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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.
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of smaller general-purpose computer developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, The New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than US$25,000, with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC.
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.
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.
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.
RT-11 is a discontinued small, low-end, single-user real-time operating system for the full line of Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 16-bit computers. RT-11 was first implemented in 1970. It was widely used for real-time computing systems, process control, and data acquisition across all PDP-11s. It was also used for low-cost general-use computing.
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RSTS is a multi-user time-sharing operating system developed by Digital Equipment Corporation for the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers. The first version of RSTS was implemented in 1970 by DEC software engineers that developed the TSS-8 time-sharing operating system for the PDP-8. The last version of RSTS was released in September 1992. RSTS-11 and RSTS/E are usually referred to just as "RSTS" and this article will generally use the shorter form. RSTS-11 supports the BASIC programming language, an extended version called BASIC-PLUS, developed under contract by Evans Griffiths & Hart of Boston. Starting with RSTS/E version 5B, DEC added support for additional programming languages by emulating the execution environment of the RT-11 and RSX-11 operating systems.
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The Professional 325 (PRO-325), Professional 350 (PRO-350), and Professional 380 (PRO-380) are PDP-11 compatible microcomputers. The Pro-325/350 were introduced in 1982 and the Pro-380 in 1985 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.
BASIC-11 was a dialect of the basic language for PDP-11 operating systems such as RSX-11, RT-11, TSX and TSX-Plus. It was a classic BASIC in that it used line numbers, supported line number editing, and classic function syntax. It provided extended support for user-defined functions, external sequential disk files, and linking with assembler language modules for device support and operating system interfaces.
Synergy DBL is a compiled, imperative programming language designed for business use. The language was originally called DBL; later it was referred to as Synergy Language; as of 2012 the official name is Synergy DBL. It is based on Digital Equipment Corporation’s DIBOL programming language.
BASIC-8, is a BASIC programming language for the Digital Equipment (DEC) PDP-8 series minicomputers. It was the first BASIC dialect released by the company, and its success led DEC to produce new BASICs for its future machines, notably BASIC-PLUS for the PDP-11 series. DEC's adoption of BASIC cemented the use of the language as the standard educational and utility programming language of its era, which combined with its small system requirements, made BASIC the major language during the launch of microcomputers in the mid-1970s.
References
- ↑ "DCL dialog". March 1995.
- 1 2 "Cutting comes with TSX-Plus". Hardcopy. December 1984. pp. 54–63.
- ↑ Milton Campbell (January 1985). "The RT-11 Perspective". Hardcopy. p. 125.
- 1 2 3 "S&H TSX-Plus on 11/23, 11/34". Computerworld . December 1, 1980. p. 67.
efficient, general-purpose timesharing for up to 20 users on 11/23 and 11/34 based ...
- ↑ "TSX-Plus: Time Share RT-11". Hardcopy. October 1982. p. 9.
