Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American
computer industry. They are generally referred to within the computing
industry as DEC, despite rebranding themselves as Digital. They were later
acquired by Compaq, who subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard. As of 2003
their product lines are still produced under the HP name.
Though DEC does not exist anymore, its logo is very much alive. It is now
the logo of Digital GlobalSoft a well respected IT services company in
India. Earlier this company was a 51 % subsidiary of DEC. Now it is a part
of HP.
In 1990, Digital Equipment Corp. was about to launch a new generation of
computer disk drives into the marketplace. Code named the RA-90, it was the
second largest development project ever undertaken by the company.
Several major technological innovations were to be simultaneously integrated
into this state of the art (at the time) product. Key metrics associated
with the product were:
* A product design cycle of five years (initiated in 1985).
* Price of $15,000 at the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) level.
* Storage capacity of one gigabyte of information (formatted).
* Mean time before failure of 40,000 hours.
Compared with today's product, this seems like ancient technology. For
example, key metrics of todayÕs disk drives are:
* Product design cycles of six months.
* Price at the OEM level of less than $100.
* Storage capacity of 60 or more gigabytes of information.
* Mean time before failure greater than 500,000 hours.
Unfortunately, because of product design glitches, the RA-90 launch was very
late in coming to market. By the time enough glitches had been resolved to
allow limited shipments, competitors had released enhanced technology drives
at much lower prices. What could have been a huge win for this organization
became a great failure. Coupled with other new product failures, this led to
the ultimate breakup of the company
History
The company was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen, a Massachusetts engineer who
had been working at Lincoln Labs on the TX-2 project. The TX-2 was a
transistor-based computer using a large amount of core memory. When that
project ran into difficulties, Olsen left to form DEC with Harlan Anderson,
a colleague from his MIT days. At the time the market was hostile to
computer companies, and investors shied from their plans. Instead they
started building small digital "blocks" (each effectively a single component
from the TX-2 design) that could be combined together to be used in a lab
setting. In 1961 the company was making a profit, and started construction
of their first computer, the PDP-1.
Through the 1960s DEC produced a series of machines aimed at a
price/performance point below IBM's mainframe machines, typically based on
an 18-bit word, using core memory. True success followed with the
introduction of the famous PDP-8 in 1964. It was a smaller 12-bit word
machine that sold for about $16,000. The PDP-8 was small enough to fit on a
cart. It was simple enough to be used for many roles, and they soon started
being sold in huge numbers to new market niches, labs, railways, and all
sorts of industrial applications. Today the PDP-8 is generally regarded as
the first minicomputer.
The PDP-8 was important historically because it was the first computer that
was regularly purchased by a handful of end users as an alternative to using
a larger system in a data center. Because of their low cost and portability,
these machines could be purchased to fill a specific need, unlike the
mainframe systems of the day that were nearly always shared among diverse users.
The PDP-8 had a limited instruction set and lacked the memory protection
hardware required for a time sharing system.
Last of the famous machines in the PDP series was the PDP-11, which switched
to a 16-bit word now that everyone in the computer industry was using ASCII.
PDP-11 machines started in the market essentially as upscale PDP-8s, but as
improvements to integrated circuits continued, they eventually were packaged
in cases no larger than a modern PC. Their larger PDP-10 cousins, which used
a 36-bit architecture, were aimed at data-processing centers instead,
eventually being sold as the DECsystem 10 and 20. While the PDP-11 systems
supported several operating system of the day, including DEC's RSTS system,
their most important role was to run Bell Labs' new UNIX operating system
that was being made available to educational institutions. These PDP-11
systems were destined to be the sandbox for a generation of computer scientists.
The PDP-11 had a 64K address space. Most models had a paged architecture and
memory protection features to allow timesharing, and could support split
Instruction & Data architectures for an effective address size of 128K.
In 1976 DEC decided to move to an entirely new 32-bit platform, which they
referred to as the super-mini. They released this as the VAX 11/780 in 1978,
and immediately took over the vast majority of the minicomputer market.
