Ken Salmon worked for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as a project engineer, straight from University, where he worked on designing processors. DEC regularly recruited from Essex University’s Computer Science course as they had a DEC system 10 mainframe – hence the students knew how to use DEC products. Ken joined the Computer Special Systems team at DEC, who made customised products for clients. His specialty was logic design. His very first job was designing a Tape Drive from scratch, which became a best seller. As his career progressed, Ken wanted to move into Sales but was discouraged from this by DEC HR, so decided to leave to work in Sales for a computer printing company. Usually DEC wanted engineers to move into management roles, but Ken did not want to go in this direction. He left DEC in 1980.