Digital Equipment Corporation

major worldwide manufacturer of computer equipment, DEC

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC. (This acronym was frequently officially used by Digital itself, but the official name was always DIGITAL.) Its PDP and VAX products were arguably the most popular minicomputers for the scientific and engineering communities during the 1970s and 1980s. DEC was acquired by Compaq in June 1998, which subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002.  As of 2007 its product lines were still produced under the HP name. From 1957 until 1992 its headquarters was in an old woolen mill in Maynard, Massachusetts.
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<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.
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