Hardware and technology Archives

Keith Saunders

Keith started his tech career as an Apprentice at the Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell, getting his first job at DEC where he was and engineer in the Computer Special Systems department. His experience building service teams at DEC meant he moved on to computer company Alliant and telecommunications form Alcatel, heading up global services.

9 May 2025

Dr. Mike Burrows

After studying for a PhD in electrical engineering, Mike was offered a job at DEC’s Systems Research Centre in Palo Alto. There he worked on the Alta Vista search engine, which became the most popular search engine in the 1990s. After DEC, Mike moved on to jobs at Microsoft and Google, where he developed a distributed lock server, still in use today

29 April 2025

Trudy Norris-Grey

Trudy trained as an accountant, working for Vodafone predecessor Racal, and then DEC as a financial analyst. She worked her way up to become DEC’s first female board member. She moved on to Kodak and then became Vice President at Oracle. She became the first female leader of a major tech company in the UK in 2005 when she headed Sun Microsystems UK.

15 April 2025

Simone Hume

Simone started work at DEC as a temp, and taking advantage of their DigiTemps programme, got a permanent job in bid support and assisted consultants with proposals for Multi–Vendor Customer Services. She moved on to Base Sales, upselling additional services to existing customers, and then Field Sales around the time of the Compaq takeover. After DEC she moved to IBM as a Partner Account Manager for the public sector.

14 April 2025

Shaheed Haque

Shaheed joined DEC straight from university, and worked as an Engineer, contributing to the development of the 50-way sync connector and other innovative technologies, including inventing a graphic editor for state machines. His ground-breaking work on video servers saw Shaheed and his team move to Oracle where they worked on tech for companies who wanted to start using satellites to do shopping on televisions.

8 April 2025

Richard Briggs

Richard started off working with computers in Air Traffic Control, moving to DEC as an engineer. As his career progressed, he specialised in networks and moved over to telecoms, his work in ADSL laying the groundwork for future broadband infrastructure.

7 April 2025

Ken Senior

Ken began his IT career as an electronics technician for the Navy, and after he left, joined Honeywell where he worked on the first computers taking commands from a keyboard. His next job was at DEC as a Field Engineer, becoming the first European Field Service manager in 1965. he worked up the ranks at DEC to Secretary to the Executive Board at DEC, working closely with founder Ken Olsen.

4 April 2025

Ken Salmon

Ken was recruited by DEC from Essex University, who trained students using DEC computers. He started in the Computer Special Systems Division working as a Project Engineer in logic design. His first job was to design a tape drive from scratch. As his career progressed he wanted to work in Sales rather than Management, so moved to a computer printing company.

1 April 2025

John Leng

After an apprenticeship at Harwell, John joined DEC as an engineering manager, and went on to open DEC UK in Reading in 1964. He had responsibility for marketing, manufacturing and engineering. He was promoted to European Regional Manager with responsibility of Digital’s efforts throughout Europe.