MIT 150: The Top 50

Number Six: The minicomputer Ken Olsen , pictured, and Harlan Anderson , who both worked at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in the 1950s, formed a start-up called Digital Equipment Corp. in 1957 to build what they called “interactive minicomputers,” which would be smaller and less expensive than mainframes and designed with business use in mind. Digital’s first minicomputer, the PDP-1, sold for $120,000 and came standard with 9K of internal memory. Digital became the second-biggest tech company in the world at one point, after IBM Corp.
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Number Six: The minicomputer

Ken Olsen, pictured, and Harlan Anderson, who both worked at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in the 1950s, formed a start-up called Digital Equipment Corp. in 1957 to build what they called “interactive minicomputers,” which would be smaller and less expensive than mainframes and designed with business use in mind. Digital’s first minicomputer, the PDP-1, sold for $120,000 and came standard with 9K of internal memory. Digital became the second-biggest tech company in the world at one point, after IBM Corp.