When I was in my 20s, I was taught the relationship between marketing and sales over a bonfire.

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Over 30 years ago, before the arrival of the personal computer, there were desktop computers called office workstations. Designed around the first generation of microprocessors, these computers ran business applications like word processing, spreadsheets, and accounting. They were an improvement over the dumb terminals hanging off of mainframes and minicomputers, but ran proprietary operating systems and software. My third startup, Convergent Technologies, was in the business of making these workstations.

The OEM Business

Convergent’s computers were bought and then resold by other computer manufacturers – all of them long gone: Burroughs, Prime, Monroe Data Systems, ADP, Mohawk, Gould, NCR, 4-Phase, AT&T. Convergent had assembled a stellar team with founders from Digital Equipment Corporation and Intel and engineers from Xerox PARC. And once we went public, we hired a veteran VP of Sales from Honeywell.

As the company’s revenues skyrocketed, Convergent started a new division to make a multi-processor Unix-based mini-computer. I had joined the company as the product marketing manager and now found myself as the VP of marketing for this new division. We were a startup inside a $200 million company. A marketer for 5 years, I thought I knew everything and proceeded to write the data sheets for our new computer.

Since this new computer was very complicated—it was a pioneer in multi-processing– I concluded it needed an equally detailed data sheet. In fact, when I was done, the datasheet describing our new computer, proudly called the MegaFrame, was 16 pages long. I fact-checked the datasheet with my boss (who would be my co-founder at Epiphany) and the rest of the engineering team. We all agreed it was perfect. We’d left no stone unturned in answering every possible question anyone could ever have about our system. As we typically did, I printed up several thousand to send out to the sales force.

The day the datasheets came back from the printers, I sent the boxes to the sales department in Convergent’s corporate headquarters, a separate building across the highway, and sent a copy to our CEO and the new VP of Sales. (I was thinking it was such a masterpiece I might get an “attaboy” or at least a “wow, thanks for doing all the hard work for our sales organization.”)

So when I got a call from the VP of sales who said, “Steve, just read your new datasheet. Why don’t you come over to corporate. We have a surprise for you,” I smugly thought, “They probably thought it was so good, I’m going to get a thank you or an award or maybe even a bonus.”

Fahrenheit 451

I got in my car to make the five minute drive over the freeway. Turning into the parking lot, I noticed smoke coming from the far end of the lawn. As I parked and walked closer I noticed a crowd of people around what seemed to be an impromptu campfire. “What the heck??” As an ex sales and marketing VP, our CEO had a Silicon Valley reputation for … Next Page »

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[Updated 5:15 pm. See below] Ken Olsen, the co-founder and former CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), died on Sunday. He was 84. The news was confirmed yesterday by Gordon College in Wenham, MA, where Olsen was a longtime trustee. There has been an outpouring of commentary about Olsen’s career and the impact of DEC on the computer industry. (You can read obituaries in the New York Times, Boston Globe, and CNET.)

Olsen, an MIT alum, started Digital with Harlan Anderson in 1957 with $70,000 in seed funding from Georges Doriot of American Research and Development. The Maynard, MA, company went on to dominate the minicomputer industry (as opposed to mainframes), employing more than 125,000 people in 86 countries and becoming the second-largest IT company behind IBM. Through the 1970s and ‘80s, DEC anchored the burgeoning Route 128 tech corridor and was joined by Data General, Wang, and other computer companies.

But DEC was famously slow to embrace the desktop computer market, and the company struggled through the late 80s and early 90s. Olsen resigned from DEC in 1992, and the company went on to be acquired by Compaq and then Hewlett-Packard. And as DEC went, so did the Route 128 ecosystem.

In a letter, Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates called Olsen “one of the true pioneers of the computing industry.” Gates added, “He was also a major influence in my life and his influence is still important at Microsoft through all the engineers who trained at Digital.”

Some of those engineers are weighing in with their remembrances. Gordon Bell, a principal researcher at Microsoft who spent 23 years at DEC as vice president of R&D, wrote in a post on Xconomy today, “I tend to remember all the humor and moments of irony that we shared while building computers at DEC.”

