Digital Equipment Corporation founder and longtime CEO Ken Olsen died this week at 84. I never met Ken Olsen, but I have a sense of him through his products. The first computer I ever programmed was a PDP-1 accessed over an old TTY terminal from my junior high school. At one point in the 1980s I owned a PDP-8 I bought as salvage and installed in my California cellar. Not only did that old PDP-8 give me many hours of fun as I brought it back to life, it also heated my bungalow! So when I think of Ken Olsen, I think of industrial-strength computers.

Avram Miller did know Ken Olsen and has a recollection of […]