The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957.
The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in May 2002. , decades-old hardware (including PDP-11, VAX, and AlphaServer) is being emulated to allow legacy software to run on modern hardware; funding for this is planned to last at least until 2030. ==History== From 1957 until 1992, DEC's headquarters were located in a former wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Their PDP series of machines became popular in the 1960s, especially the PDP-8, widely considered to be the first successful minicomputer.
Many of the sponsors are companies that had acquired pieces of DEC. Matrix management ==User organizations== Originally the users' group was called DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer User Society) during the 1960s to 1990s.
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.
Looking to simplify and update their line, DEC replaced most of their smaller machines with the PDP-11 in 1970, the year they became the third largest computer manufacturer after IBM and the UNIVAC Division of Sperry Rand.
(Although Lycos was earlier, it was much more limited.) DEC once held the Class A IP address block 16.0.0.0/8. ===Corporate=== Digital Federal Credit Union (DCU) is a credit union which was chartered in 1979 for employees of DEC.
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.
The VAX was a best-seller, with over 400,000 sold, and its sales through the 1980s propelled DEC to become the second largest computer company in the industry.
At its peak, it was the second largest employer in Massachusetts, after the 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.
MUMPS is still widely used in medical information 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.
Dobberpuhl Jim Keller Rich Witek 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.
Another distribution that ran on Alpha was Gentoo Linux. DEC was one of the first businesses connected to the Internet, with dec.com, registered in 1985, being one of the first of the now ubiquitous .com domains.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s.
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.
At its peak, it was the second largest employer in Massachusetts, after the 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.
Many of the sponsors are companies that had acquired pieces of DEC. Matrix management ==User organizations== Originally the users' group was called DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer User Society) during the 1960s to 1990s.
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 subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in May 2002. , decades-old hardware (including PDP-11, VAX, and AlphaServer) is being emulated to allow legacy software to run on modern hardware; funding for this is planned 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.
DEC's gatekeeper.dec.com was a well-known software repository during the pre-World Wide Web days, and DEC was also the first computer vendor to open a public website, on 1 October 1993.
DEC was the primary sponsor for the project, which was a contemporary of the GNU Project but not associated with it. In the period 1994–99 Linus Torvalds developed versions of Linux on early AlphaServer systems provided by the engineering department.
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.
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 workstation chips from Intel and IBM/Motorola. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry.
Dobberpuhl Jim Keller Rich Witek 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.
When Compaq acquired DEC in 1998, the users group was renamed CUO, the Compaq Users' Organisation.
The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in May 2002. , decades-old hardware (including PDP-11, VAX, and AlphaServer) is being emulated to allow legacy software to run on modern hardware; funding for this is planned to last at least until 2030. ==History== From 1957 until 1992, DEC's headquarters were located in a former wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts.
When HP acquired Compaq in 2002, CUO became HP-Interex, although there are still DECUS groups in several countries.
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