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The Ultimate Entrepreneur: The Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation
The Ultimate Entrepreneur The Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation Author:Glenn Rifkin, George Harrar Two editors of Computerworld magazine here profile DEC, the entrepreneurial electronic phenomenon launched 30 years earlier 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 star... more »tled the industry in the 1960s with far-seeing 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 preempted 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.
The first full-length portrait of Olsen and his company describes the hectic pace of DEC's growth; the engineers' revolt that led to the formation of Data General; the loss of the personal computer market to IBM and Apple; and Wall Street's call for the ouster of Ken Olsen in 1983.« less