Comment Re: Ken Olsen -- Your values are missing today (Score 1) 172
I never met him, but I always admired the way he put values ahead of pure profit.
As a Field Grunt in Field Service I always was told to do what's right for the customer. In these days of call centers, untrained support personnel reading from scripts, software that requires a paid support contract to fix security defects in the releases... or to upgrade firmware which used to be free for buying the hardware (Oracle, HP).
We're in a world which views the customer as a consumer and pushes profit ahead of everything else.
VAX/VMS was a solid well supported product and Vaxclusters were revolutionary.
Ken Olsen made mistakes... but he never forgot he was an engineer first. Here's to the techie's techie who valued more than just the bottom line.
He missed the Unix boat and was late to the "Open Systems" camp -- but the folks at DEC put an awful lot of source stuff up for download on decwrl and market-20 on their dime before there were web browsers and download.com.
Here's to AltaVista, DECnet and BasicPlus. Here's to distributed computing to the desktop.