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| - DEC provided computer display equipment for 1979 's Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This article is a stub relating to real-world information such as a performer, author, novel, magazine, or other production material. You can help Memory Alpha by fixing it.
- Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American computer company, a leading vendor in the minicomputer market throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and for a long time one of the most admired within the hacker community.
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| abstract
| - Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American computer company, a leading vendor in the minicomputer market throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and for a long time one of the most admired within the hacker community. Initially focusing on the small-end of the computer market allowed DEC (pronounced "deck") to grow without its potential competitors noticing, or caring enough to make serious efforts to compete with them. Their PDP series of machines became runaway best-sellers in the 1960s, especially the PDP-8, widely considered to be the first successful minicomputer. Looking to simplify and update their line, DEC replaced most of their smaller machines with the PDP-11 in 1970, eventually selling over 600,000 examples and cementing DECs position as one of the most innovative and successful companies in the industry. Originally designed as a follow-on to the PDP-11, DEC's VAX-11 series was the first widely-used 32-bit minicomputer. Machines of this sort, known as "superminis", were able to compete in many roles with larger mainframes like the IBM System/370. The VAX was a runaway best-seller, with over 400,000 sold, and its sales through the 1980s propelled the company into the second largest in the industry as their systems stole billions in sales from formerly larger competitors. At its peak, DEC was the second largest employer in Massachusetts, second only to the state government. The rapid rise of the business microcomputer in the late 1980s, and especially the introduction of powerful 32-bit systems in the 1990s, quickly eroded the value of DEC's systems. Network storage was another area that the company focused on in the early 1990s, but rapid progress in cost and storage capacity of hard drives eroded this lead even more rapidly. By the mid-90's, commodity machines offered performance and capacity comparable to DEC's largest systems. The company never came up with an appropriate response to these threats, and by the mid 1990s was a shell of its former self. DEC's last major attempt to find a space in the rapidly changing market was the DEC Alpha, a series of 64-bit RISC CPUs. DEC initially started work on these designs as a way to re-implement their VAX series, in the same fashion that IBM was successfully selling mainframes based on their own POWER CPUs. Alpha systems could also be scaled downwards to deliver the fastest workstations on the market, at a competitive price. Although the Alpha systems met both of these goals, and was, for most of its lifetime, the fastest CPU on the market, it did little to affect the bottom line or repair the company's status. The company was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, 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 in May 2002. As of 2007 its product lines were still produced under the HP name. The company is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC (this acronym was frequently officially used by Digital itself, but the trademark was always DIGITAL). 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.
- DEC provided computer display equipment for 1979 's Star Trek: The Motion Picture. This article is a stub relating to real-world information such as a performer, author, novel, magazine, or other production material. You can help Memory Alpha by fixing it.
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