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The legacy of Ken Olsen - by Gordon College & Televerse Productions
The Genius of Ken Olson – by Gordon College & Televerse Productions
Let me tell you the story about how I almost dumped Ken Olsen into an icy pond.
It actually was the second incident involving the founder of Digital Equipment Corp., an interview and water. By the way, he tried to get people to call it Digital, but it will always be DEC to the hundreds of thousands of folks who were associated with it as employees, customers or observers.
The first incident came in the mid-1980s when a national publication did a profile of Olsen, and the interviewer found out that Olsen enjoyed canoeing. So a photographer sat Olsen in a canoe on a river. The pose wasn’t going to show Olsen as a rising giant of industry, so the photographer had his six-foot-something subject stand up in the canoe.
When the photo ran, the flame mails came in hard. “Everyone knows you don’t stand up in a canoe….blah, blah.” Look, the canoe was safely planted on a shallow sandbar. He wasn’t going to fall.
In my case, we cut it closer.
I was working for a IT-focused publication, and we were profiling some of the pioneers of the computer industry. I spent a couple hours with Ken at The Mill in Maynard.
If you don’t know where Maynard is, it’s near Concord. Even better, talk to a dozen New England entrepreneurs who are in any way related to the computers and are anywhere in the 45 to 65 year-old age group. Eliminate the three who don’t have a tie to DEC. Draw a circle around where the remaining companies are located, and Maynard is near the center.
That’s where you’ll find The Mill. Olsen built some shiny new buildings along Route 495 during DEC’s heydays of the 1980s and early 1990s, but The Mill – a classic 19th century redbrick structure with its share of dust – was headquarters for Ken. Ken was an engineer, so a sturdy old mill was just fine for him.
Oh, right, the heydays. Olsen, his brother Stanley and Harlan Anderson founded DEC in 1957. They built what became known as minicomputers, department-sized alternatives to the giant mainframes offered by IBM and rivals such as Burroughs and Honeywell, known collectively as The BUNCH. By the late 1960s everyone was building minicomputers, and minicomputers built the Massachusetts economy.
DEC was the biggest minicomputer company by the mid-1980s. Then the company really took off, right around the time of the canoe incident. It was so hot that Olsen had to bring the Queen Elizabeth II into Boston Harbor to supplement the city’s hotel and meeting space during one giant user group meeting. Like a rocket ship, however, DEC flamed out during the 1990s.
Now, about Ken and the pond behind The Mill.
It had been what they call a wide-ranging interview, not because of the questions. The problem was that Ken tended to range. In fact, he was a nightmare for an interviewer. He talked without punctuation. You may know the type. He would start with a simple comment, and shift into a story from 40 years ago, describing the personalities involved in a decision, and then timeshift into the current. Next thing you know, you have a 500-word history but no good quotes. Running the comment in print as is would have been as exciting as reading a bunch of machine code, but the meat was there.
In the interview, which occurred when DEC was ebbing, Ken addressed two of his critics’ key points. One, regarding the PC, was his statement that there was no need for anyone to have a computer in their home. The myth was that DEC ran into trouble because it didn’t acknowledge the PC. That was wrong. DEC was selling PCs fairly early on. One of the causes of its eventual failure was that it sold the wrong PCs the wrong way. It wasn’t alone in that. The list of PC hardware makers in the ’80s ran hundreds of pages.
His critics also pointed to the theory that Olsen the founder should have given up the reins to his company much earlier. It was the old business school argument that founders build companies, they don’t run them. As with his view on the home computer, there was no mea culpa, no apology, from Olsen. He just explained why he made the decisions that he did, no attempt at spin control.
Right. Back to the water.
When Ken decided the interview was over, that was it. Just time for a quick photo session. We went out to the pond behind The Mill. (It seems that all mills need a pond, and the pond and the red brick made for a nice background). The late winter ice was thin and soft, and water was showing at the edges.
The photographer positioned Ken on a foot-wide, industrial age wooden beam that jutted out from shore into the pond. Ken was a big man, with a handshake that enveloped the average guy’s paw. And the feet had to be sized near the mid-teens. He barely fit on the beam.
After a couple of shots, the photographer asked him to turn a bit. Mistake. Big feet shuffling, arms windmilling. Ken’s face was whiter than the ice, and the PR person who set up the interview saw her career crashing as fast as it seemed Ken was going to crash through the ice.
Enter the photographer, who calmly grabbed Ken’s shirt and restored order. Image of newspaper saved. PR person keeps job for at least a little while longer. CEO saved, but photo shoot over.
So now you know a bit more about Ken Olsen and the day we almost dumped the CEO. Olsen died over the weekend at the age of 84.
Read about Olsen's career timeline and highlights.
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