Digital Equipment Corporation: PDP and VAX Pioneer That Dismissed the PC

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At MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson watched students line up for 15-minute turns on the small, interactive TX-0 while a faster IBM mainframe sat ignored. In 1957 venture capitalist Georges Doriot funded them on the condition that they keep the word computer out of the name and not sell one yet. Digital Equipment Corporation set up in a Civil War-era wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, sold circuit board modules, and was profitable in its first year. The PDP-1 arrived in 1960 and ran Spacewar, the PDP-8 of 1965 cost under $25,000 and launched the minicomputer era, and the 1970 PDP-11 used the Unibus to make peripherals easy to add, becoming the platform where Unix and C were developed.

The 32-bit VAX and its VAXcluster design let companies add machines instead of replacing them, and by the mid-1980s DEC had 100,000 employees and was second only to IBM. Its answer to the IBM PC in 1982 was three mutually incompatible machines, the Professional, DECmate II and Rainbow 100, plus RX50 floppies that required special preformatted disks. Factions fought over the costly VAX 9000 and a secret RISC workstation project, losses mounted, and in 1992 the board forced Olsen to resign. Robert Palmer bet on the 64-bit Alpha chip, the fastest microprocessor of its day, but Microsoft dropped Windows NT support. DEC sold off divisions, and in January 1998 Compaq bought what remained, mainly for its services organization.

• DEC registered the domain dec.com in 1985.
• Around 1977 Olsen said there was no reason for a person to want a computer at home, later clarifying he meant home automation.
• The Rdb database went to Oracle and the networking business to Cabletron.
• StrongARM and DEC's chip plants went to Intel, largely in a patent lawsuit settlement.
• DEC created the AltaVista search engine, and former engineers helped build Windows NT.