Succeeding despite yourself is often identified as a new approach, a new discipline.
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Let's take a look at DEC from a management point of view. That is the real story. When thirty-one year old Ken Olsen and his twenty-eight year old partner Harlan Anderson emerged from their M.I.T. research labs in the late fifties, one thing was certain: they were engineers, not businessmen. Their plan was to commercialize their computer knowledge by debunking the high priests of high technology. They would put computers in the hands of those using them instead of requiring users to go on hands and knees into the glass and air conditioned temples of the mainframe gods that were then the self-appointed keepers of the computer kingdom. A holy war is not a bad business strategy to begin with. The actual business plan was modest and conservative. A learn-as-you-go approach can be made to work, provided you don't attempt to invent management at the same time you are inventing products. Being able to do one is no assurance that you can do the other.
Departing from M.I.T.'s Lincoln Labs where they had worked on the SAGE (Semi Automatic Ground Environment) Air Defense System for the U.S. Government, Olsen had a new idea and a new technology to bring to the computer world. Communications with the mainframes of the day was by electric typewriter and punch cards. You typed in commands, added data and programs by stacks of cards, and then the answers printed out on rolls of paper. It seemed normal at the time. The task that Olsen had been assigned in the SAGE System was to get text to appear on radar screens. The big cathode ray tubes displayed "live" electronic returns from aircraft in the form of blurred blips on the screen. They were re-painted each time the sweep of a rotating antenna received a renewed reflected signal from the aircraft being illuminated with radio frequency energy.
With hundreds of blips on a screen at any one time and each of them moving with each new paint, they somehow had to be numerically labeled, and then those labels had to be made to follow or track the aircraft.
With a touch of a button, Olsen made a tiny electronic circle appear in the middle of the screen. With a stick control, the circle could then be moved to cover a radar blip, numbers could be typed in next to it, and the whole little designator could then be assigned to a tracker who would keep the one on top of the other as they moved about.
While he was at it, Olsen worked on a map that appeared on the screen and a method of electronically going to any point on that map and being able to zoom in on a specific area, with that spot becoming the center of the screen and the map shifting accordingly.
All this eventually translated into the DEC PDP-1 (Programmed Data Processor), which had a computer screen and keyboard. It was launched in 1959 at $120,000 per copy, and DEC was off and running. Olsen had become the father of interactive computing.
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