Digital Equipment Corporation, using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline.
Programmed Data Processor (PDP), referred to by some customers, media and authors as "Programmable Data Processor," is a term used by the Digital Equipment Corporation from 1957 to 1990 for several lines of minicomputers. The name "PDP" intentionally avoids the use of the term "computer" because, at the time of the first PDPs, computers had a reputation of being large, complicated, and expensive machines, and the venture capitalists behind Digital would not support Digital's attempting to build a "computer"; the word "minicomputer" had not yet been coined. So instead, Digital used their existing line of logic modules to build a Programmed Data Processor and aimed it at a market that could not afford the larger computers.
The PDP-1 is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, BBN and elsewhere. The PDP-1 is the original hardware for playing history's first game on a minicomputer, Steve Russell's Spacewar!
The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, making it one of DEC's most successful product lines. The PDP-11 is considered by some experts to be the most popular minicomputer.
The PDP-7 was a minicomputer produced by Digital Equipment Corporation as part of the PDP series. Introduced in 1964, shipped since 1965, it was the first to use their Flip-Chip technology. With a cost of US$72,000, it was cheap but powerful by the standards of the time. The PDP-7 is the third of Digital's 18-bit machines, with essentially the same instruction set architecture as the PDP-4 and the PDP-9.
RSX-11 is a discontinued family of multi-user real-time operating systems for PDP-11 computers created by Digital Equipment Corporation. In widespread use through the late 1970s and early 1980s, RSX-11 was influential in the development of later operating systems such as VMS and Windows NT.
The PDP-6 is a computer model developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1964. It was influential primarily as the prototype (effectively) for the later PDP-10; the instruction sets of the two machines are almost identical.
Kenneth Harry Olsen was an American engineer who co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson and his brother Stan Olsen.
DIBOL or Digital's Business Oriented Language is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language, designed for use in Management Information Systems (MIS) software development.
DECtape, originally called Microtape, is a magnetic tape data storage medium used with many Digital Equipment Corporation computers, including the PDP-6, PDP-8, LINC-8, PDP-9, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-12, and the PDP-15. On DEC's 32-bit systems, VAX/VMS support for it was implemented but did not become an official part of the product lineup.
Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits.
The Professional 325 (PRO-325), Professional 350 (PRO-350), and Professional 380 (PRO-380) were PDP-11 compatible microcomputers introduced in 1982 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as high-end competitors to the IBM PC.
RADIX 50 or RAD50, is an uppercase-only character encoding created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use on their DECsystem, PDP, and VAX computers.
Harlan Anderson was an American engineer and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which later became the second largest computer company in the world. Other notable entities that Anderson has been associated with include Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a member of the technical staff. He served as Director of Technology for Time, Inc., where he spearheaded their evaluation of the future of the printed word during the explosion of television, long before the Internet existed.
AlphaStation is the name given to a series of computer workstations, produced from 1994 onwards by Digital Equipment Corporation, and later by Compaq and HP. As the name suggests, the AlphaStations were based on the DEC Alpha 64-bit microprocessor. Supported operating systems for AlphaStations comprise Tru64 UNIX, OpenVMS and Windows NT. Most of these workstations can also run various versions of Linux and BSD operating systems.
In computer communications, enquiry is a transmission-control character that requests a response from the receiving station with which a connection has been set up. It represents a signal intended to trigger a response at the receiving end, to see whether it is still present. The response, an answer-back code to the terminal that transmitted the WRU signal, may include station identification, the type of equipment in service, and the status of the remote station.
In computer architecture, 18-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 18 bits wide. Also, 18-bit CPU and ALU architectures are those that are based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size.
The PDP-12 was created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1969 and was marketed specifically for science and engineering. It was the third in the LINC family and its main uses were for applications in chemistry, applied psychology, patient monitoring and industrial testing. It is the combination of the LINC computer and the PDP-8 and can run programs for either computer. It features a single central processor with two distinct operating modes, each with its own instruction set that allows it to run both computers' programs. PDP-12 Basic System weighed about 600 pounds (270 kg).
Code page 1020, also known as CP1020, is an IBM code page number assigned to the French-Canadian variant of DEC's National Replacement Character Set (NRCS). The 7-bit character set was introduced for DEC's computer terminal systems, starting with the VT200 series in 1983, but is also used by IBM for their DEC emulation. Similar but not identical to the series of ISO 646 character sets, the character set is a close derivation from ASCII with only ten code points differing.
Digital News was a trade publication that focused on products from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
