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Digital Equipment Corporation (or DEC) was a computer company founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957.  It released a line of popular minicomputers, starting with the pdp/8 in 1958.  At its peak in the late 1980s, the company employed over 100,000 people across the world and had $4 billion in cash on hand, making it the second largest computer company in the world, behind [[IBM]].  The popular [[PDP-11]] and [[VAX]] minicomputers were sold by DEC from the 1970s on.  However, a precipitous decline at a time when PCs were growing in popularity resulted in Compaq buying DEC in 1998, although the PDP-11 rights were sold to Mentec.

Digital Equipment Corporation (or DEC) was a hardware, software, and services company, producing all of the computers, terminals, printers, and most other peripheral devices associated with their computer systems.

 

DEC was founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957.  It released a several lines of popular minicomputers, starting with the pdp/8 in 1958.  At its peak in the late 1980s, the company employed over 100,000 people across the world and had $4 billion in cash on hand, making it the second largest computer company in the world, behind [[IBM]].  The popular [[PDP-11]] and [[VAX]] minicomputers were sold by DEC from the 1970s on.  However, a precipitous decline in business at a time when PCs were growing in popularity resulted in Compaq buying DEC in 1998, although the PDP-11 rights were sold to Mentec.  DEC produced various personal computers as well, including the Gigi, and a workstation based on a pdp/8 in microprocessor form.  The 8086/Z80 hybrid DEC Rainbow personal computer competed for a time with the IBM PC.  However, DEC did not successfully market the Rainbow against the PC and, unlike the PC, the hardware architecture was kept proprietary, which led to DEC dropping the Rainbow line after selling about 300,000 units.

 

DEC had a huge influence on the modern computer industry.  The PDP-11 and VAX systems were much admired and inspired some [[CPU]]s that followed. Unix (the [[predecessor of Linux]]) and the C programming language were both developed on PDP-11 systems.  This is doubtless due to the fact that PDP-11s and VAXes were common in university settings.  The VT100 [[terminal]] set the base standard for smart terminals, and the VMS operating system (now OpenVMS) running on the VAX and AXP computers was also very popular.  The 8-bit CP/M operating system was inspired by the pdp/8's OS/8 and PDP-11's RT-11 operating systems.  In turn, MSDOS was based on 86DOS, which was based on CP/M.  And Microsoft Windows was originally based on MSDOS.  Further, ACLs (Access Control Lists) were a feature of VMS that was later incorporated into Windows.