digital equipment corporation not to be confused with digital research or western digital digital equipment corporation industry computer manufacturing fate acquired by compaq after divestiture of major assets successor hewlett packard 2002 present compaq 1998 2002 founded 1957 61 years ago 1957 defunct 1998 headquarters maynard massachusetts united stateskey peopleken olsen founder president and chairman harlan anderson cofounder c gordon bell vp engineering productspdp minicomputers vax minicomputers alpha servers and workstations decnet vt100 terminallat and terminal serverstrongarm microprocessorsdigital linear tapenumber of employeesover 140000 1987 websiteresearchmicrosoftcomenusumpeoplegbelldigitaltimelinetmlnhomehtm digital equipment corporation also known as dec and using the trademark digital was a major american company in the computer industry from the 1950s to the 1990s dec was a leading vendor of computer systems including computers software and peripherals their pdp and successor vax products were the most successful of all minicomputers in terms of sales 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 pdp11 vax and alphaserver systems were still produced under the hp name history history of digital equipment corporation from 1957 until 1992 decs headquarters were located in a former wool mill in maynard massachusetts since renamed clock tower place and now home to many companies dec was acquired in june 1998 by compaq which subsequently merged with hewlettpackard hp in may 2002 some parts of dec notably the compiler business and the hudson massachusetts facility were sold to intel 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 pdp8 widely considered to be the first successful minicomputer looking to simplify and update their line dec replaced most of their smaller machines with the pdp11 in 1970 eventually selling over 600000 units and cementing decs position in the industry originally designed as a followon to the pdp11 decs vax11 series was the first widely used 32bit minicomputer sometimes referred to as superminis these systems were able to compete in many roles with larger mainframe computers such as the ibm system370 the vax was a bestseller with over 400000 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 32bit systems in the 1990s quickly eroded the value of decs systems decs last major attempt to find a space in the rapidly changing market was the dec alpha 64bit risc instruction set architecture dec initially started work on alpha as a way to reimplement their vax series but also employed it in a range of highperformance 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 some of decs product lines were still produced under the hp name products dec vaxstation beyond decsystem1020 pdp vax and alpha dec was well respected for its communication subsystem designs such as ethernet dna digital network architecture predominantly decnet products dsa digital storage architecture diskstapescontrollers and its dumb terminal subsystems including vt100 and decserver products research decs research laboratories or research labs as they were commonly known conducted decs corporate research some of them were operated by compaq and are still operated by hewlettpackard the laboratories were western research laboratory wrl in palo alto california us systems research center src in palo alto california us network systems laboratory nsl in palo alto california us cambridge research laboratory crl in cambridge massachusetts us paris research laboratory prl in paris france metrowest technology campus mtc in maynard massachusetts us some of the former employees of decs research labs or decs rd in general include gordon bell technical visionary vp engineering 197283 microsoft research leonard bosack mike burrows luca cardelli dave cutler led rsx11m and vaxvms operating systems development then led windows nt development at microsoft ed decastro cofounder of data general corporation alan eustace jim gettys early developer of x window system henri gouraud jim gray alan kotok leslie lamport butler lampson louis monier isaac nassi radia perlman marcus ranum brian reid paul vixie some of the former employees of digital equipment corp who were responsible for developing alpha and strongarm daniel w dobberpuhl jim keller rich witek some of the work of the research labs was published in the digital technical journal accomplishments and legacy dec supported the ansi standards especially the ascii character set which survives in unicode and the iso 8859 character set family decs own multinational character set also had a large influence on iso 88591 latin1 and by extension unicode software the first versions of the c language and the unix operating system ran on decs pdp series of computers first on a pdp7 then the pdp11s which were among the first commercially viable minicomputers although for several years dec itself did not encourage the use of unix dec produced widely used and influential interactive operating systems including os8 tops10 tops20 rstse rsx11 rt11 and openvms pdp computers in particular the pdp11 model inspired a generation of programmers and software developers some pdp11 systems more than 25 years old software and hardware are still being used to control and monitor factories transportation systems and nuclear plants dec was an early champion of timesharing systems the commandline interfaces found in decs systems eventually codified as dcl would look familiar to any user of modern microcomputer clis those used in earlier systems such as ctss ibms jcl or univacs timesharing systems would look utterly alien many features of the cpm and msdos cli show a recognizable family resemblance to decs oses including command names such as dir and help and the namedotextension file naming conventions notes11 and its followon product vax notes were two of the first examples of online collaboration software a category that has become to be known as groupware len kawell one of the original notes11 developers later joined lotus development corporation and contributed to their lotus notes product the mumps programming language with its builtin database was developed on the pdp7 9 and 15 series machines mumps is still widely used in medical informations systems such as those provide by meditech and epic systems hardware vax and microvax computers very widespread in the 1980s running vms formed one of the most important proprietary networks decnet which linked business and research facilities the