In doing some research for my book, The Flight of a Wild Duck which will be published in September, I ran across a poster that Ken Olsen had commissioned. I had been looking for it for many years. A few months after joining Digital Equipment in the summer of 1979, I was promoted to Senior … Continue reading
Tag Archives: Digital Equipment
Factory of broken dreams: Will the Googleplex be next
Intel just announced that it would close the Hudson Manufacturing Facility it acquired from Digital Equipment Corp in 1997. The press release from Intel said “the Hudson plant has been used to make a variety of low-end chips found in many electronic devices.” The closure of this plant will not mean much to people other than the thousand or so people directly affected. The exception to this are the few pioneers who vision and drive created it in the first place. They dared to dreamed big and lost. While they understood the potential of semi-conductor technology and large scale integration, like all of us at that time, they did not understand that the computer industry was about to be turned sideway and that companies that were vertically integrated would fail like Digital would fail.
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Alta Vista RIP
Evidently, Yahoo will close down Alta Vista on July 8th, the Internet search company it acquired in 2003. This is the second time Yahoo has killed Alta Vista. Let me explain.
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Goodbye Ken Olsen
Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment died yesterday at the age of 84. He was a special and I would say even extraordinary person who had a great impact on the computer industry and on me personally. Continue reading