Digital Equipment Corporation
<company> (DEC) A computer manufacturer and software vendor.
Before the
killer micro revolution of the late 1980s, hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's pioneering
time-sharing machines.
The first of the group of hacker cultures nucleated around the PDP-1 (see
TMRC). Subsequently, the
PDP-6,
PDP-10,
PDP-20,
PDP-11 and
VAX were all foci of large and important hackerdoms, and DEC machines long dominated the
ARPANET and
Internet machine population.
The first PC from DEC was a
CP/M computer called Rainbow, announced in 1981-82.
DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era (roughly 1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace microcomputers and
Unix early cost it heavily in profits and prestige after
silicon got cheap.
However, the
microprocessor design tradition owes a heavy debt to the
PDP-11 instruction set, and every one of the major general-purpose microcomputer operating systems so far (CP/M,
MS-DOS,
Unix,
OS/2) were either genetically descended from a DEC OS, or incubated on DEC
hardware or both.
Accordingly, DEC is still regarded with a certain wry affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up on DEC machines.
The contrast with
IBM is instructive.
Quarterly sales $3923M, profits -$1746M (Aug 1994).
DEC was taken over by
Compaq Computer Corporation in 1998.
Home (http://www.digital.com/.html).
