Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are far more well known than Ken Olsen.
Why? I think because of one word: Vision!
Read on...
jamie
¶ 11/07/2008
By 1980, the Apple II and other personal computers on the market were changing the minds of bigger, older computer companies about the future of personal computing. IBM, which dominated the market for large mainframe computers, and Digital Equipment Corporation, which had been doing a booming business in what were then seen as "smaller" computers with a wide variety of applications, had been slow about seeing that PCs were the wave of the future. Indeed, Ken Olsen, the founder of DEC (whom Bill Gates had idolized as a teenager), had been debunking the PC since 1977, when he told a convention of the World Future Society,
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
This famously mistaken judgment meant that DEC would later have to make a massive attempt to catch up, and it eventually led to Olsen's ouster from the company.
