Beitrag - Digital Equipment Corporation

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Type: 1957
Address: 146 Main Street, Maynard, Massachusetts 01754, U.S.A.
Telephone: (508) 493-5111
Fax: (508) 493-8780
Employees: 113,800
Sales: $13.9 billion
Stock Exchanges: Midwest New York Pacific Zürich Geneva
Incorporated: 1957

Digital Equipment Corporation is a leading worldwide supplier of networked computer systems, software, and services. Its products serve a variety of applications, such as scientific analysis, industrial control, time-sharing, commercial data processing, graphic arts, word processing, office automation, health care, instrumentation, engineering, and simulation.

Digital is best known for introducing the minicomputer to the information processing industry, a development that altered the way potential customers perceived the computer. In addition to being more accessible to non-specialists than traditional mainframes, the minicomputer was smaller, faster, and less expensive. In defining the needs of a new generation of computer users, Digital set the stage for the development of the personal computer and the workstation in the mid-1980s. Content with its dominance in the core minicomputer market, however, Digital was slow to adapt its product line to these new markets. The company's entry into the personal computer arena in 1982 was a failure, and later PC collaborations with Olivetti and Intel achieved mixed results. In the early 1990s, after several years of indecision, Digital's focus shifted to a new series of machines, primarily workstations, based on the company's own ultra-fast Alpha microprocessor.

Digital is noted for its entrepreneurial style of management. For that reason, it was much watched during the 1970s and early 1980s when it experienced its fastest growth. In 1982 the company's management structure was praised in Thomas J. Peters's and Robert H. Waterman's In Search of Excellence, but Digital's success was not without turbulence. After a period of phenomenal growth in the 1970s, Digital began to outgrow the unique entrepreneurial structure that had made it a serious challenger to the industrial computer giants.

In the summer of 1957, Ken Olsen asked American Research & Development (ARD), a venture capital firm in Boston, for $70,000 to establish a computer company. Olsen and his partner, Harland Anderson, were 31 and 28 years old respectively and had just come out of the Digital Computer Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). General Georges Doriot, the head of ARD and a professor at the Harvard Business School, encouraged them to write a business proposal but advised them not to use the word 'computer,' since large corporations like General Electric and RCA were already failing in the nascent industry. Doriot, who later joined Digital's board of directors and influenced Olsen's leadership style, was concerned also that a proposal from the young, inexperienced engineers would not be well received.

Heeding Doriot's advice, Olsen and Anderson proposed the production of printed circuit modules instead of computers, and promised to turn a profit in their first year. ARD offered them $70,000, and the two engineers located their company in the small mill town of Maynard, Massachusetts.

In early 1958 Digital shipped its first products, the Digital Laboratory Module and the Digital Systems Module. The company sold $94,000 worth of these modules to research facilities. Despite the recession of the late 1950s, Digital turned a profit at the end of its first year.

The Whirlwind and Sage computers which Olsen and Anderson had worked on at MIT influenced Olsen's commitment to producing interactive and interlinked computers. The Whirlwind was used to power a cockpit flight simulator for the navy. While other universities were designing computers to calculate complex equations, MIT designed the Whirlwind for immediate interaction with the user. The SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Defense System), a U.S. Air Force project during the Cold War, was a massive network of computers and radar systems used to detect enemy aircraft in the nation's airspace.

When Olsen and Anderson established Digital, the only computers commercially available were million-dollar mainframes from companies such as IBM, Univac, and Burroughs. The people who worked with these computers were programmers provided or trained by the company. Olsen had observed students waiting in line to use Whirlwind's interactive offspring, the TX-O, an early transistorized system at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, while an IBM machine was virtually ignored. Seeing the need for more interactive machines, Olsen sought to wean computers away from programmers.

In 1960 the company introduced its first computer, the PDP-1 (Program Data Processor). The PDP-1 came with a cathode-ray tube (CRT), a screen which allowed the user to see what was being entered and received from the central processing unit. This novel addition demonstrated Olsen's commitment to making computers accessible to users. Unlike the room-sized mainframe computers of the day, the PDP-1 was no larger than a refrigerator. It cost $120,000 at a time when comparable machines by rival manufacturers were selling for $1 million.

In 1963 Gordon Bell, who would become Digital's most eminent engineer, designed the PDP-5. The PDP-5 was the forerunner of the PDP-8, the industry's first minicomputer. That same year, Bell also designed a large-scale computer, the PDP-6. Together, the PDP-5 and the PDP-8 illustrated the company's versatility and creativity. By 1964 the PDP-5 was Digital's cheapest computer at $27,000, while the PDP-6 was the most expensive at $300,000.

There was virtually no organizational structure during Digital's early years because Olsen was committed to creating an environment much like the research labs at MIT. A temporary position as liaison between MIT and IBM in 1959 convinced Olsen that the hierarchy at companies like IBM did not allow for creativity and the flow of ideas. Unlike other computer companies at the time, Digital did not lease its computers. Leasing computers, with a contract for support and services, kept customers in a dependent relationship. Since Digital's customers, mostly scientists and engineers, did not require technical support, the company provided virtually none of the software and maintenance services offered by its giant competitors. Digital did not spend its capital on software design and maintenance services, and passed its savings along to customers. Olsen also felt that leasing hindered technical development by creating a reluctance to allow a product to become obsolete.

Digital survived without an organizational structure for seven years. By 1964 various engineering groups were no longer coordinating with the company's other divisions, causing bottlenecks in certain areas of manufacturing and order processing. As a result, product shipments were often delayed. That year, Digital's revenues dropped to $900,000, down from $1.2 million in 1963.

As a result, Olsen decided to structure the company into a team of product line managers. In this model, the product line manager became an entrepreneur within the company and competed with other teams for centralized manufacturing and sales forces. Each manager had complete responsibility for a product line from conceptualization to sales, and was accountable for its performance. This matrix organization, as it was called, was responsible for an abundance of products developed over the next 15 years. By the mid-1970s the company developed more than 20 new product lines. While the matrix organization resulted in dynamic growth, it also created uncertainty among some of Digital's employees, and in 1966 Olsen's partner, Anderson, resigned.

