The death of Digital Equipment founder Ken Olson has prompted a bit of sniggering; the late entrepreneur dismissed the personal computer as a toy for playing video games that would never find a place in the business world. But as Bill Gates is the first to point out, there would have been no personal computer without DEC’s generation of minicomputers.

Mr. Olsen and his younger brother Stan lived their passion for electronics in the basement of their Stratford home, inventing gadgets and repairing broken radios. After a stint in the Navy at the end of World War II, Mr. Olsen headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. He took a job at M.I.T.’s new Lincoln Laboratory in 1950 and worked under Jay Forrester, who was doing pioneering work in the nascent days of interactive computing.

In 1957, itching to leave academia, Mr. Olsen, then 31, recruited a Lincoln Lab colleague, Harlan Anderson, to help him start a company. For financing they turned to Georges F. Doriot, a renowned Harvard Business School professor and venture capitalist. According to Mr. Colony, Digital became the first successful venture-backed company in the computer industry. Mr. Anderson left the company shortly afterward, leaving Mr. Olsen to put his stamp on it for more than three decades.

In Digital’s often confusing management structure, Mr. Olsen was the dominant figure who hired smart people, gave them responsibility and expected them “to perform as adults,” said Edgar Schein, who taught organizational behavior at M.I.T. and consulted with Mr. Olsen for 25 years. “Lo and behold,” he said, “they performed magnificently.”

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 8:00 pm.