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 he was forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline.
Foonly Inc. was an American computer company formed by Dave Poole in 1976, that produced a series of DEC PDP-10 compatible mainframe computers, named Foonly F1 to Foonly F5.
Systems Concepts, Inc., was a company co-founded by Stewart Nelson and Mike Levitt focused on making hardware products related to the DEC PDP-10 series of computers. One of its major products was the SA-10, an interface which allowed PDP-10s to be connected to disk and tape drives designed for use with the channel interfaces of IBM mainframes.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used.
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 PDP–11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the late 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.
VAX is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The VAX-11/780, introduced October 25, 1977, was the first of a range of popular and influential computers implementing the VAX ISA. The VAX family was a huge success for DEC, with the last members arriving in the early 1990s. The VAX was succeeded by the DEC Alpha, which included several features from VAX machines to make porting from the VAX easier.
David Neil Cutler Sr. is an American software engineer. He developed several computer operating systems, namely Microsoft's Windows NT, and Digital Equipment Corporation's RSX-11M, VAXELN, and VMS.
Ultrix is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems for the PDP-11, VAX, MicroVAX and DECstations.
Chester Gordon Bell is an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later became Vice President of Engineering 1972–1983, overseeing the development of the VAX computer systems. Bell's later career includes entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate 1986–1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research, 1995–2015.
Interlisp is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language Lisp. Interlisp development began in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Lisp implemented for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 computer by Danny Bobrow and D. L. Murphy. In 1970, Alice K. Hartley implemented BBN LISP, which ran on PDP-10 machines running the operating system TENEX. In 1973, when Danny Bobrow, Warren Teitelman and Ronald Kaplan moved from BBN to the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), it was renamed Interlisp. Interlisp became a popular Lisp development tool for artificial intelligence (AI) researchers at Stanford University and elsewhere in the community of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Interlisp was notable for integrating interactive development tools into an integrated development environment (IDE), such as a debugger, an automatic correction tool for simple errors, and analysis tools.
The history of computing hardware in the Eastern Bloc is somewhat different from that of the Western world. As a result of the CoCom embargo, computers could not be imported on a large scale from Western Bloc.
PRISM was a 32-bit RISC instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the outcome of a number of DEC research projects from the 1982–1985 time-frame, and the project was subject to continually changing requirements and planned uses that delayed its introduction. This process eventually decided to use the design for a new line of Unix workstations. The arithmetic logic unit (ALU) of the microPrism version had completed design in April 1988 and samples were fabricated, but the design of other components like the floating point unit (FPU) and memory management unit (MMU) were still not complete in the summer when DEC management decided to cancel the project in favor of MIPS-based systems. An operating system codenamed MICA was developed for the PRISM architecture, which would have served as a replacement for both VAX/VMS and ULTRIX on PRISM.
SIMH is a free and open source, multi-platform multi-system emulator. It is maintained by Bob Supnik, a former DEC engineer and DEC vice president, and has been in development in one form or another since the 1960s.
The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of 32-bit superminicomputers, running the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Development began in 1976. In addition to being powerful machines in their own right, they also offer the additional ability to run user mode PDP-11 code, offering an upward compatible path for existing customers.
New Implementation of LISP (NIL) is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the 1970s, and intended to be the successor to the language Maclisp. It is a 32-bit implementation, and was in part a response to Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White, with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp while fixing many of its problems.
The VAX 9000 is a discontinued family of mainframes developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using custom ECL-based processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA). Equipped with optional vector processors, they were marketed into the supercomputer space as well. As with other VAX systems, they were sold with either the VMS or Ultrix operating systems.
The biographical book, The ultimate entrepreneur: the story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation, chronicles the experiences of Ken Olsen racing to design minicomputers at the company of his own founding, Digital Equipment Corporation. At the time the book was published by two computer journal writers, Ken Olsen was competing with other Massachusetts computing companies such as Data General, Prime Computer, Wang Laboratories, Symbolics, Lotus Development Corporation, and Apollo Computer. While believing in the value of software, he did not believe in the value of software separate from hardware, and missed the opportunity to fund Lotus 1-2-3 or Visicalc. He also missed the importance of the personal computer, but his futuristic vision of the Client–server model helped to launch Ethernet.
Charon is the brand name of a group of software products able to emulate several CPU architectures. The emulators available under this brand mostly cover the Digital Equipment DEC hardware platforms PDP-11, VAX, and AlphaServer, which support many of the legacy operating systems, including Tru64 and OpenVMS. The product range also includes virtualization solutions for HP 3000 using MPE/iX and SPARC. Charon software products have been developed by the Swiss software company Stromasys SA, which has its headquarters in Cointrin, near Geneva.
TENEX is an operating system developed in 1969 by BBN for the PDP-10, which later formed the basis for Digital Equipment Corporation's TOPS-20 operating system.
