Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was a significant computer company and operated from the 1960s to the late 1990s. The company was co-founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen, an electrical engineer and Harlan Anderson, a physicist. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after DEC had gone into decline. 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 effectively created the small computer market with the entry level PDP-1. The PDP-8 effectively created the "minicomputer" market.
DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq Computer Corp. when 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 and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in May 2002. As of 2007, PDP-11, VAX, and AlphaServer systems were produced under the HP name.
Ken Olsen at the Mill
From 1957 until 1992, DEC's headquarters were located in a former wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts. In 1957 Ken Olsen signed a $300 monthly lease for 8,860 square feet on the second floor of Building 12. In June 1974, after occupying more and more space at the mill, DEC purchased the mill for $2.25 million in stock. The mill's buildings were vacated in 1993, after DEC exited, 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 competitors making serious efforts to compete with them. DEC's PDP-1 computer introduced in 1960 was the first entry level interactive computer priced at $120,000. At the time comparable batch oriented computers from IBM, Honeywell and Univac were priced in the million dollar range. DEC only sold 49 PDP-1 computers, but it provided them the experience to build more sophisticated systems. In 1962, annual sales reached a respectable $6.2 million. In 1963 the PDP-1 featured the first timesharing operating system thanks to DEC's development of drum storage allowing the entire memory to be moved to the drum in 20ms. In 1963 DEC built the PDP-5 minicomputer which was followed by the 36 bit PDP-6 in 1964.
Their PDP series of machines became popular in the 1960s, especially the PDP-8, introduced in 1965 was widely considered to be the first mass-produced minicomputer. Looking to simplify and update their line, DEC replaced most of their smaller machines with the PDP-11, eventually selling over 600,000 units and cementing DEC's position in the industry. The PDP-11/20 was the first member of this computer family and was introduced in 1970. This was the only hardwired instruction set computer of the PDP-11 series. Subsequent PDP-11 computers from the single board PDP-11/04 to the higher end PDP-11/70 were microprogrammed to feature the same instruction set across all models. A concept also used by IBM's successful System/360 series of computers.
In 1975 DEC introduced the LSI-11/03, the world's first microprocessor. It's PDP-11 instruction set compatible CPU was implemented across three Large Scale Integration (LSI) 40 pin integrated circuits. Further LSI implementations of the PDP-11 computer were the LSI-11/23 (F-11 chip set), the 11/83 and 11/93 (J-11 chip) and were used in single board PDP-11 systems. As a follow-on to the PDP-11, DEC's VAX-11 (Virtual Address Extension to the PDP-11) series introduced in 1977 was the first widely used 32-bit minicomputer. The VAX systems with their VMS multi-user operating system competed in many roles with larger mainframe computers such as the IBM System/370. The VAX was a best-seller, with over 400,000 sold. Many models of the VAX were produced, from large ECL based commercial systems to VLSI single chip CMOS implementations of the VAX. 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 competing powerful 32-bit systems in the 1990s, eroded the value of DEC's systems. DEC's last major attempt to find a space in the rapidly changing market was the DEC Alpha 64-bit RISC instruction set architecture. Alpha was the first 64-bit microprocessor, another first for DEC. DEC started work on Alpha as a way to re-implement their VAX series and to employ it in a range of high-performance workstations. The Alpha processor family met both of these goals and for most of its lifetime it was the fastest commercial processor. Alpha systems were well positioned for CPU intensive applications and found its niche in scientific computing markets. High Alpha chip prices made it uncompetitive in the microprocessor market. It was subsequently surpassed by lower priced mass market x86 chips from Intel and AMD.
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