Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation or simply DEC, was an American technology company considered a pioneer in the manufacture of minicomputers.

It was founded in 1957, and existed until 1998, when it was acquired by Compaq (which, in turn, would be acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002).

Digital opened the market for the production of minicomputers, with its popular PDP series, laying the foundations for the later creation of personal computers.

The acronym DEC was officially used by Digital, after being dropped by the Dairy Equipment Company of Madison, Wisconsin in order to avoid a trademark patent conflict with it.

Its PDP and VAX products were probably the most popular minicomputers in the scientific and engineering communities during the 1970s and 1980s. Until 2005, its production lines were still manufacturing under the HP (Hewlett-Packard) name.

Digital Equipment should not be confused with Digital Research; the two were distinct entities; or with Western Digital (despite the fact that Western Digital manufactured the LSI-11 chipset that would later be used by Digital Equipment in PDP-11/03 computers).

Minicomputers vs. Main-frames and Microcomputers

What made the Digital company famous was being the creator of the so-called minicomputers. This class of computers, now obsolete, fell between the huge mainframe multi-user mainframe systems and the later personal (single-user) systems or microcomputers.

This type of machine was born in the 1960s, thanks to the development of transistor technology and its application to electronic circuits. Normally, a minicomputer occupied the space of one or two refrigerators, unlike the machines of the time that occupied entire rooms.

DEC's PDP series is considered the first in this class of computers. His PDP-8 was the first minicomputer widely accepted by the scientific community.

The lower cost of hardware and the success of microprocessors led to the end of this type of computer.

History

Digital Logo in a pc.

The principles of DEC

The company was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, two engineers who had been working at the Lincoln Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the TX-2 project. The TX-2 was a transistor-based computer using the then enormous 36-bit word count, with 64 kilobytes of main memory. When that project started to run into difficulties, Olsen and Anderson left MIT to form DEC. Georges Doriot and his American Research and Development Corporation (ARDC) provided the company with capital of approximately US$60,000.

The company was born in an old woolen mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, which was used as the company's headquarters until 1992.

At that time, the market was hostile to computer manufacturers, and investors were scared of these types of projects. DEC then began to build small "modules" digital (corresponding to the components of the TX-2) such as gates, transformer conductors, etc., which could be combined to be used in laboratories.

DEC in the 60s and its line of PDP systems

During the 1960s DEC developed a series of computers that had a better price/performance ratio than IBM's, generally based on 18-bit words. In 1961 the company was a beneficiary and then began the construction of its first computer, the PDP-1, designed by Ben Gurley. To serve laboratories at lower cost, in 1963, DEC provided the PDP-5, a minicomputer that met with real success. This followed with the introduction of the famous PDP-8 in 1964, a smaller, 12-bit word machine that sold for approximately $16,000. The PDP-8 was small enough to fit on top of a car. It was quite simple to use and offered a variety of functions, which is why it was sold in huge numbers to new places and markets: laboratories, railways, and all kinds of industrial use. It was the first computer that was regularly purchased by a handful of end users as an alternative to running a larger system in a data center. Because of their low price and portability, these machines could be purchased to fill a specific need, unlike the mainframe systems of those days, which were almost always shared among multiple users. Today the PDP-8 is commonly considered the first minicomputer.

The PDP-8 spawned a cousin, the PDP-12, which combined data acquisition and demonstration capabilities (developed with NIH-sponsored LINC computers).

16-bit machine architectures were inspired by the PDP-8, including the CV 2100 and Nova General Data, and to a lesser extent National Semiconductor's IMP, Step, and INS8900 microprocessors, as well as the Signetics 2650 microprocessor.

PDP-8 based machines can be characterized by a small number of accumulators, or a small number of general registers (R0-R3), rather than a relatively large number of regular registers (such as R0-R7 or R15), and by the memory that is addressed in terms of low page and current page.

Another famous piece of equipment in the PDP series was the PDP-11, which, following an industry trend toward 8-bit bytes, used a 16-bit word, as it allowed ASCII characters to be supported. The PDP-11s started out on the market like the PDP-8s, but with notable improvements as they used integrated and discrete circuits. They used various operating systems of the time, including the new Unix operating system, as well as DEC RSX and RSTS (real time east).

In fact, the PDP-11 is known as the platform on which the UNIX operating system and the C language were developed.

Both RSTS and Unix became available in educational institutions at little or no cost. The PDP-11 systems were destined to be the cradle of a generation of engineers and computer scientists.

A typical PDP-11 was a refrigerator-sized, 8-inch floppy drive, where the operating system, FORTRAN compiler, user programs, and data could reside. The Operating System was loaded from the floppy after a boot binary sequence from a keyboard for that purpose (each key activated a boot address bit, 16 in total). RAM memory as small as 8Kbytes was common, based on magnetic core technology (more commonly known as bubble memory) (virtual paging was provided by the operating system); a teletype terminal fulfilled user data input and output functions (for example, in 32-column continuous paper prints) and had rear accesses (combs) for real-time data input, with an A/D converter included (for example, for signal processing, process control, etc.).

