Career
During his studies at MIT, the Office of Naval Research of the United States Department of the Navy recruited Olsen to help build a computerized flight simulator. Also while at MIT he directed the building of the first transistorized research computer. Olsen was an engineer who had been working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the TX-2 project.
In 1957, Ken Olsen and an MIT colleague, Harlan Anderson, decided to start their own firm. They approached American Research and Development Corporation, an early venture capital firm, which had been founded by Georges Doriot, and founded Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). In the 1960s, Olsen received patents for a saturable switch, a diode transformer gate circuit, an improved version of magnetic core memory, and the line printer buffer. (Note that MIT professor Jay W. Forrester is generally credited with inventing the first practical magnetic core memory).
Ken Olsen was known throughout his career for his paternalistic management style and his fostering of engineering innovation. Ken Olsen's valuing of innovation and technical excellence spawned and popularized techniques, such as engineering matrix management, that are broadly employed today throughout many industries.
He was inducted as a Fellow of the Computer History Museum in 1996. He was awarded the Vermilye Medal in 1980.
In 1986, Fortune Magazine named Olsen "America's most successful entrepreneur", and the same year he received the IEEE Engineering Leadership Recognition Award. Olsen was the subject of a 1988 biography, The Ultimate Entrepreneur: The Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation written by Glenn Rifkin and George Harrar.
In 2011, he was listed at #6 on the MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT.
Read more about this topic: Ken Olsen
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