Technobumpkin

Technobumpkin.

That was the term people at Digital  Equipment Corporation applied to the personal style of founder Ken Olsen, who died this past Sunday at the age of 84.

Becoming one of the very first venture-backed enterprises, he and two partners started the company is 1957, dropping the word "computer" from its name at the request of their conservative financial backers.


Almost everything they did became a template for others to follow. To wit:


-- Building smaller, more distributed, computers, in recognition of the simple fact that smaller machines were all that most customers needed to manage the routine tasks of their businesses;


-- Building a culture that was informal, centered on engineering, and without walls of any kind; a kind of "anti-IBM" of its day, which was Olsen's intention;


-- Locating in a recycled woolen mill in industrial Lowell Massachusetts, one of the earliest attempts to preserve historic structures for modern purposes (their biggest problem at the facility was keeping the pigeons out);


-- Adopting a relaxed dress code that featured rubber-soled shoes, unheard of in the executive suite at the time.

While embracing such modern, and ground-breaking, concepts, Olsen had  much in common with an earlier generation of "Titans" who created new kinds of organizations to exploit the rapid-fire development of technology in their respective eras. The similarities, to be sure, extend to his religious and philosophical roots in a Puritan view of the world. A FORTUNE Magazine story recounts a typical Olsen talk to a group of visitors to the company:

"Olsen starts by speaking of science as a search for truth, and life as a pilgrimage, and humility as the key to business success. 'It's easy to compete with people who think they know it all,' he says. Pretty soon the discussion shifts to the Puritans. He calls them the 'toughest men this world has ever seen,' better equipped to cope with failure than people today. Their secret? Never expecting much of their fallen fellow man, and never blaming others for their mistakes."

Like the rest of us, Olsen didn't get everything right. He had a dim view of the concept of personal computers for the home, for example.

But he did leave us with a clear notion of what a "shared vision"  means.