Name/Title
1988- The Ultimate Entrepreneur, Ken OlsenDescription
1988- This is the Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation by George Harrar, Glenn Rifkin, 336 PAGES: Hardcover, CONDITION: Excellent. Two editors of Computerworld magazine here profile DEC, the entrepreneurial electronic phenomenon launched 30 years ago by a trio of M.I.T. engineers in a defunct factory near Boston. The leader was Ken Olsen, whose informal hands-on management style contrasted sharply with the structured methods at IBM, a soon-to-be competitor. Digital startled the industry in the 1960s with farseeing minicomputer development, the authors recall, and later survived expansion problems, the defection of top people and a clumsy lunge at the personal-computer field that was pre-empted in the event by IBM and Apple. Olsen and DEC won renewed top-rank success in the late 1980s with an imaginative computer-networking program that gave a new dimension to information electronics. Rifkin and Harrar, in this long and sluggish business saga, write for technological cognoscente without explaining to lay readers the computer's many-faceted functions and uses. 60,000 first printing; $50,000 ad/promo.General Notes
Note
For those who got into computing before the DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) and Compaq's merge, DEC's VAX/VMS, Alpha processor, elegant workstation and notebooks are way too familiar. This book gives an insight to the making of Digital. Ken Olsen and his people who took a $70,000 investment and turn Digital into to a Fortune 50 company worth over $25 billion.
This is not today's silicon valley IPO thriller that an unprofitable company is worth $50 billion overnight. This is a book about a company in a competitive emerging market that survived and thrived.
Digital has an irreplaceable place in computer history. When IBM missed the minicomputer trend, Digital took it. Then both missed the PC trend (first IBM, then Digital). When Apple's order processing system run out of capacity, they was put on wait list for Digital's PDP-11.