[W/K] :: Digital Equipment Corporation

  Digital Equipment Corporation
       
           (DEC) A computer manufacturer and software vendor.
       
          Before the killer micro revolution of the late 1980s,
          hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering
          time-sharing machines.  The first of the group of hacker
          cultures nucleated around the PDP-1 (see TMRC).
          Subsequently, the PDP-6, PDP-10, PDP-20, PDP-11 and
          VAX were all foci of large and important hackerdoms, and DEC
          machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine
          population.
       
          The first PC from DEC was a CP/M computer called Rainbow,
          announced in 1981-82.
       
          DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era
          (roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace
          microcomputers and Unix early cost it heavily in profits
          and prestige after silicon got cheap.  However, the
          microprocessor design tradition owes a heavy debt to the
          PDP-11 instruction set, and every one of the major
          general-purpose microcomputer operating systems so far
          (CP/M, MS-DOS, Unix, OS/2) were either genetically
          descended from a DEC OS, or incubated on DEC hardware or
          both.  Accordingly, DEC is still regarded with a certain wry
          affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up
          on DEC machines.  The contrast with IBM is instructive.
       
          Quarterly sales $3923M, profits -$1746M (Aug 1994).
       
          DEC was taken over by Compaq Computer Corporation in 1998.
       
          http://www.digital.com/.html).html">Home (http://www.digital.com/.html).
       
          (1999-06-03)