Digital Equipment Corporation


Digital Equipment Corporation, using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline.
Although the company produced many different product lines over their history, they are best known for their work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis of all time. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space.
As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially with the introduction of RISC-based workstation machines, the performance niche of the minicomputer was rapidly eroded. By the early 1990s, the company was in turmoil as their mini sales collapsed and their attempts to address this by entering the high-end market with machines like the VAX 9000 were market failures. After several attempts to enter the workstation and file server market, the DEC Alpha product line began to make successful inroads in the mid-1990s, but was too late to save the company.
DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. During the purchase, some parts of DEC were sold to other companies; the compiler business and the Hudson, Massachusetts facility, were sold to Intel. At the time, Compaq was focused on the enterprise market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence. However, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002.
, decades-old hardware is being emulated in order to continue benefitting from software written long ago; funding for this is scheduled to last at least until 2030.

History

From 1957 until 1992, DEC's headquarters were located in a former wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts. The headquarter buildings were vacated in 1993, renamed Clock Tower Place, and subsequently redeveloped as Mill & Main Place, a 1.1 million square foot facility for offices and light industry.
Initially focusing on the small end of the computer market allowed DEC to grow without its potential competitors making serious efforts to compete with them. Their PDP series of machines became popular in the 1960s, especially the PDP-8, widely considered to be the first successful minicomputer. Looking to simplify and update their line, DEC replaced most of their smaller machines with the PDP-11 in 1970, eventually selling over 600,000 units and cementing DEC's position in the industry.
Originally designed as a follow-on to the PDP-11, DEC's VAX-11 series was the first widely used 32-bit minicomputer, sometimes referred to as "superminis". These systems were able to compete in many roles with larger mainframe computers, such as the IBM System/370. The VAX was a best-seller, with over 400,000 sold, and its sales through the 1980s propelled the company into the second largest computer company in the industry. At its peak, DEC was the second largest employer in Massachusetts, second only to the Massachusetts State Government.
The rapid rise of the business microcomputer in the late 1980s, and especially the introduction of powerful 32-bit systems in the 1990s, quickly eroded the value of DEC's systems. DEC's last major attempt to find a space in the rapidly changing market was the DEC Alpha 64-bit RISC instruction set architecture. DEC initially started work on Alpha as a way to re-implement their VAX series, but also employed it in a range of high-performance workstations. Although the Alpha processor family met both of these goals, and, for most of its lifetime, was the fastest processor family on the market, extremely high asking prices were outsold by lower priced x86 chips from Intel and clones such as AMD.
DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the enterprise market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence. However, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002.

Products

Beyond DECsystem-10/20, PDP, VAX and Alpha, DEC was well-respected for its communication subsystem designs, such as Ethernet, DNA, DSA, and its "dumb terminal" subsystems including VT100 and DECserver products.
Rainbow 100

Research

DEC's Research Laboratories conducted DEC's corporate research. Some of them were continued in operation by Compaq and are still operated by Hewlett-Packard. The laboratories were:
Some of the former employees of DEC's Research Labs or DEC's R&D in general include:
Some of the former employees of Digital Equipment Corp were responsible for developing DEC Alpha and StrongARM:
Some of the work of the Research Labs was published in the Digital Technical Journal, which was in published from 1985 until 1998.

Accomplishments and legacy

DEC supported the ANSI standards, especially the ASCII character set, which survives in Unicode and the ISO 8859 character set family. DEC's own Multinational Character Set also had a large influence on ISO 8859-1 and, by extension, Unicode.

Software

Originally the users' group was called DECUS during the 1960s to 1990s. When Compaq acquired DEC in 1998, the users group was renamed CUO, the Compaq Users' Organisation. When HP acquired Compaq in 2002, CUO became HP-Interex, although there are still DECUS groups in several countries. In the United States, the organization is represented by the Encompass organization; currently Connect.

Several editions of the Small Computer Handbook were published by DEC, giving information about their PDP line of computers. The editions were:
Web sites with photos of their covers include: