Ken Olsen
American engineer and businessman (1926–2011)
Kenneth Harry Olsen (February 20, 1926 – February 6, 2011) was an American engineer who co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson and his brother Stan Olsen.
Early life
Kenneth Harry Olsen was born on February 20, 1926, in Bridgeport, Connecticut and grew up in the neighboring town of Stratford, Connecticut. His father's parents came from Norway and his mother's parents from Sweden. Olsen began his career working summers in a machine shop. Fixing radios in his basement gave him the reputation of a neighborhood inventor.
After serving in the United States Navy between 1944 and 1946, Olsen attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned both a BS (1950) and an MS (1952) degree in electrical engineering.
Career
Pre-DEC
During his studies at MIT, the Office of Naval Research of the United States Department of the Navy recruited Olsen to help build a computerized flight simulator. Also while at MIT, he directed the building of the first transistorized research computer, the TX-0. Olsen was an engineer who had been working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the TX-2 project.
Olsen's most important connection to Project Whirlwind was his work on the Memory Test Computer (MTC), described as "a special purpose computer built to test core memory for the Whirlwind." Unlike the 18-bit TX-0, which was "designed to be a predecessor for a larger 36 bit machine, the TX-2," Whirlwind and the MTC used 16 bits.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ken Olsen” is american engineer and businessman (1926–2011). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Olsen, American and engineer, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q454315. VIAF identifies the subject as 122272494. The Library of Congress control number is n83125984. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926, 2011, 1957 and 1944.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ken Olsen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.