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Some photos of the 2007 Party (If you took some, please e-mail them to the webmaster)
2007 is the 50th Anniversary Year of the founding of Digital Equipment Corporation. The following is a trip down memory lane for many of us. Enjoy !
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 once 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 2006 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. HISTORY The company was founded in 1957
by Ken
Olsen and Harlan
Anderson, two engineers who had been working at MIT
Lincoln
Laboratory on the TX-2
project. The TX-2 was a transistor-based
computer using the then-huge amount of 64K
36-bit
words of core
memory. When that project ran into difficulties, Olsen and Anderson
left MIT to form DEC. Venture
capital of about $70,000 was provided by Georges
Doriot and his American
Research and Development Corporation. AR&D later sold its
investment in Digital for approximately $450 million, certainly the best VC
return ever at the time. At the time the VC market was hostile to computer
companies, and investors shied from their plans. The original business plan
named the company "Digital Computer Corporation", but AR&D
required that the name be changed to DEC. Instead DEC started building small
digital "modules" (flip flops, gates, transformer drivers, etc.) that
could be combined together to run scientific and engineering experiments. In 1959
Ben Gurley started design of their first computer, the PDP-1
(PDP being an initialism
for Programmable
Data Processor. This was to help get VC funds -- "We aren't
building computers, we're building 'Programmable Data Processors'."). DEC
began its operations in an old Civil War era woolen mill in Maynard, MA where
there was plenty of inexpensive manufacturing space.
System Building Blocks 1103
hex-inverter card (both sides) The first modules were the free-standing "laboratory
modules", placing one or two gates inside an extruded aluminum housing.
These modules could be stacked up in a pre-configured 19" rack shelf that
supplied power to the modules; the logic circuits were then established using banana
plug patch
cords installed at the front of the modules. The same circuits were
then packaged as "System
Building Blocks", which were used to build the PDP-1.
A "B" (blue) series
Flip Chip module containing 9 transistors, 1971 The same circuits were then packaged as the first
"R" (red) series "Flip-Chip®"
modules. Later, other module series provided additional speed, much higher logic
density, and industrial I/O capabilities. Digital published extensive data about
the modules in free catalogs that became very popular. In the 1980s, DEC built the VT180
(codenamed "Robin"), which was a VT100
terminal with a Z80-based
microcomputer running CP/M. This evolved into the Rainbow
100, which had both Z80 and 8088
CPUs and was capable of running CP/M,
CP/M-86,
and MS-DOS. DEC also used Intel 8-bit microprocessors as embedded
processors within larger systems, for example, as the console processor in PDP-11/04, 11/34, and 11/44 systems and as the main
processor within the VT100
family of video terminals.
A PDP-8 on display at the Smithsonian's
National
Museum of American History in Washington,
D.C.. This example is from the first generation of PDP-8s, built with
discrete transistors and later known as the Straight 8. To serve laboratories at a lower cost, DEC provided the PDP-5,
an early minicomputer in 1963. 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. 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. Today the PDP-8 is generally regarded as the first minicomputer.
The PDP-8 spawned a cousin, the PDP-12,
which merged data acquisition and display capabilities developed with the NIH-sponsored
LINC
computers into the PDP-8 architecture. The PDP-8 was used as the "brains" for many,
specific scientific and research projects. Once such adaptation was the "Durrum
Instruments D-500 Amino Acid Analyzer" wherein a PDP-8 was used
for process
control. Many 8 and 16 bit machine architectures are said to be
inspired by the PDP-8, including the HP
2100 and Data
General Nova, and to a lesser extent the National
Semiconductor IMP, PACE, and INS8900
microprocessors and the Signetics
2650 microprocessor. Machines based on the PDP-8 can be characterized
by a small number of accumulators (such as AC and MQ, or A and B), or a small
number of general registers (R0-R3) rather than a relatively large number of
regular registers (such as R0-R7 or R15), and by memory addressing in terms of a
base page and a current page (related to PC value). The design of the 4 bit Intel
4004 was also inspired by the PDP-8, although it has a series of
regular registers (R0-R15), because Ted
Hoff while evaluating the Busicom
designed calculator chipset for production by Intel realized that the PDP-8
sitting in the corner of the room was far more powerful than these chips yet the
circuitry was much simpler. Therefore he proposed that Intel not make the chips
designed by Busicom, but instead design a "computer chipset" for them
that they could program as a calculator. Data
General was formed by a group of DEC engineers in May,1968 and
rapidly brought the 16-bit NOVA minicomputer to market, based on a proposed
architecture that DEC management had rejected. DEC immediately found itself
behind in the industry transition to 8-bit bytes. The PDP-11
16-bit computer was designed in a crash program by Harold McFarland, Gordon
Bell, Roger Cady, and others. Its numerous architectural innovations,
including the UNIBUS, proved superior to all competitors and the
"11" architecture was soon the industry leader. The first model was
the PDP-11/20 and was followed by higher performance models such as the 11/45
and 11/70. When improvements to integrated
circuits enabled the single-chip microprocessor, 11s eventually were
packaged into systems no larger than a modern PC. The PDP-11 supported several operating systems, including Bell
Labs' new UNIX
operating system as well as DEC's DOS-11, RSX-11, IAS, RT-11,
and RSTS/E.