In the fall of 1965 Digital unveiled the PDP-8. This machine triggered the explosive growth of the minicomputer industry, and the company grew from a small technical company to a major computer manufacturer. The PDP-8 was small and attracted users who wanted to integrate it into their larger mainframe systems. It sold for $18,000, which at the time was a very low price for a high-performance general-purpose computer. Digital sold 50,000 PDP-8s over the machine's 15-year life span; the model contributed significantly to growth in revenues and profits of between 25 percent and 40 percent per year. Between 1965 and 1967 alone, revenues multiplied sixfold to $4.5 million.

Because Digital's computers were versatile and accessible, they attracted an entirely new class of customer: the OEM, or Original-Equipment Manufacturer. Under this system, outside companies bought Digital's computers and integrated their own hardware and software programs for specific applications, such as scientific instrumentation. They then sold the package as their own product. This unique arrangement saved Digital the costly, labor-intensive job of writing software and servicing its machines. As a result, overhead costs remained stable while revenues poured in. OEMs also opened up new markets to Digital. Because of their adaptable nature, Digital's computers were used for a wide variety of applications, from calculating scientific problems to running electronic scoreboards in sports stadiums.

The business world now began to view computers as a viable industry. Attempts by larger companies to buy Digital were rebuffed; Olsen firmly refused to sell out, and for many years Digital in turn resisted the trend to buy out smaller, dynamic companies. By the early 1990s, Digital's outside holdings were still modest by industry standards. As Digital's entrepreneurial style permeated the industry and the availability of investment capital increased, engineers began to dream about starting their own companies. In 1968 Edson de Castro, an engineer who had worked on the design of the PDP-8, left Digital to start his own company. Data General would become Digital's first serious competitor in the minicomputer market.

In January 1970 Digital announced plans to build the PDP-11, to be sold for $10,800. It was the first time that Digital had announced a machine still in the design stage. Data General had already announced a machine in the same class of computers a year earlier and was beginning to encroach upon Digital's customer base. When Industrial Research named the PDP-11 one of the most significant technical products introduced in 1970, sales increased. Eventually, 600,000 PDP-11s were sold. By 1972, Digital was back on top of the minicomputer market.

Digital has been a pioneer in community and labor relations. To bring growth to otherwise depressed communities, the company established plants in cities hard hit by recessions, such as Maynard and Springfield, both in Massachusetts. Until the late 1980s, Digital was especially known for its no-layoff tradition. During the recession of 1970, while the rest of the industry was laying off hundreds of people, Digital put its employees to work in other areas of the company, from sweeping the parking lot to sales. Digital also funded a study of the reproductive health of women who worked in one of its semiconductor plants. The study found a correlation between high exposure to semiconductor material and miscarriages, and Digital publicized the study despite the potentially negative consequences. Digital's lack of rigid hierarchy during this period was much-admired, as was the ability of employees to directly influence decision making. Decisions were made by a consensus of engineering, marketing, design, and review committees. Olsen's fundamental corporate values, which he summarized as 'honesty, integrity, doing the right thing,' became formalized policy in 1974.

Reacting to market pressure and the enthusiasm of its engineers, Digital entered the personal computer market. On May 10, 1982 Digital announced three personal computer products, the Rainbow 100, the DECmate II, and the Professional 350, but internal competition to build a personal computer had drained the company's marketing resources. While Digital hesitated and its engineers warred internally over competing products, other companies had already entered the market.

The failure of the personal computer project foreshadowed other problems resulting from Digital's once vaunted matrix management system. The consensus required to initiate product lines made it difficult for Digital to respond quickly in an increasingly fast-paced market. Another problem was the existence of too many independent product domains within the company. While Digital had an array of new products and established itself in a number of different markets, customer territories became unclear and intense competition between the domains drained Digital's resources. Furthermore, the company's growth in new market areas overwhelmed sales and service forces as they tried to meet the demands of new customers. With nearly 70 minicomputer manufacturers to compete with, DEC's sales force was also busy defending its lead in the minicomputer market.

Other product line teams developed technologies which brought Digital successfully into the new decade. In the late 1970s the engineering group headed by Gordon Bell developed the VAX line of computers. The VAX architecture evolved into a range of computers from small desktop machines to computer clusters which could compete with mainframes. Interlinked, these machines gave companies complete automation throughout their various divisions.

Olsen had the foresight to realize that Digital's sales and marketing force was not ready for the potential success of the VAX systems and the more businesslike customers that it would attract. Thus, Olsen began to transform Digital into a unified marketing organization by redirecting its product lines into a market-oriented scheme. Rather than simply allowing the product line teams to develop and sell any product, Digital identified markets to target, assigning product lines to each area.

By 1984 Olsen had completely reorganized Digital. This change shifted profit and loss responsibility away from product line managers. It took five years to dismantle the matrix organization, which had existed for 19 years and was a symbol of Digital's growth and success. Due to the shift in power, more than 50 managers left to start their own companies or to join others.

The timing of Digital's new direction could not have been better. By the early 1980s the corporate world had become a multivendor environment where machines of different sizes and applications could not communicate or share information. Over the next 18 months ten new VAX minicomputers were unveiled. These machines could network not only among themselves, but with other vendors' products as well. Consequently, Digital lured an estimated $2 billion in sales away from IBM. In 1986 Digital's profits rose 38 percent in an industry which was declining, and by 1987 the company was threatening IBM's number one position in the computer industry. The trend was, however, short-lived. By the late 1980s, it became clear that Digital's commitment to producing a wide range of consummately-engineered and competitively-priced machines was being compromised by problems with timing and with a confusing management structure. This was reflected in plummeting sales and revenues, culminating in a fiscal-year loss of $617 million in July 1991, Digital's first. Digital was also forced to abandon its longstanding no-layoff strategy and cut its work force by 6,000 in fiscal year 1991 through a combination of layoffs and voluntary retirement packages.

