Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. They are generally referred to within the computing industry as DEC, despite rebranding themselves as Digital. They were later acquired by Compaq, who subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard. As of 2003 their product lines are still produced under the HP name.

Though DEC does not exist anymore, its logo is very much alive. It is now the logo of Digital GlobalSoft a well respected IT services company in India. Earlier this company was a 51 % subsidiary of DEC. Now it is a part of HP.

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 first 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 in 1967. It was a smaller 12-bit word machine that sold for about $25,000. The PDP-8 was small enough to fit on a cart. 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.

The PDP-8 was important historically because it was the first computer that was regularly purchased by a handful of end users as an alternative to using a larger system in a data center. Because of their low cost and portability, these machines could be purchased to fill a specific need, unlike the mainframe systems of the day that were nearly always shared among diverse users.

The PDP-8 had a limited instruction set and lacked the memory protection hardware required for a time sharing system.

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 than 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. While the PDP-11 systems supported several operating system of the day, including DEC's RSTS system, their most important role was to run Bell Labs' new UNIX operating system that was being made available to educational institutions. These PDP-11 systems were destined to be the sandbox for a generation of computer scientists.

The PDP-11 had a 64K address space. Most models had a paged architecture and memory protection features to allow timesharing[?], and could support split I&D architectures for an effective address size of 128K.

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. Desperate attempts by competitors such as Data General (which had 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.

The VAX series had an instruction set that is rich even by today's standards. In addition to the paging and memory protection features of the PDP series, the VAX supported virtual memory.

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 every 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 be used both in the VAX series, as well as a Unix workstation line 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 "OpenVMS", and it began to advertise more aggressively. DEC was simply not prepared to sell into a crowded 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 company's 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 an 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 Micro-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.

Digital was the first commercial business connected to the Internet, digital.com (http://www.digital.com) being one of the first of the now ubiquitous .com domains.

The popular AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com/), created by Digital, was one of the first comprehensive Internet search engines (although Lycos was earlier, it was much more limited).