Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation (or DEC) was a hardware, software, and services company, producing all of the computers, terminals, printers, and most other peripheral devices associated with their computer systems. It was ultimately purchased by Compaq in 1998 in what was then the largest computer manufacturer merger in American history.

History[edit]

DEC was founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. It released several lines of popular minicomputers, starting with the pdp/8 in 1958. In 1968, DEC released a integrated-circuit version of the PDP-8, which made DEC a pioneer in the application of integrated circuits in commercial computers^[1]. At its peak in the late 1980s, the company employed over 100,000 people across the world and had $4 billion in cash on hand, making it the second largest computer company in the world, behind IBM. The popular PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers were sold by DEC from the 1970s on. However, a precipitous decline in business at a time when PCs were growing in popularity resulted in Compaq buying DEC in 1998, although the PDP-11 rights were sold to Mentec. DEC produced various personal computers as well, including the Gigi, and a workstation based on a pdp/8 in microprocessor form. The 8086/Z80 hybrid DEC Rainbow personal computer competed for a time with the IBM PC. However, DEC did not successfully market the Rainbow against the PC and, unlike the PC, the hardware architecture was kept proprietary, which led to DEC dropping the Rainbow line after selling about 300,000 units.

DEC is mentioned in the Tracy Kidder non-fiction book The Soul of a New Machine, as then-competitor Data General Corporation (which was founded by three former DEC employees) was attempting to compete with DEC's VAX computer line; the book also features internal competition between a better-funded Data General product in North Carolina and a fledgling "skunk works" project in Massachusetts.

Importance and influence[edit]

DEC had a huge influence on the modern computer industry. The PDP-11 and VAX systems were much admired and inspired some CPUs that followed. Unix (the predecessor of Linux) and the C programming language were both developed on PDP-11 systems. This is doubtless due to the fact that PDP-11s and VAXes were common in university settings. The VT100 terminal set the base standard for smart terminals, and the VMS Operating system (now OpenVMS) running on the VAX and AXP computers was also very popular. The 8-bit CP/M operating system was inspired by the pdp/8's OS/8 and PDP-11's RT-11 operating systems. In turn, MS DOS was based on 86DOS, which was based on CP/M, and Microsoft Windows was originally based on MSDOS. Further, ACLs (Access Control Lists) were a feature of VMS that was later incorporated into Windows.

References[edit]

1. ↑ Eldon C. Hall, Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AIAA:1996, ISBN 1-56347-185-X)