DEC's largest machines were the PDP-6 and the successor PDP-10 with the TOPS-10 and TOPS-20 timesharing operating systems.

Finally the PDP series ends with the PDP-15 (starting in 1970 and later sold as the "XVM" series) which is also considered one of the important PDPs, as it was an early user of TTL integrated circuits.

Most models had a physical paged memory architecture and memory protection features to allow time sharing, and Data spaces for a virtual effective address size of 128 kilobytes and a virtual effective address size of 128 kilobytes. physical address up to 4 MB.

These computers were moderately powerful in their time, they were mainly used in industrial, scientific, medical laboratories and in universities.

VAX systems

In 1976 DEC decided to extend the architecture of the PDP-11 to 32-bit, creating the first 32-bit minicomputer. The super-mini announced in 1978 was released as the VAX 11/780, it didn't take long to win the majority of the minicomputer market.

Digital VAX 11/780 at the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.

There were several desperate attempts by competitors such as Data General (which had been formed in 1968 by Ed DeCastro and 8 other DEC engineers who had worked on a 16-bit design) to recapture market share but failed, not only thanks to successful of DEC, but also by the appearance of the microcomputer and the workstation in the minicomputer market.

In 1983, DEC canceled its "Jupiter" project, which had been intended to build a successor to the PDP-10, focusing on the VAX architecture as its computer architecture at the time. The VAX series had an instruction set that is rich even by today's standards (as well as a wealth of driving modes). In addition to the paging and memory protection features of the PDP series, the VAX supported virtual memory. The VAX computer could be used with both Unix and the powerful VAX/VMS multi-user and multi-task operating system, DEC's proprietary system.

At its peak, in the 1980s, Digital was the second-largest computer manufacturer and supplier in the world, with more than 100,000 employees. At that time, DEC offered, in addition to its computers, a series of products, most of them proprietary: such as the DECnet network, a relational database manager, its own powerful diverse compilers (VAX-FORTRAN was probably the most efficient and fastest of his time), word processor (EDT, EVE and VAX-TPU), etc. Although many of these products were very well designed, many of them were incompatible with other non-DEC products. However, they had a heyday and preference by the scientific community, during almost the entire 1980s.

After it, consumers began to opt for more open and standard products; Added to this, the benefits of RISC workstations were already evolving, reaching the CISC of VAX.

The company that created the minicomputer, and possibly the first computers for effective staffing, did not respond well to the restructuring and exponential evolution of the computer industry.

The alpha systems

During the 1980s DEC made several attempts at designing a RISC (reduced instruction set) processor architecture to replace the VAX architecture. Eventually, in 1992 DEC released the Alpha microprocessor (originally called AXP). It was a 64-bit processor, it had a RISC architecture (as opposed to the 32-bit CISC architecture used in the VAX), it was one of the first 64-bit microprocessors designed (some authors assume it was the first).

Alfa offered an operating platform for various VMS, UNIX and Windows NT operating systems and was considered for several years as the world's fastest (and most powerful) microprocessor. However DEC with their computers based on the Alpha micros failed to gain significant market shares from their strongest competitors.

Personal Computers

Digital responded to the challenge of the IBM-PC (which would later be the compatible standard) with three machines, tied to proprietary architectures. One machine was for "professionals" (the workstation), barely hiding DEC president Ken Olsen's contempt for the IBM personal computer. Another one was for word processing only, and the third one was "almost" the IBM compatible. All three were, in no time, commercial failures. The packaging was based on the VT220 terminals (used in VAX).

DEC's Professional Series Model was based on the PDP-11/23 (11/73).

The DecMate I and II, which were inspired by the latest version of the PDP-8, were word processors that couldn't compete with the already popular Wang word processor. DEC introduced Personal Computers (non-compatible PCs) under the CP/M-86 operating system, which, as is known, was quickly displaced by MS-DOS. DEC never produced a truly compatible PC, the computer it deemed "compatible" It was the VAXMATE that was marketed in 1986 with VENTANAS SRA. V1.0, based on VAX/VMS operating system, if it supported Microsoft network protocols. DEC's lines of personal computers peaked with the early-introduced 64-bit Alpha RISC technologies (1990s).

Achievements

• Beyond DECsystem-10/20, PDP, VAX and Alpha, DEC was highly respected by its impeccable designs and engineering, such as DNA (Digital Network Architecture - DECnet products) and DSA (Digital Storage Archetecture - discs/cints/regulators). It was also highlighted by high quality in all its products. Many DEC computers are still in use.

• DEC was preferred in academic, scientific and industry (process control).

• Digital supported ANSI standards, especially ASCII characters. The Digital Multinational Character Game itself also had a large influence on Latin characters in ISO 8859-1 and Unicode.

• The first versions of programming language C and UNIX system were developed on the Digital PDP series (first on a PDP-7, then on PDP-11).

• Digital also developed the family of the very popular VAX mini and microcomputers, with 32-bit CISC architecture, without forgetting the first commercially accepted workstation (the VT-78), with 64-bit microprocessor architecture, Alfa AXP.

