstation" machine from DEC when they had an employee sale and later we also had an Atari 400 and Atari 800. This got me on the road to learning programming myself. That has lead to many interesting jobs, my own time at DEC, living in Germany, and even take my side track for the last 9 years running eguns.com It also provided me with money for a few years to buy gun toys back when I did some contracting and was single! DEC had a profound personal effect on me but also opened up computing to the "masses" at the time and that lead to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates doing there thing. With Ken Olsen, I don't know if we would have had Steve Jobs and Bill Gates or how (or even if) the change to a more personal immediate style of computing would have occurred.

[500grains]

So what happened to DEC? Bought out or closed down?

I had to use a PDP/11 in a hardware design course way back when. It would go down after 10 p.m. when I needed it most and when the lab guy was gone. One of the other kids figured out how to break into the room where it was and get it up again. I skipped that portion of the lesson.

The whole place had a mild hum to it, the floor was those white tiles with big thick wires underneath, and the electricity bill must have been enormous because there was a lot of stuff there. The Vax machines were upstairs and reserved for grad students. The Vaxes were in a large sound-insulated room so that the hum did not annoy professors in their offices.

Out of the whole program, I liked recursive programming the best (and COBOL batch database bullshit the worst). Recursive programming seemed like a simplified version of the Matrix movie: I was never sure where I really was or whether it was real or not.

[chadbag]

So what happened to DEC? Bought out or closed down?


The AP article (second link I posted) describes it best but basically they got bought up by Compaq (which got bought up later by HP). DEC products are still in use and HP continues some of the product lines. Other pieces were sold off to Oracle, Intel, some of the disk drive makers, etc.

[500grains]

Are the VAX machines still in use?

I hear that the IRS is using some IBM mainframes from the 1970s. Amazing, if true.

[HES]

A lot of institutions (mainly financial) are still using IBM mainframes (system 36s, 38s and even 390s) running SNA (now tunneled in IP packets). Its a case of legacy systems and "If it aint broke, dont fix it.

[chadbag]

Are the VAX machines still in use?


There are probably a bunch of them out there. However, DEC introduced the Alpha (officially, at least at start, Alpha AXP) in the early 90s and moved their VMS (later OpenVMS) operating system to it and so most people running VMS are probably on Alpha machines now. Don't know when HP discontinued the last Alphas. However, it appears OpenVMS has been ported to Itanium and is still available from HP

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/

VMS was the real jewel. The HW architecture was good but was not that important. People are wedded to VMS, not the VAX or Alpha. VMS was and probably is light years ahead of unix in many regards and for many sorts of jobs.

[WGG]

Ken was a great IT visionary even though he missed the moves to the PC and Unix. He was also a kind and generous man.

I still remember the night I was working a tech support hot line when I learned that the board of directors had replaced Ken with Robert Palmer. The founder who would not lay off his employees had been fired and Palmer sold the company off in pieces.

I worked for DEC for 10 years before Compaq bought us and then merged with HP. Been here 22 years now and it sure isn't as fun as when Ken was my boss.

[chadbag]

Ken was a great IT visionary even though he missed the moves to the PC and Unix. He was also a kind and generous man.


I heard stories when I was a kid about Ken wandering around The Mill on Christmas Eve telling engineers to go home to their families.

And about his puttering up to Canobie Lake Park in NH in his old Ford car (small sub compact old car, not big hi-falutin car), to the company party, with a "I [heart] DEC" bumper sticker.

Ken was the Steve Jobs or Bill Gates of the previous IT Generation.



I still remember the night I was working a tech support hot line when I learned that the board of directors had replaced Ken with Robert Palmer. The founder who would not lay off his employees had been fired and Palmer sold the company off in pieces.

I worked for DEC for 10 years before Compaq bought us and then merged with HP. Been here 22 years now and it sure isn't as fun as when Ken was my boss.

I left DEC in Spring of 1993. I started at ZKO/Spit Brook and ended my DEC career in Munich at the German HQ. Just a few months before Ken got the boot, I was in a cost center meeting and I remember saying I wanted to work at DEC for the next 50 years. Just a short while later, after Ken was gone, I volunteered to get laid off (laying off in Germany is/was very hard so they looked for volunteers first, discretely so not to run afoul of the "workers council").

I was working for a startup company in NH that was doing VMS Y2K remediation in 1998 when Compaq bought DEC. We were almost all former DECcies. It was a huge event when Compaq bought DEC. Kind of like a body blow to the kidneys even though we all no longer worked there -- we all had friends still there.

[WGG]

I had just gotten off 93 and was sitting at the light before turning into the Salem plant when I heard that Compaq bought DEC. I couldn't believe what I was hearing on the radio, although I should have know it was coming after Palmer sold off the semiconductor and network groups.

It was a really turbulent time in my life since I was going through a divorce at the time and this just added to the uncertainty. Not many months later they told us they were closing the plant and moving the work to either Houston, TX or Fremont, CA. I have been in Houston 10 years now and still miss NH.