The company's difficulties were exemplified by the introduction of a new mainframe in 1990. Ignoring predictions from industry analysts on Wall Street that the market for large, expensive mainframes was dead, the company embarked on a $1 billion research and development program to extend its VAX technology to a mainframe environment. The result was a series of machines, including the flagship VAX 9000, which were more powerful and complex than any in the company's history. Due to last-minute design modifications and production delays, however, the VAX 9000 line was not introduced until 1990, two years later than originally planned, and first-year sales fell far short of the $1 billion goal which had been established. Sluggish mainframe sales were not Digital's only miscalculation. Undaunted by its failure in the PC market in the early 1980s, in 1991 the company introduced a new line of personal computers based on the powerful Intel 486 microprocessor. Once again sales failed to live up to expectations.

In April 1991 Digital joined Compaq Computer Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, and 18 other computer companies in endorsing the development of a new computer standard, the Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) initiative. Although the system would have enabled machines of all sizes and configurations to communicate with each other through the use of the same software, attempts to agree on a single operating system failed. By early 1992, three ACE operating systems had been proposed, and only the simplest software packages were capable of running on all machines. IBM's PC design remained unchallenged. Nevertheless, Digital's joint ventures with such companies as Intel, Italy's Olivetti, and Microsoft Corporation represent a growing trend toward standardization and cooperation among manufacturers.

Meanwhile, Digital turned its attention to workstations, a market it had long neglected. The key design element in the new series was the company's own Alpha chip, based on a new technology called Reduced Instruction Set Computing, or RISC, which had already catapulted Sun Microsystems ahead of all competitors in the workstation sector. The new workstations were scheduled for release in 1993. During the same period, Digital turned increasingly to the sale of services and consulting as a means of shoring up flagging computer sales.

By this time, the personal computer market had become intensely competitive, and as hardware prices fell, companies found it increasingly difficult to recoup the tremendous research and development costs associated with introducing a new product. Much higher margins were forthcoming in the software market, an area that had never been Digital's strength. Traditional companies such as Digital and IBM, with large bureaucracies and entrenched cultures, were compared unfavorably with smaller, less hierarchical organizations which seemed to be more successful at adapting quickly to changes in technology and customer needs.

In an attempt to reorganize along leaner lines, Ken Olsen restructured his company three times between 1988 and 1991. The result was confusion and a lack of direction at all levels of Digital, for which many industry-watchers held Olsen personally responsible. Amid the turmoil, some top managers resigned, including the chief financial officer and the president of Digital's European operations. In April 1992 Digital announced a shocking $294 million quarterly loss, and critics commented that only a massive cost-cutting initiative could save the company. Under increasing pressure from the board to improve performance, Ken Olsen surprised outsiders by announcing that he would step down as president and chief executive officer of the company effective October 1992. His successor was Robert B. Palmer, vice president of worldwide manufacturing, logistics, and component engineering.

With a new chief executive at the helm, Digital faced the challenge of maintaining its status as a major computer corporation in a quickly changing environment. Like other large manufacturers, it downsized its operations and became more flexible in order to remain competitive. The company's strengths continue to be its dedication to engineering excellence and willingness to take risks with new technologies. Its future success depends on its ability to pursue the timely introduction of new products.

Principal Subsidiaries

Computer Insurance Company of Rhode Island; Computer Insurance Company Limited (Bermuda); Digital Computer Taiwan Limited; Digital Equipment Aktiebolag (Sweden); Digital Equipment B.V. (Netherlands); Digital Equipment Betriebliche Altersversor-gungsgesellschaft m.b.H. (Germany); Digital Equipment of Canada Limited; Digital Equipment Caribbean, Inc.; Digital Equipment Centre Technique (Europe); S.A.R.L. (France); Digital Equipment China Limited; Digital Equipment do Brasil Ltd.; Digital Equipment Co. Ltd. (U.K.); Digital Equipment Corporation A/S (Norway); Digital Equipment Corporation A/S (Denmark); Digital Equipment Corporation (Australia) Pty. Ltd.; Digital Equipment Corporation (Consultancy) Ltd. (U.K.); Digital Equipment Corporation Espana, S.A. (Spain); Digital Equipment Corporation Finance B.V. (Netherlands); Digital Equipment Corporation GmbH (Austria); Digital Equipment Corporation International (Switzerland); Digital Equipment Distribution (Ireland) Limited; Digital Equipment Corporation OY (Finland); Digital Equipment Corporation (New Zealand) Limited; DEC Digital Equipment Corporation S.A./A.G. (Switzerland); Digital Equipment (DEC) Limited (Israel); Digital Equipment (DEC) Technical Center Limited (Israel); Digital Equipment Filipinas Incorporated (Philippines); Digital Equipment Foreign Sales Corporation B.V. (Netherlands); Digital Equipment France; Digital Equipment GmbH (Germany); Digital Equipment Hellas S.A. (Greece); Digital Equipment (Holdings) B.V. (Netherlands); Digital Equipment Hong Kong Limited; Digital Equipment International B.V. (Netherlands); Digital Equipment International Betriebliche Altersversorgungsgesellschaft m.b.H. (Germany); Digital Equipment International GmbH. (Germany); Digital Equipment International Limited (Switzerland); Digital Equipment (Korea) Inc.; Digital Equipment (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd.; Digital Equipment de Mexico, S.A. de C.V.; Digital Equipment N.V./S.A. (Belgium); Digital Equipment Panama, Inc.; Digital Equipment Parts Center B.V. (Netherlands); Digital Equipment Portugal, Limitada; Digital Equipment PRC Limited (Hong Kong); Digital Equipment S.p.A. (Italy); Digital Equipment Scotland Limited; Digital Equipment Services, Inc.; Digital Equipment Singapore (PTE) Limited; Digital Equipment (Thailand) Ltd.; Digital Growth Inc.; Digital Incorporated; Digital International Sales Corporation; Old Colony Insurance Limited (Bermuda); Cascade Computing AB (Sweden); Digital Equipment Beteiligungen GmbH (Germany); Digital-Kienzle Computersysteme GmbH & Co. K.G. (Germany); Digital Equipment Corporation International (Europe); Digital Equipment Corporation Japan; Digital Equipment Corporation de Puerto Rico; Digital Equipment Corporation Services-Europe; Digital Equipment China Incorporated; Digital Equipment Czechoslovakia, spol. s.r.o.; Digital Equipment Export (India) Ltd.; Digital Equipment Finance Corporation; Digital Equipment (India) Ltd.; Digital Equipment (Hungary) Ltd.; Digital Equipment International Limited; Digital Equipment Maroc S.A.R.L. (Morocco); Digital Equipment Properties Limited; Digital Equipment Service Industries Solutions Company Limited; Digital Equipment (Small Medium) Enterprise B.V. i.o. (Netherlands); Digital Equipment Turkiye A.S. (Turkey); Digital Realty Corporation; EA Systems, Inc.; Kienzle-Miete GmbH (Germany); PCS Computersysteme GmbH (Germany); Procad GmbH Rechnerunterstutzte Konstruk-tionssysteme; Société Civile Immobiliere (SCI) Parc du Boids Briard (France).

Further Reading

Olsen, Kenneth H., Digital Equipment Corporation: The First Twenty-Five Years, New York, The Newcomen Society in North America, 1983.

'America's Most Successful Entrepreneur,' Fortune, October 27, 1986.

Rifkin, Glenn, and George Harrar, The Ultimate Entrepreneur, Chicago, Contemporary Books, 1988.

'Where is DEC Going?,' Forbes, January 7, 1991.

'Crunch Time at DEC,' Business Week, May 4, 1992.

'Did DEC Move Too Late?,' Business Week, August 3, 1992.

Pearson, Jamie, Digital at Work: Snapshots from the First Thirty-Five Years, Burlingtion Digital Press, 1992.

— Lynn Hall; Update by Moya Verzhbinsky


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 frequently officially used by Digital itself,[1] but the trademark was always DIGITAL). Its PDP and VAX products were arguably the most popular minicomputers for the scientific and engineering communities during the 1970s and 1980s. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, which subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. As of 2007 its product lines were still produced under the HP name. From 1957 until 1992 its headquarters was located in an old wool 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.
Contents
[hide]

    * 1 History
          o 1.1 8-bit systems
          o 1.2 12-bit systems
          o 1.3 16-bit systems
          o 1.4 18-bit systems
          o 1.5 24-bit systems
          o 1.6 36-bit systems
          o 1.7 VAX and Ethernet systems
          o 1.8 32-bit MIPS and 64-bit Alpha systems
          o 1.9 StrongARM
          o 1.10 Personal computers
          o 1.11 Designing solutions
          o 1.12 Closing DEC's business
    * 2 Research
    * 3 Accomplishments
    * 4 Anecdotes
    * 5 User organizations
    * 6 Notes
    * 7 References
    * 8 External links

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 64 K 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 to that point. 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" such as flip flops, gates, and transformer drivers that could be combined to run scientific and engineering experiments. In 1959, Ben Gurley started design of the company's first computer, the PDP-1 (PDP being an initialism for Programmable Data Processor) as a means of attracting VC funding. As he put it, "We aren't building computers, we're building 'Programmable Data Processors'." DEC began operations in a Civil War era textile mill in Maynard, Mass., where plenty of inexpensive manufacturing space was available.
System Building Blocks 1103 hex-inverter card (both sides)

The first modules were the free-standing "laboratory modules," placing one or two gates inside an extruded aluminum housing. These modules could be stacked in a preconfigured 19-in 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.
A "B" (blue) series Flip Chip module containing nine transistors, 1971

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.

By 1997 Digital had subsidiary companies in more than two dozen countries including Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China (People's Republic), Columbia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Israel, Japan, Jersey States, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. [2]

8-bit systems

In the 1980s, DEC built the VT180 (codenamed "Robin"), which was a VT100 terminal with a Z80-based microcomputer running CP/M.

This evolved into the Rainbow 100, which had both Z80 and 8088 CPUs and was capable of running CP/M, CP/M-86, and MS-DOS.

DEC also used Intel 8-bit microprocessors as embedded processors within larger systems; for example, as the console processor in PDP-11/04, 11/34, and 11/44 systems and as the main processor within the VT100 family of video terminals.

12-bit systems
A PDP-8 on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.. This example is from the first generation of PDP-8s, built with discrete transistors and later known as the Straight 8.

To serve laboratories at a lower cost, DEC provided the PDP-5, an early minicomputer, in 1963. True success followed with the introduction of the famous PDP-8 in 1964. It was a smaller, 12-bit word machine that sold for about $16,000 and was small enough to fit on a cart. The device was simple enough to be used for many roles, and was soon being sold in large quantities to new market niches such as labs, railways, and various industrial applications.

The PDP-8 was important historically because it was the first computer that was regularly purchased by a handful of end users as an alternative to using a larger system in a data center. Because of their low cost and portability, these machines could be purchased to fill a specific need, unlike the mainframe systems of the day that were nearly always shared among diverse users. Today, the PDP-8 is generally regarded as the first minicomputer. The PDP-8 spawned a cousin, the PDP-12, which merged data acquisition and display capabilities developed with the NIH-sponsored LINC computers into the PDP-8 architecture.

The PDP-8 was used as the "brains" for many specific scientific and research projects. Once such adaptation was the "Durrum Instruments D-500 Amino Acid Analyzer" wherein a PDP-8 was used for process control.

Many 8- and 16-bit machine architectures are said to be inspired by the PDP-8, including the HP 2100 and Data General Nova, and to a lesser extent the National Semiconductor IMP, PACE, and INS8900 microprocessors and the Signetics 2650 microprocessor. Machines based on the PDP-8 can be characterized by a small number of accumulators (such as AC and MQ, or A and B), 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 memory addressing in terms of a base page and a current page (related to PC value).

The design of the 4-bit Intel 4004 was also inspired by the PDP-8, although it has a series of regular registers (R0-R15). While evaluating the Busicom designed calculator chipset for production by Intel, Ted Hoff realized that the PDP-8 sitting in the corner of the room was far more powerful than newer chips, yet the circuitry was much simpler. Therefore, he proposed that Intel not make the chips designed by Busicom, but instead design a "computer chipset" that buyers could program as a calculator.

16-bit systems

Data General was formed by a group of DEC engineers in May, 1968, and rapidly brought the 16-bit NOVA minicomputer to market, based on a proposed architecture that DEC management had rejected. DEC immediately found itself behind in the industry transition to 8-bit bytes. The PDP-11 16-bit computer was designed in a crash program by Harold McFarland, Gordon Bell, Roger Cady, and others. Its numerous architectural innovations, including the UNIBUS, proved superior to all competitors and the "11" architecture was soon the industry leader. The first model was the PDP-11/20, which was followed by higher performance models such as the 11/45 and 11/70. When improvements to integrated circuits enabled the single-chip microprocessor, 11s eventually were packaged into systems no larger than a modern PC.

The PDP-11 supported several operating systems, including Bell Labs' new Unix operating system as well as DEC's DOS-11, RSX-11, IAS, RT-11, and RSTS/E. Many early PDP-11 applications were developed using standalone paper-tape utilities. DOS-11 was the PDP-11's first disk operating system, but was soon supplanted by more capable systems. RT-11 provided a practical real-time operating system, allowing the PDP-11 to continue Digital's critical role as a computer supplier for embedded systems. RSX provided a general-purpose multitasking environment and supported a wide variety of programming languages. IAS was a time-sharing version of RSX-11D. Both RSTS and Unix were time-sharing systems available to educational institutions at little or no cost, and these PDP-11 systems were destined to be the sandbox for a generation of engineers and computer scientists. Large numbers of 11/70s were deployed in telecommunications and industrial control applications. AT&T became DEC's largest customer.

The PDP-11's 16-bit byte-oriented architecture provided a 64KB virtual address space. Most models had a paged physical memory architecture and memory protection features, useful for multitasking and time-sharing, and some supported separate Instruction & Data spaces for an effective virtual address size of 128KB within a physical address size of up to 4 MB.

Another significant innovation of the PDP's architecture (PDP-11 in particular, but also to some degree the other PDPs) was that all peripheral device interfaces were memory mapped: rather than using special I/O instructions to work with peripherals, programmers accessed device registers by reading and modifying the contents of specific physical memory addresses.

PDP operating systems were the model for many other operating systems. CP/M used a command syntax similar to RT-11's, and even retained the awkward PIP program used to copy other programs. DEC's use of '/' for "switches" (command-line options) would lead to the adoption of '\' for pathnames in Windows as opposed to '/' in Unix.

The use of paged physical memory (with a MMU), and the use of memory-mapped device I/O were both important influences on the Intel architecture; both of these are essential features of modern CPUs.

The PDP-11 series was cloned in COMECON countries as the SM EVM series, and was produced in quantities comparable to original PDP-11 production.

18-bit systems

Through the 1960s, DEC produced a series of machines aimed at a price/performance point below IBM's mainframe machines, typically based on an 18-bit word using core memory: the PDP-1, the PDP-4 (1963), the PDP-7 (the first to use their Flip-Chip technology) and PDP-9 (1965), and finally the PDP-15 series (starting in 1970 and later sold as the "XVM" series). The PDP-15 was an early user of TTL integrated circuits. These computers were moderately powerful computers for their time, mainly used in industrial, scientific, and medical laboratories.

24-bit systems

According to Gordon Bell, the second PDP (PDP-2) was reserved for a 24-bit computer that was never developed.

36-bit systems

A paper design for the third PDP (PDP-3) was developed and a single computer was produced from the specification by a DEC customer using DEC System Building Blocks.

For larger scientific applications DEC produced the PDP-6 in 1964, using a 36-bit architecture. Using the same word length as the IBM 701-7094 series scientific computers, which were being replaced by the 32-bit IBM System/360 series, and the UNIVAC 1107, which was replaced by the successor UNIVAC 1108 the next year, provided an alternative growth path for scientific customers. The successor was the PDP-10 series, eventually sold as the DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20.

One of the most unusual peripherals produced for the PDP-10 was the DECtape. The DECtape was a length of standard magnetic tape wound on 5-in reels. However, the recording format was a 10-track approach using fixed-length numbered 'blocks' organized into a standard file structure, including a directory. Files could be written, read, changed and deleted on a DECtape as though it were a hard drive. In fact, some PDP-10 systems had no hard drives at all, using DECtapes alone for their primary data storage. For greater efficiency, the DECtape drive could read and write to a DECtape in both directions.

VAX and Ethernet systems
A representative VAX-11/780 system configuration

In 1976, DEC decided to extend the PDP-11 architecture to 32 bits, creating its first 32-bit minicomputer, referred to as a super-mini. This was launched as the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) 11/780 in 1978, and immediately took over the vast majority of the minicomputer market.[citation needed] Desperate attempts by competitors such as Data General (which had been formed in 1968 by Ed DeCastro and eight other DEC engineers who had worked on a 16-bit design that DEC had rejected) to win back market share failed, due not only to DEC's successes, but the emergence of the microcomputer and workstation into the lower-end of the minicomputer market.[citation needed] In 1983, DEC canceled its "Jupiter" project, which had been intended to build a successor to the PDP-10, and instead focused on promoting the VAX as their the single computer architecture for the company.[citation needed] It was believed that microprocessor technology at the low end and networking of larger systems could produce a 1:1000 range of computing power from one architecture.[citation needed]

The VAX series had an instruction set that is rich even by today's standards (as well as an abundance of addressing modes). In addition to the paging and memory protection features of the PDP series, the VAX supported virtual memory. The VAX could use both Unix and DEC's own VMS operating system.

In 1984, DEC launched its first 10 Mbit/s Ethernet. Ethernet allowed scalable networking, and VAXcluster allowed scalable computing. Combined with DecNet and Ethernet-based terminal servers (LAT), DEC had produced a networked storage architecture which allowed them to compete directly with IBM. The Ethernet replaced the IBM token-ring, and went on to become the dominant networking model in use today.

At its peak in the late 1980s, Digital was the second-largest computer company in the world, with over 100,000 employees. It was during this time that the company appeared to take on a feeling of invincibility, and it branched out into software, producing products for almost every "hot" niche at the time. This included Digital's own networking system, DECnet, file and print sharing, relational database, and even transaction processing. Although many of these products were well designed, most of them were DEC-only or DEC-centric, and customers frequently ignored them and used third-party products instead. This problem was further magnified by Olsen's aversion to traditional advertising and his belief that well-engineered products would sell themselves. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on these projects, at the same time that workstations based on RISC architecture were starting to approach the VAX in performance. Constrained by the huge success of their VAX/VMS products, which followed the proprietary model, the company was very late to respond to commodity hardware in the form of Intel-based personal computers and standards-based software such as Unix as well as Internet protocols such as TCP/IP. In the early 1990s, DEC found its sales faltering and its first layoffs followed. The company that created the minicomputer, a dominant networking technology, and arguably the first computers for personal use, did not effectively respond to the significant restructuring of the computer industry.

32-bit MIPS and 64-bit Alpha systems
Inside view of AlphaServer 2100.

During the 1980s, DEC made several attempts at designing a RISC (reduced instruction set) processor to replace the VAX architecture. One of these, PRISM, reached an advanced stage before being canceled in 1988. Instead, DEC launched the MIPS-based DECstation and DECsystem line of workstations and servers.

Eventually, in 1992, DEC launched the DECchip 21064 processor, the first implementation of their Alpha instruction set architecture (initially named Alpha AXP, the "AXP" was later dropped). This was a 64-bit RISC architecture (as opposed to the 32-bit CISC architecture used in the VAX) and one of the first "pure" (not an extension of an earlier 32-bit architecture) 64-bit microprocessor architectures and implementations. The Alpha offered class-leading performance at its launch, and subsequent variants continued to do so into the 2000s. Alpha-based computers (the DEC AXP series, later the AlphaStation and AlphaServer series) superseded both the VAX and MIPS architecture in DEC's product lines, and could run OpenVMS, DEC OSF/1 AXP (later, Digital Unix or Tru64 UNIX) and Microsoft's then-new operating system, Windows NT.

DEC tried to compete in the Unix market by adding POSIX-compatibility features to the VAX/VMS operating system (becoming "OpenVMS") and by selling its own version of Unix (Ultrix on PDP-11, VAX and MIPS architectures; OSF/1 on Alpha), and began to advertise more aggressively. DEC was simply not prepared to sell into a crowded Unix market however, and the low end PC-servers running NT (based on Intel processors) took market share from Alpha-based computers. DEC's workstation and server line never gained much popularity beyond former DEC customers.[citation needed]

StrongARM

In the mid-1990s, Digital Semiconductor collaborated with ARM Limited to produce the StrongARM microprocessor. This was based in part on ARM7 and in part on DEC technologies like Alpha, and was targeted at embedded systems and portable devices. It was highly compatible with the ARMv4 architecture and was very successful, competing effectively against rivals such as the SuperH and MIPS architectures in the portable digital assistant market. Microsoft subsequently dropped support for these other architectures in their PocketPC platform. In 1997, as part of a lawsuit settlement, the StrongARM intellectual property was sold to Intel. They continued to manufacture StrongARM, as well as developing it into the XScale architecture. Intel subsequently sold this business to Marvell Technology Group in 2006.

Personal computers

Digital responded to the challenge of the IBM-PC with not one, but three machines, tied to proprietary architectures. One machine was for "professionals," barely hiding president Ken Olsen's contempt for the IBM PC. One was for word processing only and another was "almost" IBM compatible. All three were commercial failures. Packaging was based on the new VT220 terminals. The DEC Professional was based on the PDP-11/23 (11/73) which, running RSX-11M+ derived the menu-driven P/OS, was software incompatible with the base of largely CP/M and 8080 based microcomputers. The 'Pro' provided 64K 16-bit addresses windowing into 2 MB of physical memory, compared to 1 MB capacity of the Intel 8086. The DECmate was the latest version of the PDP-8 based word processors, but not really suited to general computing, nor competitive with Wang Laboratories word processing that was becoming popular. The Rainbow 100 ran an 8086 implementation of CP/M, so applications could in theory be recompiled; but, by this time, users were expecting custom-built applications such as Lotus 1-2-3, which was eventually ported along with MS-DOS V2.0 and introduced in late 1983. Users objected to having to buy preformatted floppy disks.

