Computer pioneer Ken Olsen dies at age 84 - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110208/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_obit_olsen)

There's some history lost.

My Dad worked for Digital/Compaq for over 20 years: 1980 - 2001. It was certainly a great company for many years and made a lot of people in MA and NH very successful.

The network of former DEC employees is very wide. I work in IT today and I am always running in to people who have a DEC connection.

Ken Olsen became a bit of a recluse over the past 10+ years which is a sad end for a man who had such a profound impact on both the computer industry as well as the local economy.

Early on in my career I worked on a DEC VAX 8550. The VAX hounds used to tell me the the unix world stole the ideas for unix from VMS.
Reading that story it was sad one guy built something so special and another just dismantles it until it got swallowed up by Compaq and then HP.

DEC was the force behind the "Massachusetts Miracle". Mr. Olsen was the force behind DEC. God bless him.