Desperate attempts by competitors such as Data General (which had been
formed in 1968 by a former DEC engineer who had worked on a 16-bit design
that DEC had rejected) to win back market share failed, due not only to
DEC's successes, but the emergence of the microcomputer and workstation into
the lower-end of the minicomputer market. In 1983, DEC cancelled their
"Jupiter" project, which had been intended to build a successor to the
PDP-10, and instead focused on promoting the VAX as their flagship model.
The VAX series had an instruction set that is rich even by today's standards
(as well as an abundance of addressing modes). In addition to the paging and
memory protection features of the PDP series, the VAX supported virtual
memory. The VAX could use both UNIX and DEC's own VMS operating system.
At its peak in the late 1980s, Digital was the second-largest computer
company in the world, with over 100,000 employees. It was during this time
that they appeared to gain a feeling of invincibility, and branched out into
software, producing products for almost every then "hot" niche. This
included their own networking system, DECnet, file and print sharing,
relational database, and even transaction processing. Although many of these
products were well designed, most of them were DEC-only or DEC-centric, and
customers frequently ignored them and used 3rd party products instead. This
problem was further magnified by Olsen's aversion to advertising and his
belief that well-engineered products would sell themselves. Hundreds of
millions of dollars were spent on these projects, at the same time that
workstations based on RISC architecture were starting to approach the VAX in
performance. In the early 1990s DEC "suddenly" found its sales faltering,
and DECs first layoffs followed.
Their response was to design a single microprocessor with 64-bit RISC
architecture (as opposed to the 32-bit CISC architecture used in the VAX)
that could be used both in the servers, as well as a workstation line of
their own. The result was the Alpha processor, which held the performance
crown into the year 2000's. The Alpha-based computers (AlphaServer) was able
to run VMS, UNIX and Microsoft's new server operating system NT. DEC also
tried to compete in the Unix market by marketing the VMS operating system as
"OpenVMS" and by selling their own Unix (OSF1, later renamed to Tru64), and
it began to advertise more aggressively. DEC was simply not prepared to sell
into a crowded Unix market however and furthermore the low end PC-servers
running NT (based on Intel processors) took marketshare from Alpha-based
computers. DEC's workstation and server line never gained much popularity
beyond former DEC customers.
Ken Olsen was replaced by Robert Palmer as the company's CEO, but Palmer was
unable to stave the tide of red ink and more rounds of layoffs ensued. DEC's
database product was sold to Oracle. In May 1997 DEC sued Intel for
allegedly infringing on its Alpha patents in designing the Pentium chips.
The settlement resulted in DECs chip business being sold to Intel, its
networking business being sold to Cabletron, and eventually the company
itself being sold to Compaq on January 26, 1998. Compaq itself was taken
over by Hewlett-Packard in 2002.
Accomplishments
Digital supported the ANSI standards, especially the ASCII character set,
which survive in Unicode and the ISO character set. This finessed EBCDIC.
Digital's own Multinational Character Set also had a large influence on the
Latin-1 characters in ISO 8859-1 and Unicode.
The first versions of the C programming language and the UNIX system ran on
Digital's PDP series of computers (first on a PDP-7, then the PDP-11's),
which were the first commercially viable minicomputers.
Digital also produced the popular VAX computer family, the Alpha (AXP)
microprocessor (the first commercially available 64-bit microprocessor), the
first commercially successful workstation (the VT-78), and some commercially
unsuccessful personal computers including the DEC One, the first laptop
computer and the first MS-DOS computer to use 3 1/2" floppy disks, which
were later to become an industry standard.
Digital produced top-line operating systems, like OS-8, RT-11, RSX-11 and
VMS. PDP computers, in particular the PDP-11 model, inspired a generation of
programmers and software developers. Some PDP-11 systems more than 25 years
old (software and hardware) are still being used (as of 2003) to control and
monitor factories, transportations systems and nuclear plants. VAX and
Micro-VAX computers (very widespread in the 1980s) running VMS formed one of
the most important pre-Internet networks, DECnet, which mixed business and
research facilities.
Digital was the first commercial business connected to the Internet,
digital.com being one of the first of the now ubiquitous .com domains.
The popular AltaVista, created by Digital, was one of the first
comprehensive Internet search engines (although Lycos was earlier, it was
much more limited).
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