DEC was initially resistant to even supporting MS-DOS, and did not produce a true IBM-PC compatible computer for many years, although the VAXmate came close, introduced in 1986 along with MS-Windows V1.0 and a VAX/VMS based (file and print) server for Microsoft's network protocols (such as SMB and NetBIOS) along with integration into DEC's own DECnet-family, providing LAN/WAN connection from PC to mainframe (supermini). The lines of DECs personal computers peaked with the Alpha-based 64-bit RISC workstations introduced in the early 1990s. DEC later produced a range of true IBM-PC compatible computers, including the Starion, Venturis, Celebris and Digital PC desktop lines, the HiNote series of laptops and the Digital Server and Prioris ranges of servers.[3]

Designing solutions

Beyond DECsystem-10/20, PDP, VAX and Alpha, Digital was well respected for its communication subsystem designs, such as Ethernet, DNA (Digital Network Architecture - predominantly DECnet products), DSA (Digital Storage Architecture - disks/tapes/controllers), and its "dumb terminal" subsystems including VT100 and DECserver products.[4]

Closing DEC's business
New 1993 corporate logo

In June 1992, Ken Olsen was replaced 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 had joined DEC in 1985 to run Semiconductor Engineering and Manufacturing. His relentless campaign to be CEO, and success with the Alpha microprocessor family, made him a candidate to succeed Olsen. At the same time a more modern logo was designed[5]. However, Palmer was unable to stem the tide of red ink. More rounds of layoffs ensued and many of DEC's assets were spun off:

    * Worldwide training was spun off to form an independent/new company called Global Knowledge Network.
    * Their database product, Rdb, was sold to Oracle.
    * The DLT tape technology was sold to Quantum Corporation in 1994.
    * Text terminal business (VT100 and its successors) was sold in August 1995 to Boundless Technologies.
    * In March 1997, DEC's CORBA-based product, ObjectBroker, and its messaging software, MessageQ, was sold to BEA Systems, Inc.
    * In May 1997, DEC sued Intel for allegedly infringing on its Alpha patents in designing the Pentium chips. As part of a settlement, DEC's chip business was sold to Intel. This included DEC's StrongARM implementation of the ARM computer architecture, which Intel sold as the XScale processors commonly used in Pocket PCs.
    * In 1997, the printer business was sold to GENICOM (now TallyGenicom), which then produced models bearing the Digital logo.
    * At about the same time, the networking business was sold to Cabletron Systems, and subsequently spun off as Digital Network Products Group.
    * The DECtalk and DECvoice voice products were spun off, and eventually arrived at Fonix.
    * The rights to the PDP-11 line and several PDP-11 operating systems were sold to Mentec in 1994.[6]

Eventually, on January 26, 1998, what remained of the company (including Digital's multivendor global services organization and customer support centers) was sold to Compaq, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. Hewlett-Packard now sells what were formerly Digital's StorageWorks disk/tape products,[7] as a result of the Compaq acquisition.

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

The digital.com and DEC.com domain names are now owned by Hewlett-Packard and redirect to their US website.[8]

The Digital Federal Credit Union (DCU), which was chartered in 1979 for employees of DEC, is now open to essentially everyone, with over 700 different sponsors, including the companies that acquired pieces of DEC.

Research

DEC's Research Laboratories (or Research Labs, as they were commonly known) conducted Digital's corporate research. Some of them were operated by Compaq and are still operated by Hewlett-Packard. The laboratories were:

    * Western Research Laboratory (WRL) in Palo Alto, California
    * Systems Research Center (SRC) in Palo Alto, California
    * Network Systems Laboratory (NSL) in Palo Alto, California
    * Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts
    * Paris Research Laboratory (PRL) in Paris, France
    * MetroWest Technology Campus (MTC) in Maynard, Massachusetts

Some of the former employees of Digital's Research Labs or Digital's R&D in general include:

    * Gordon Bell
    * Henry Burkhardt III, co-founder of Data General Corporation and Kendall Square Research
    * Mike Burrows
    * Luca Cardelli
    * Dave Cutler
    * Ed deCastro, co-founder of Data General Corporation
    * Jim Gettys
    * Henri Gouraud
    * Jim Gray
    * Alan Kotok
    * Leslie Lamport
    * Butler Lampson
    * Louis Monier
    * Brian Reid
    * Paul Vixie

Some of the work of the Research Labs was published in the Digital Technical Journal,[9] published until 1998.[10]

Accomplishments

Digital supported the ANSI standards, especially the ASCII character set, which survives in Unicode and the ISO 8859 character set family. Digital's own Multinational Character Set also had a large influence on ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) and, by extension, Unicode.

The first versions of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system ran on Digital's PDP series of computers (first on a PDP-7, then the PDP-11's), which were among the first commercially viable minicomputers, although for several years Digital itself did not encourage the use of Unix.

Digital also produced the popular VAX computer family, the first pure 64-bit microprocessor architecture (Alpha AXP), the first commercially successful workstation (the VT-78), and some commercially unsuccessful personal computers. The central computing system of the Soviet reusable Buran spaceship was based on two MicroVAX computers.[citation needed]

Digital produced widely used interactive operating systems, including OS-8, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, RSTS/E, RSX-11, RT-11, and OpenVMS. PDP computers, in particular the PDP-11 model, inspired a generation of programmers and software developers. Some PDP-11 systems more than 25 years old (software and hardware) are still being used to control and monitor factories, transportation systems and nuclear plants. Digital was an early champion of time-sharing systems.

Digital was to the command-line interface (CLI) what Apple was to the GUI: there was history before and innovation after, but it was Digital's operating systems that put it together in a complete and definitive form. The command-line interfaces found in Digital's systems, eventually codified as DCL, would look familiar to any user of modern microcomputer CLIs; those used in earlier systems, such as CTSS, IBM's JCL, or Univac's time-sharing systems, would look utterly alien. Many features of the CP/M and MS-DOS CLI show a recognizable family resemblance to Digital's OSes, including command names such as DIR and HELP and the "name-dot-extension" file naming conventions.

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 peer-to-peer networking standards. Email, file sharing, and distributed collaborative projects existed within the company long before their value was recognized in the market.

Digital, Intel and Xerox through their collaboration to create the DIX standard, were champions of Ethernet, but Digital is the company that made Ethernet commercially successful. Initially, Ethernet-based DECnet and LAT protocols interconnected VAXes with DECserver terminal servers. Starting with the UNIBUS to Ethernet adapter, multiple generations of Ethernet controllers from Digital were the de facto standard. The CI "computer interconnect" adapter was the industry's first network interface controller to use separate transmit and receive "rings".

