RIP, Ken Olsen (DEC founder)

[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.