Digital Equipment Corporation is long gone. It was bought by Compaq, which in turn was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. But as long as DEC founder Ken Olsen was alive, the legendary Massachusetts minicomputer company wasn’t truly dead. Now Olsen is gone, leaving behind a legacy that is both classic and curious.
For years, DEC was second only to IBM (albeit a distant second), and its influence here in Massachusetts can’t be overstated. The so-called Massachusetts Miracle of the 1980’s was led by Ken Olsen and Digital, and the idea that DEC could disappear almost overnight was unthinkable; but like Prime, DG (Data General), and Wang, DEC was swept away by the rapid move business and industry made from minicomputers to microcomputers. Massachusetts endured a grueling recession in the first half of the 1990’s that was ended thanks to the Internet revolution.
Olsen left DEC but, unlike Steve Jobs, he never returned to the company he created. Once or twice Olsen was featured in the Boston Globe, saying he had an idea he was developing, but nothing came of it. For all practical purposes, Olsen was retired. One of the noteworthy things that Olsen did was to hire Bob Taylor in 1983, just as the Massachusetts Miracle was about to kick off. Taylor had left Xerox PARC, where he managed the development of a few innovations, including the Graphical User Interface, LASER printers, and Ethernet, and that was after his years managing the creation of a little thing called the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet.