Portrait of Kenneth H. Olsen

Accession: 102630448

Description: In 1957, Ken Olsen, along with Harlan Anderson, an MIT Lincoln Laboratory colleague, founded the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC began producing printed circuit logic modules used by engineers to test electronic equipment. Olsen quickly realized that many of the functions being performed by mainframe computers could be done by much smaller computers and set out to produce them, thus the world first small interactive computer was announced in 1960, the Programmed Data Processor PDP-1.