Digital 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 HSC50/70/90 and later series of Hierarchical Storage Controllers. HSCs delivered the first hardware RAID 0 and 1 capabilities and the first serial interconnects of multiple storage technologies. This technology was the forerunner to systems like Network of Workstations which are used for massively cooperative tasks such as web-searches and drug research.

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 X3.64 standard, and even today terminal emulators such as HyperTerminal, PuTTY and Xterm still emulate a VT100 (or its more capable successor, the VT220).

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. Digital was the primary sponsor for this project, which was one of the first large scale free software projects,[citation needed] a contemporary of the GNU Project but not associated with it.

Dave Cutler, who led the development of RSX-11M, RSX-11M+, VMS and then VAXeln, left Digital in 1988 to lead the development of Windows NT. A rumor circulated for a long time that WNT=VMS+1 (increment each letter by one). In the early 1990s, when asked directly about this, Cutler quipped "What took you so long ?", leaving open the possibility that VMS becoming WNT was a very unlikely coincidence. However, as noted in the article on Windows NT, the order of events does not support this.

Notes-11 and its follow-on product, VAXnotes, 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 Notes-11 developers later joined Lotus Development Corporation and contributed to their Lotus Notes product.

Digital was one of the first businesses connected to the Internet with dec.com, registered in 1985,[11] being one of the first of the now ubiquitous .com domains. gatekeeper.dec.com was a well-known software repository during the pre-World Wide Web days, but Digital was also the first computer vendor to open a public website, on October 1, 1993.[12] The popular AltaVista, created by Digital, was one of the first comprehensive Internet search engines. (Although Lycos was earlier, it was much more limited.)

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 hard-disk-based MP3-player, the Personal Jukebox, started at the DEC Systems Research Center. (The project was started about a month before the merger into Compaq was completed.)

DEC's Western Research Lab created the Itsy Pocket Computer. This was developed into the Compaq iPaq line of PDAs, which replaced the Compaq Aero PDA.

Anecdotes
Employee coffee mug

    * The first spam in computer history was sent on May 3, 1978 by a Digital employee. Over 400 people received his promotional message via the ARPANET network.
    * Ken Olsen's primary concern about customers and employees "Our Employees are our greatest Asset" was distributed on a coffee mug, to encourage all employees.
    * Ken Olsen is famously quoted as having said in 1977: "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
    * In 1960, DEC engineers realized that in specifying connectors on a frame, where numbers mark the card slot locations and letters mark the connectors on individual cards, some letters cause confusion. Thus the letters G, I, O, and Q were dropped to avoid confusion with C, 1, and 0. The remaining 22 letters were since known as the DEC alphabet[citation needed]. Similar alphabet subsets are used in other applications, for example, seat numbering and record locators used by airlines, and Vehicle Identification Numbers used by motor vehicle manufacturers.

User organizations

Originally the users' group was called DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer User Society) during the 1960s to 1990s. When Compaq acquired Digital in 1998, the users group was renamed CUO, the Compaq Users' Organisation. When HP acquired Compaq in 2002, CUO became HP-Interex, although there are still DECUS groups in several countries. In the United States, the organization is represented by the Encompass organization.

Notes

   1. ^ "DEC used by Digital itself:" PDP11 Processor Handbook (1973): page 8, "DEC, PDP, UNIBUS are registered trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation;" page 1-4, "Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) designs and manufactures many of the peripheral devices offered with PDP-11's. As a designer and manufacturer of peripherals, DEC can offer extremely reliable equipment... The LA30 DECwriter, a totally DEC-designed and built teleprinter, can serve as an alternative to the Teletype."
   2. ^ http://www.secinfo.com/dsvRx.83Pe.7.htm SEC Web site retrieved January 22,2008
   3. ^ Compaq.com - Digital PC Products - Retired Hardware Products
   4. ^ For in-depth articles regarding Digital technologies, refer to the archived Digital Technical Journal
   5. ^ Ned Batchelder and http://vt100.net/dec/logo
   6. ^ Mentec
   7. ^ HP StorageWorks - Data and Network Storage Products and Solutions
   8. ^ www.digital.com, www.DEC.com
   9. ^ Digital Technical Journal - Online Issues
  10. ^ At least some of the research reports are available online at ftp.digital.com, in the subdirectories WRL, SRC, NSL, CRL, PRL (see Research section). Verified July 2006
  11. ^ dec.com
  12. ^ DECTEI-L Archives - February 1994 (#2)

References

    * Edgar H. Schein, Peter S. DeLisi, Paul J. Kampas, and Michael M. Sonduck, DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation (San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler, 2003), ISBN 1-57675-225-9.
    * C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, and John E. McNamara, Computer Engineering - A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design; Digital Press, 1978, ISBN 0-932376-00-2.
    * Alan R. Earls, Digital Equipment Corporation; Arcadia Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-7385-3587-7.

External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Digital Equipment Corporation

    * GBell's CyberMuseum for Digital Equipment Corp (DEC)
    * Historic Digital Equipment Corporation Marketing Materials at the Computer History Museum
    * Rise and Fall of DIGITAL (Equipment Corporation), a company chronicle at a German computer museum
    * Ken Olsen, New England Economic Adventure
    * Digital Equipment Computer Users Society Proceedings and Publications, 1962–1992 Charles Babbage Institute Digital Equipment Computer Users Society (DECUS), a worldwide computer users group, was established in March of 1961. Collection includes proceedings for DECUS annual symposia and DECUS publications, including DECUSOPE newsletter, DECUS Program Library and pamphlets.
    * OpenVMS.org: OpenVMS Community Portal
    * Tru64.org: Tru64 UNIX News and Information Portal
    * Pictures of DEC chips at chipdb.org
    * A LinkedIn group for DEC enthusiasts
    * LinkedIn group for DEC Alumni
    * The Mouse That Roared: PDP-1 Celebration Event panel, 15 May 2006.



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