Yuchun Lee, the co-founder and former CEO of Unica (now part of IBM), worked at Digital from 1989-1992. He writes in an e-mail, “DEC was an organization with a terrific culture: one of intellectual honesty, meritocracy, and a desire to win. All of this can be directly attributed to Ken Olsen and his vision as the founder and leader of the best days of Digital. I’ve learned much of what a great and significant company ought to look and feel like as one grows up and am very fortunate to have cut my teeth there right out of school.”

History is made, and then it’s gone unless we pay attention. Olsen was the prototypical Boston tech entrepreneur. He leaves behind a legacy of thousands of employees who have gone on to new endeavors. DEC also provides a well-known case study of a hugely successful venture-backed company that failed to adapt to a changing market. Then again, not very many tech companies last more than 30 years.

I’ll update this space with any more unique comments or stories I hear from the innovation community.

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When we are riding a bus along Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, a man strikes up a conversation with my wife and me. “You know, I’m a ‘DEC:ie,’ that’s what we used to be called when I worked for DEC, Digital Equipment,” he tells us.

It’s been 10 years since the company ceased to exist, after being bought by PC manufacturer Compaq in 1998. When people still, a decade later, regard themselves as “DEC:ies,” it says something about the impact DEC once had, as the first, largest, and most successful firm in the once flourishing Massachusetts minicomputer industry.

When the cluster was at its heyday during the 1970s and 1980s, it was home not only to DEC but to a number of other minicomputer manufacturers, including Wang, Prime, Data General, and Apollo, as well as suppliers of everything from motherboards to software. Today, it may hard to believe that only 20 years ago Route 128, the beltway around Boston, rivaled Silicon Valley as a symbol of innovation and cutting-edge computing technology. Nobody talks about minicomputers any more, the firms have virtually all disappeared, either by being bought up or by going out of business. But the legacy of the minicomputer cluster is still important to the economy in several ways; in fact, some of the product lines that originated from it way back when continue to generate billions of dollars in revenues.

I have my own memories of Digital Equipment. In 1988, I interviewed the company’s founder and CEO Ken Olsen for the Swedish magazine Ny Teknik, where I will return to work after finishing my fellowship at Xconomy in a few days.

The company’s headquarters was in an old textile plant called The Mill—a huge maze of dark red brick buildings in Maynard, MA. The place had a certain austerity to it, with Ethernet cables running on naked metal cable troughs through corridors and offices, and a reception lobby furnished with rustic shaker chairs.

Olsen and Harlan Anderson, his coworker from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, had founded DEC in 1957 with $70,000 in seed money from venture capital pioneer general Georges Doriot. They put out their first minicomputer, the PDP-1, two years later. It was followed by an enormous range of other products, not only computers like the PDP-8, PDP-11, and the famous VAX models, but also terminals, printers, communication units, and software.

Ken Olsen was an impressive, tall man who downplayed his own importance during the interview, talking about helping other people grow and delegating responsibilities. But at the same time, he was known to be strong-willed and emotional.

I got a small taste of his well-known hot temper when I asked why DEC was so ambivalent in its support for the Unix operating system—a common complaint among users of the company’s machines. “Nobody supports Unix more than we do, it’s running on more of our machine’s than on any one else’s,” he told me. After the outburst, I decided not to confront him with his notorious characterization of Unix vendors as “snakeoil salesmen.”

When we met, DEC had grown to be the second-largest company in the computer industry. Olsen was generally regarded as one of the USA’s most successful managers, and many expected DEC to surpass number one IBM in sales within a few years. But in reality, the company had already reached it peak. The staff had expanded rapidly, but sales were stalling and profits had begun to erode. Ken Olsen abruptly left the firm in 1992, six years before Compaq bought the troubled company. DEC’s sale also heralded the end of the Massachusetts minicomputer era.

It is hard to define a minicomputer in specific technical terms. Firms like Apollo, Prime, and Data General each had different approaches, and it might be easier to regard “mini” as more of a cultural identity. The term set the industry apart from the traditional mainframe builders of that time such as IBM or Univac. A fascinating account of the inner culture of a minicomputer company is Tracy Kidder’s 1981 book The Soul of a New Machine, in which the author closely follows a development project at DEC spin-off Data General, a company that had been founded by PDP-8 chief designer Ed DeCastro.

Minicomputers were of course smaller and less expensive than mainframe machines, but they … Next Page »

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