• DEC designed famous and robust operating systems such as OS-8, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, RSTS/E, RSX-11, RT-11, VMS, and OpenVMS. His PDP series, in particular the PDP-11 model, inspired a whole generation of software developers. Some PDP-11 systems over 25 years (software and hardware) are still used to control and monitor factories, transport systems and nuclear reactors. Digital was a pioneer and champion of real time systems and shared time systems.

• VAX and MicroVAX computers (very widespread in the 1980s) under VMS operating platform formed one of the most important pre-Internet networks; DECnet, mixed research and business facilities. DECnet protocols formed one of the first standard peer-to-peer connection standards. The email, FTP, TelNet, shared files, and collaborative projects existed within the company long before its value was recognized on the market.

• Digital, Intel and Xerox were strong Ethernet, but Digital is the company that made Ethernet commercially accepted. At first, Ethernet was based on DECnet technology and protocols that interconnected from VAX equipment with DECserver servers. Its Ethernet adapters and multiple generations of Ethernet regulators were standardized, especially the PCI Fast Ethernet driver family that had a great success.

• Clustering, the operating systems technology that treated multiple machines as a logical unit, was developed by Digital. This technology was the precursor of systems such as the Network of Working Terminals, which are used for enormously cooperative tasks, such as web searches and research projects.

• The VT100 Terminal became industry standard, and until today terminal emulators such as the Putty and Xterm still emulate a VT100 as a Hyperterminal (although they actually emulate their most powerful successor, the VT220).

• The X Window System, the first remote-windowing system, was developed in the Athena Project at MIT. Digital was the primary sponsor for this project.

• Digital was one of the first businesses connected to the Internet. dec.com (certified in 1985) was one of the first domains, now called ubicuos.com, the first seller of computers by public site_web.

• AltaVista, created by Digital, was one of the first comprehensive search engines on the Internet.

• DEC invented the Digital Linear Ribbon (DLT).

• Working on the first hard drive based on MP3-player, the optical disk server had its principles at the DEC Systems Research Center (the project was started about a month before the merger with Compaq was completed).

DEC Closing of Business

In June 1992 Ken Olsen was succeeded by Robert Palmer as the company's president. Digital's board of directors also granted Palmer the title of “Chief Executive Officer” (CEO), a title that had never been used during Digital's 35-year existence. Palmer joined DEC in 1985 to lead Semiconductor Engineering and Manufacturing. His relentless campaign for CEO, and success with the Alfa family of microprocessors, made him a contender for success against Olsen. A new logo was designed. However, Palmer was unable to stem the subsequent tide of layoffs and liquidation of many of DEC's assets; for example:

• Your database product, Rdb, was acquired by Oracle.
• His DLT tape technology was sold to Quantum Corporation in 1994.
• His Business Texts Terminal (VT100 and Successors) were acquired in August 1995 by Boundless Technologies.
• In March 1997, DEC CORBA-based products: ObjectBroker, and its messaging software, MessageQ, was sold to BEA Systems, Inc.
• In May 1997, DEC sued Intel claiming to violate its patent of Alpha processors in the design of the Pentium chips. As part of a agreed solution, DEC chips were sold to Intel. This included the implementation of DEC StrongARM of the ARM computing architecture, which Intel sold as commonly used Xscale processors on Pocket PCs.
• In 1997, the printer business was sold to GENICOM (now called TallyGenicom).
• At about the same time, the network business (networking) was sold to Cabletron Systems, and then released as "Digital Network Products Group".
• DECtalk and DECvoice voice products finally arrived at Fonix.
• In 1994, the rights of PDP-11 and several lines Operating Systems for PDP were acquired by Mentec.

Finally, on January 26, 1998, what was left of the company was sold to Compaq, which was later acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. Hewlett-Packard now sells what was Digital's StorageWorks (disk products and tape).

The Digital logo survived for a while after the company ceased to exist, as the logo of Digital GlobalSoft, an Indian computer services company (which was a 51% subsidiary of DEC). Digital GlobalSoft was later renamed "HP GlobalSoft" (also known as "HP Global Delivery India Center" or GDIC HP), and the Digital logo was no longer used.

The domain names digital.com and DEC.com are now owned by Hewlett-Packard and are redirected to their own US website.

Once for DEC employees in 1979, the Digital Federal Credit Union (DCU) is now essentially open to everyone, with more than 700 different patrons, including companies that purchased parts of DEC.

Curiosities

• DEC was the first company to send unwanted mail or "spam" to the ArpaNet network in 1978 to promote DEC-20.
• According to Tex Texin, the concept of numeronimo began to be used in DEC. The first word of this type was "S12n", email account name given by the system administrator to Jan Scherpenhuizen, an employee of (DEC), because his last name was considered too long to be used as an account name. By 1985, colleagues who found this surname difficult to pronounce, also began to say verbally "S12n". The use of the numerónimos became part of the corporate culture of DEC.