by Harlan E. Anderson
After the failed idea for a grandoise new enterprise that I had not been involved with at Lincoln Labs, Ken Olsen and I had been bitten by the idea of the two of us starting someting together during the winter of 1956-7. While still working full-time at our Lincoln Lab jobs, we were fairly secretive about what we had been planning during our evening and weekend time together.
Our mutual experience at Lincoln in successfully building the Memory Test Computer on a fast-track schedule was the cornerstone of our early relationship. Our vague idea was to make small, transitorized computers.
The first and most obvious problem was money. Neither of us had any to spare to invest in our dream. Ken had witnessed a commercial enterprise during his year at IBM, but in his capacity as an engineering liaison did not obtain any management or financial experience. He did see bureaucracy in action, which he didn’t like.
Other than our lunch hour visits to the Lexington Public Library to study their collection of business books, our experience had been limited to making budgets for engineering expenses at Lincoln. These did not, of course, include things like overhead, income, sales expense, accounts receivable, cash flow, balance sheets, etc.
[...] Did you know of the Lexington Public Library’s role in the founding of DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and so part of the creation of the computer revolution we’ve been living through the last 50 of so years? “Other than our lunch hour visits to the Lexington Public Library to study their collection of business books, our experience had been limited to making budgets for engineering expenses at Lincoln. These did not, of course, include things like overhead, income, sales expense, accounts receivable, cash flow, balance sheets, etc.” (from Harlan Anderson’s blog) [...]