decnet protocols formed one of the first peertopeer networking standards with decnet phase i being released in the mid1970s email file sharing and distributed collaborative projects existed within the company long before their value was recognized in the market the la36 and la120 dot matrix printers became industry standards and may have hastened the demise of the teletype corporation the vt100 computer terminal became the industry standard implementing a useful subset of the ansi x364 standard and even today terminal emulators such as hyperterminal putty and xterm still emulate a vt100 or its more capable successor the vt220 dec invented digital linear tape dlt formerly known as compactape which began as a compact backup medium for microvax systems and later grew to capacities of 800 gigabytes work on the first harddiskbased mp3player the personal jukebox started at the dec systems research center the project was started about a month before the merger into compaq was completed decs western research lab created the itsy pocket computer this was developed into the compaq ipaq line of pdas which replaced the compaq aero pda networking dec intel and xerox through their collaboration to create the dix standard were champions of ethernet but dec is the company that made ethernet commercially successful initially ethernetbased decnet and lat protocols interconnected vaxes with decserver terminal servers starting with the unibus to ethernet adapter multiple generations of ethernet hardware from dec were the de facto standard the ci computer interconnect adapter was the industrys first network interface controller to use separate transmit and receive rings dec also invented clustering an operating system technology that treated multiple machines as one logical entity clustering permitted sharing of pooled disk and tape storage via the hsc507090 and later series of hierarchical storage controllers hsc the hscs delivered the first hardware raid 0 and raid 1 capabilities and the first serial interconnects of multiple storage technologies this technology was the forerunner to architectures such as network of workstations which are used for massively cooperative tasks such as websearches and drug research the x window system the network transparent window system used on unix and linux and also available on other operating systems was developed at mit jointly between project athena and the laboratory for computer science dec was the primary sponsor for this project which was a contemporary of the gnu project but not associated with it in the period 199499 linus torvalds developed versions of linux on early alphaserver systems made available to him by the engineering department another distribution that ran on alpha was gentoo linux dec was one of the first businesses connected to the internet with deccom registered in 1985 the popular altavista created by dec was one of the first comprehensive internet search engines although lycos was earlier it was much more limited dec once held the class a ip address block 160008 corporate digital federal credit union dcu is a credit union which was chartered in 1979 for employees of dec today its field of membership is open to existing family members over 900 different sponsors several communities in massachusetts and several organizations dcu has over 700 different sponsors including the companies that acquired pieces of dec matrix management user organizations decus logodigital equipment corporationusers society originally the users group was called decus digital equipment computer user society 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 hpinterex although there are still decus groups in several countries in the united states the organization is represented by the encompass organization currently connect notes present digital equipment corporation nineteen fiftyseven to the present dec press 1978 david donald miller 1997 open vms operating system concepts elsevier isbn9781555581572 alan r earls 20040630 digital equipment corporation arcadia publishing isbn9780738535876 edgar h schein with p delisi p kampas m sonduck 20030701 dec is dead long live dec berrettkoehler pub isbn9781576752258 jamie parker pearson september 1992 digital at work snapshots from the first thirtyfive years digital press isbn1555580920 glenn george harrar rifkin george harrar 1988 the ultimate entrepreneur the story of ken olsen and digital equipment corporation mcgrawhillcontemporary isbn9780809245598 c gordon bell j craig mudge john e mcnamara digital equipment corporation 1978 computer engineering a dec view of hardware systems design isbn0932376002 wikimedia commons has media related to digital equipment corporation gbells cybermuseum for digital equipment corp dec rise and fall of digital equipment corporation a company chronicle at a german computer museum ken olsen new england economic adventure works by digital equipment corporation at project gutenberg works by or about digital equipment corporation at internet archive vtedigital equipment corporation computerspdp 18bit pdp1 pdp4 pdp7 pdp9 pdp15 12bit linc pdp5 pdp8 pdp12 linc8 decmate pdp14plc 36bit pdp6 pdp10 decsystem20 16bit pdp11 dec professional vax vax11 microvax vax 8000 vaxstation firefly vaxserver vax 6000 vax 4000 vax 9000 vaxft vax 700010000 x86 rainbow 100 vaxmate decstation multia digital personal workstation mips decstation decsystem see 36bit for decsystem20 and the pdp10decsystem10 alpha dec 3000 axp dec 4000 axp dec 700010000 axp decpc axp 150 dec 2000 axp multia alphaserver alphastation digital personal workstation vteoperating systems by digital equipment corporation tops10 tss8 os8 dos11 rt11 rstse rsx11 tops20 vaxvms vaxeln ultrix digital unix dsm11 categorydec operating systems vtedigital equipment corporation video terminals vt05 1970 vt50vt52 1975 vt55 vt62 vt100 1978 vt101 vt102 vt103 vt105 vt110 vt125 vt131 vt132 vt180 vt220 1983 vt240 vt241 vt320 1987 vt330 vt340 vt340 vt420 1990 vt510 1993 vt520 1994 vt525 vt lan40 vtehard disk drive manufacturers history of hard disk drives present seagate technology toshiba western digital hgst past computer memories inc conner peripherals control data corporation digital equipment corporation excelstor technology fujitsu hewlettpackard ibm iomega jt storage jvc kalok kyocera maxtor memorex micropolis miniscribe mitsubishi electric nec plus development prairietek priam corporation quantum rodime samsung electronics sony storage technology corporation syquest texas instruments 