Digital Equipment Corporation
DEC

    (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.
   In 2002 Compaq was in turn acquired by Hewlett-Packard who
   sold off parts of Digital Equipment Corporation to Intel and
   absorbed the rest.  The Digital logo is no longer used.

   (2012-07-29)