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Digital Equipment should not be confused with Digital Research; the two were completely separate entities.
The company was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen, a Massachusetts engineer who had been working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the TX-2 project. The TX-2 was a transistor-based computer using the then-huge amount of 64K 36-bit words of core memory. When that project ran into difficulties, Olsen left to form DEC with Harlan Anderson, a colleague from his MIT days. At the time the market was hostile to computer companies, and investors shied from their plans. Instead they started building small digital "modules" (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 1960sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Years: 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around 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-8The PDP-8 was the first successful commercial minicomputer, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the 1960s. It was the first widely-sold computer in the DEC PDP series of computers (the PDP-5 was not originally intended to be a general-purpo in 1964Events January January 1 Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland is dissolved. January 3 Senator Barry Goldwater announces that he will seek the Republican nomination for President. January 5 In the first meeting between leaders of the Roman Catholic and Ort. It was a smaller 12-bit word machine that sold for about $16,000. 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.
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. Today the PDP-8 is generally regarded as the first minicomputerMinicomputer is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems ( mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems ( microcomputers or.
Their larger PDP-10The PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of cousins, which used a 36-bit architecture, were aimed at data-processing centers instead, eventually being sold as the DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20.
Another 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.
The PDP-11 systems supported several operating systems of the day, including Bell Labs' new UNIX operating system as well as DEC's RSX and RSTS. Both RSTS and UNIX were available to educational institutions at little or no cost, and these PDP-11 systems were destined to be the sandbox for a generation of engineers and computer scientists.
The PDP-11's 16-bit, byte-oriented architecture provided a 64KB virtual address space. Most models had a paged physical memory architecture and memory protection features to allow timesharing, and some could support split Instruction & Data spaces for an effective virtual address size of 128KB and a physical address size of up to 4MB.
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 11/780 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 (as well as an abundance of addressing modes). In addition to the paging and memory protection features of the PDP series, the VAX supported virtual memory. The VAX could use both Unix and DEC's own VMS operating system.
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 based on RISC architecture were starting to approach the VAX in performance. Blinded by their own success of the VAX/ VMS products which followed the proprietary model, the company executives would later be blind-sided by commodity hardware in the form of Intel-based personal computers and standards-based software such as unix and internet protocols such as TCP/IP. In the early 1990s DEC "suddenly" found its sales faltering, and DEC's first layoffs followed.
In 1990 DEC was about to launch a new generation of computer disk drives into the marketplace. Code named the RA-90, it was the second largest development project ever undertaken by the company. Several major technological innovations were to be simultaneously integrated into this state of the art (at the time) product. Unfortunately, because of product design glitches, the RA-90 was very late in coming to market. By the time enough glitches had been resolved to allow limited shipments, competitors had released enhanced technology drives at much lower prices. What could have been a huge win for this organization became a great failure.
Their response was to design a single microprocessor with 64-bit RISC architecture (as opposed to the 32-bit CISC architecture used in the VAX) that could be used both in the servers, as well as a workstation line of their own. The result was the Alpha processor, which held the performance crown into the 2000s. The Alpha-based computers (AlphaServer) were able to run VMS, Unix and Microsoft's new server operating system Windows NT. DEC also tried to compete in the Unix market by marketing the VMS operating system as " OpenVMS" and by selling their own Unix (OSF/1, later renamed to Digital Unix and then renamed again to Tru64), and it began to advertise more aggressively. DEC was simply not prepared to sell into a crowded Unix market however, and furthermore the low end PC-servers running NT (based on Intel processors) took marketshare from Alpha-based computers. DEC's workstation and server line never gained much popularity beyond former DEC customers.
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. DEC's database product was sold to Oracle. In May 1997 DEC sued Intel for allegedly infringing on its Alpha patents in designing the Pentium chips. The settlement resulted in DEC's chip business being sold to Intel, its networking business being sold to Cabletron, and eventually the company itself being sold to Compaq on January 26, 1998. Compaq itself was taken over by Hewlett-Packard in 2002.
The Digital logo survived for a while after the company ceased to exist, as the logo of Digital GlobalSoft, an IT services company in India (which was a 51% subsidiary of DEC). Digital GlobalSoft was later renamed "HP GlobalSoft", and no longer uses the Digital logo.
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