DEC, Digital Equipment Corp

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC. (This acronym was once officially used by Digital itself, but the official name was always DIGITAL. more...

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) Its PDP and VAX products were arguably the most popular mini-computers for the scientific and engineering communities during the 70s and 80s. DEC was acquired by Compaq in June 1998, which subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. As of 2006 its product lines were still produced under the HP name. From 1957 until 1992 its headquarters was in an old woolen mill in Maynard, Massachusetts.

Digital Equipment Corporation should not be confused with Digital Research; the two were unrelated, separate entities; or with Western Digital (despite the fact that they made the LSI-11 chipsets used in Digital Equipment Corporation's low end PDP-11/03 computers). Note, however, that there were Digital Research Laboratories where DEC did its corporate research.

History

The company was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, two engineers 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 and Anderson left MIT to form DEC. Venture capital of about $70,000 was provided by Georges Doriot and his American Research and Development Corporation. AR&D later sold its investment in Digital for approximately $450 million, certainly the best VC return ever at the time. At the time the VC market was hostile to computer companies, and investors shied from their plans. The original business plan named the company "Digital Computer Corporation", but AR&D required that the name be changed to DEC. Instead DEC started building small digital "modules" (flip flops, gates, transformer drivers, etc.) that could be combined together to run scientific and engineering experiments. In 1959 Ben Gurley started design of their first computer, the PDP-1 (PDP being an initialism for Programmable Data Processor).

The first modules were the free-standing "laboratory modules", placing one or two gates inside an extruded aluminum housing. These modules could be stacked up in a pre-configured 19" rack shelf that supplied power to the modules; the logic circuits were then established using banana plug patch cords installed at the front of the modules. The same circuits were then packaged as "System Building Blocks", which were used to build the PDP-1.

The same circuits were then packaged as the first "R" (red) series "Flip-Chip®" modules. Later, other module series provided additional speed, much higher logic density, and industrial I/O capabilities. Digital published extensive data about the modules in free catalogs that became very popular.

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