What is DEC?
Digital Equipment Corporation, later acquired by Compaq (who subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard), was a pioneer in the American computer industry. They are generally referred to within the computing industry as DEC, despite rebranding themselves as Digital.
History
The company was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen, a Massachusetts engineer who had been working at Lincoln Labs on the TX-2 project. The TX-2 was a transistor-based computer using a large amount of core memory. When that project ran into difficulties, Olsen left to form DEC. At the time the market was hostile to computer companies, and investors shied from their plans. Instead they started building small digital "blocks" (each effectively a single component from the TX-2 design( that could be combined together to be used in a lab setting. In 1961 the company was making a profit, and started construction of their fist computer the PDP-1.
Through the 1960s DEC produced a series of machines aimed at a price/performance point below IBM's mainframe machines, typically based on an 18-bit word, using core memory. True success followed with the introduction of the famous PDP-8, a smaller 12-bit word machine that sold for about $25,000. It was simple enough to be used for many roles, and they soon started being sold in huge numbers to new market niches, labs, railways, and all sorts of industrial applications. Today the PDP-8 is generally regarded as the first minicomputer.
Last of the famous machines in the PDP series was the PDP-11, which switched to a 16-bit word now that everyone in the computer industry was using ASCII. PDP-11 machines started in the market essentially as upscale PDP-8s, but as improvements to integrated circuits continued, they eventually were packaged in cases no larger that a modern PC. Their larger PDP-10 cousins, which used a 36-bit architecture, were aimed at data-processing centers instead, eventually being sold as the DECsystem 10 and 20.
In 1976 DEC decided to move to an entirely new 32-bit platform, which they referred to as the super-mini. They released this as the VAX 11/70 in 1978, and immediately took over the vast majority of the minicomputer market Despite attempts by competitors such as Data-General (which has been formed in 1968 by a former DEC engineer who had worked on a 16-bit design that DEC had rejected) to win back market share failed, due not only to DEC's successes, but the emergence of the microcomputer and workstation into the lower-end of the minicomputer market. In 1983, DEC cancelled their "Jupiter" project, which had been intended to build a successor to the PDP-10, and instead focused on promoting the VAX as their flagship model.
At its peak in the late 1980s, Digital was the second largest computer company in the world, with over 100,000 employees. It was during this time that they appeared to gain a feeling of invincibility, and branched out into software, producing products for almost very then "hot" niche. This included their own networking system, DECnet file and print sharing, relational database, and even transaction processing. Although many of these products were well designed, most of them were DEC-only or DEC-centric, and customers frequently ignored them and used 3rd party products instead. This problem was further magnified by Olsen's aversion to advertising and his belief that well-engineered products would sell themselves. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on these projects, at the same time that workstations were starting to approach the VAX in performance. In the early 1990s DEC "suddenly" found its sales faltering, and DECs first layoffs followed.
Their response was to design a single microprocessor that could use both the VAX series, as well as a UNIX workstation of their own. The result was the Alpha processor, which held the performance crown for much of the 1990s. DEC also tried to compete with UNIX by marketing the VMS operating system as "Open VMS", and it began to advertise more aggressively. DEC was simply not prepared to sell into a crowed UNIX market however, and their workstation and server line never gained much popularity beyond former DEC customers. Meanwhile the UNIX server market effectively ended sales of the VAX as well.
Ken Olsen was replaced by Robert Palmer as the companies CEO, but Palmer was unable to stave the tide of red ink and more rounds of layoffs ensued. Its database product was sold to Oracle, its chip business was sold to Intel, and eventually the company itself was sold to Compaq on January 26 1998, which itself was taken over by Hewlett-Packard in 2002.
Accomplishments
The first versions of the C programming language and the UNIX system ran on Digital's PDP series of computers (specifically the PDP-11), which were the first commercially viable minicomputers.
Digital also produced the popular VAX computer family, the Alpha (AXP) microprocessor (the first commercially available 64 bit microprocessor), the first commercially successful workstation (the VT-78), and some commercially unsuccessful personal computers including the DEC One, the first laptop computer and the first MS-DOS computer to use 3 1/2" floppy disks, which were later to become industry standard.
Digital produced top-line operating systems, like OS-8, RT-11, RSX-11 and VMS. PDP computers, in particular the PDP-11 model, inspired a generation of programmers and software developers. Some PDP-11 systems more than 25 years old (software and hardware) are still being used (as of 2003) to control and monitor factories, transportations systems and nuclear plants. VAX and Miro-VAX computers (very widespread in the 1980s) running VMS formed one of the most important pre-Internet networks, DECNET, which mixed business and research facilities.
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PIE Software Inc. 19/04/2003
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