Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. They are generally referred to within the computing industry as DEC. (This acronym was once officially used by DEC itself, but later discarded.) .They were later acquired by Compaq, which subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard. As of 2004 their product lines were still produced under the HP name. For many years their headquarters was in an old woolen mill in Maynard, Massachusetts

Accomplishments

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

Related Topics:
ANSI - ASCII - Unicode - ISO - Multinational Character Set - Latin-1 - ISO 8859-1

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The first versions of the C programming language and the UNIX system ran on Digital's PDP series of computers (first on a PDP-7, then the PDP-11's), which were the first commercially viable minicomputers.

Related Topics:
C programming language - UNIX system - PDP - Minicomputer

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Digital also produced the popular VAX computer family, the Alpha (AXP) microprocessor, the first commercially successful workstation (the VT-78), and some commercially unsuccessful personal computers.

Related Topics:
VAX - Alpha

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Digital produced top-line operating systems, like OS-8, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, RSTS/E, RSX-11, RT-11, and VMS. 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 (as of 2004) to control and monitor factories, transportations systems and nuclear plants. Digital was an early champion of time-sharing systems, as anybody who has used other operating systems like MVS or VM/CMS from IBM can attest.

Related Topics:
OS-8 - TOPS-10 - TOPS-20 - RSTS/E - RSX-11 - RT-11 - VMS - PDP-11 - As of 2004 - Time-sharing - MVS - VM/CMS - IBM

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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 OSes that put it together in a complete and definitive form. The command-line interfaces found in the Digital's OSes, eventually to be codified as DCL, would look familiar to any user of modern microcomputer CLI's; those used in earlier systems, such as CTSS, IBM's JCL, 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 syntax.

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VAX and Micro-VAX computers (very widespread in the 1980s) running VMS formed one of the most important pre-Internet networks, DECnet, which mixed business and research facilities. The DECnet protocols formed one of the first peer-to-peer networking standards.

Related Topics:
Micro-VAX - VMS - DECnet

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Digital was one of the major champions of ethernet. For multiple generations of computers, ethernet controllers from Digital were de facto standard components on many computer boards.

Related Topics:
Ethernet

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Clustering, an operating system technology which treated multiple machines as one logical entity was invented by Digital. This technology was the fore-runner to systems like Network of Workstations which are used for massively cooperative tasks such as web-searches and drug research.

Related Topics:
Clustering - Network of Workstations

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The VT-100 computer terminal became the industry standard and even today terminal emulators such as hyperterminal and Xterminals follow that standard.

Related Topics:
VT-100 - Computer terminal

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The X Window System, the first remote-windowing system, was developed by Project Athena at MIT. Digital was the primary sponsor for this project.

Related Topics:
X Window System - Project Athena - MIT

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Dave Cutler, the operating system guru who led the development of RSX-11M, RSX-11M+, VMS and then VAXELN left Digital in 1988 to lead the development of Windows NT. There have been much rumors/jokes that WNT=VMS+1 (increment each letter by one).

Related Topics:
Dave Cutler - RSX-11 - VMS - VAXELN - 1988

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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.

Related Topics:
Groupware - Len Kawell - Lotus Development Corporation - Lotus Notes

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Digital was one of the first commercial businesses connected to the Internet, digital.com being one of the first of the now ubiquitous .com domains.

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The popular AltaVista, created by Digital, was one of the first comprehensive Internet search engines (although Lycos was earlier, it was much more limited).

Related Topics:
AltaVista - Search engine - Lycos

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