Many early PDP-11 applications were developed using standalone paper-tape
utilities. DOS-11 was the PDP-11's first disk operating system, soon supplanted
by more capable systems. RT-11 provided a practical real-time operating system,
allowing the PDP-11 to continue Digital's critical role as a computer supplier
for embedded
systems. RSX provided a general-purpose multitasking
environment, and supported a wide-variety of programming languages. IAS was a time-sharing
version of RSX-11D. Both RSTS and UNIX were time-sharing systems available to
educational institutions at little or no cost, and these PDP-11 systems were
destined to be the sandbox for a generation of engineers and computer
scientists. Large numbers of 11/70's were deployed in telecommunications and
industrial control applications. AT&T became DEC's largest customer. The PDP-11's 16-bit, byte-oriented
architecture provided a 64KB virtual address space. Most models had paged
physical memory architecture and memory protection features, useful for
multitasking and time-sharing, and some supported separate Instruction &
Data spaces for an effective virtual address size of 128KB within a physical
address size of up to 4MB. Another significant innovation of the PDP's architecture
(PDP-11 in particular, but also to some degree the other PDPs) was that all
peripheral device interfaces were memory mapped: rather than using special I/O
instructions to work with peripherals, programmers accessed device registers by
reading and modifying the contents of specific physical memory addresses. PDP operating systems were the model for many other
operating systems. CP/M
used command syntax similar to RT-11's, and even retained the awkward PIP
program which was used to copy programs. DEC's use of '/' for
"switches" (command-line options) would lead to the adoption of '\'
for pathnames in Windows
as opposed to '/' in Unix. 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: the PDP-1, the
PDP-4 (1963), the PDP-7 (the first to use their Flip-Chip®
technology) and PDP-9
(1965), and finally the PDP-15
series (starting in 1970 and later sold as the "XVM" series). The
PDP-15 was an early user of TTL
integrated
circuits. These computers were moderately powerful computers for
their time, mainly used in industrial, scientific, and medical laboratories. According to Gordon
Bell, the second PDP (PDP-2) was reserved for a 24-bit computer that
was never developed. In addition to the VAX below, DEC collaborated with ARM
Limited to produce the StrongARM
processor. This processor, based in part on ARM7 and in part on DEC technologies
like Alpha, was highly compatible with the ARMv4
architecture and set the standard for microprocessors intended for mobile
applications, virtually destroying the market for technologies such as MIPS
and SuperH
in these markets. Microsoft
subsequently dropped PocketPC
support for these architectures, largely as a result of the extremely broad
appeal of StrongARM.
When DEC ceased to trade, the StrongARM
intellectual property was sold to Intel,
who continued to manufacture StrongARM,
as well as developing it into XScale. A paper design for the third PDP (PDP-3) was developed,
and a single computer was produced from the specification by a DEC customer
using DEC System Building Blocks. For larger scientific applications DEC produced first the
PDP-6 in 1964, using a 36-bit architecture. Using the same word length as the IBM
701-7094 series scientific computers, which were being replaced by
the 32-bit IBM System/360
series, and the UNIVAC
1107, which was replaced by the successor UNIVAC
1108 the next year, provided an alternative growth path for
scientific customers. The successor was the PDP-10 series, eventually being sold as the DECsystem-10
and DECSYSTEM-20. One of the most unusual peripherals produced for the
PDP-10 was the DECtape.
The DECtape was a length of standard magnetic tape wound on 5" reels.
However, the recording format was a 10-track approach using fixed-length
numbered 'blocks' organized into a standard file structure, including a
directory. Files could be written, read, changed and deleted on a DECtape as
through it were a hard drive. In fact, some PDP-10 systems had no hard drives at
all, using DECtapes alone for their primary data storage. For greater
efficiency, the DECtape drive could read and write to a DECtape in both
directions.
A representative VAX-11/780
system configuration In 1976
DEC decided to extend the PDP-11
architecture to 32 bits, creating the first 32-bit minicomputer which they
referred to as a super-mini.
This was launched as the VAX
(Virtual Address eXtension) 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 Ed DeCastro and 8 other DEC engineers 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 canceled their "Jupiter"
project, which had been intended to build a successor to the PDP-10,
and instead focused on promoting the VAX as their single computer architecture
for the company. It was believed that microprocessor technology at the low end
and networking of larger systems could produce a 1:1000 range of computing power
from one architecture. 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 third party products instead. This problem was further magnified by Olsen's
aversion to traditional 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. Constrained by
their huge success of the VAX/VMS products, which followed the proprietary
model, the company was very late to respond to commodity hardware in the form of
Intel-based
personal computers and standards-based software such as Unix
and Internet
protocols such as TCP/IP.
In the early 1990s
DEC found its sales faltering, and its first layoffs followed. The company that
created the minicomputer and arguably the first computers for personal use did
not effectively respond to the significant restructuring of the computer
industry.
Inside view of AlphaServer
2100. During the 1980s
DEC made several attempts at designing a RISC
(reduced instruction set) processor to replace the VAX architecture. Eventually,
in 1992
DEC launched the Alpha
processor (initially named Alpha AXP,
the "AXP" was later dropped). This was a 64-bit RISC
architecture (as opposed to the 32-bit CISC
architecture used in the VAX) and one of the first 64-bit microprocessor
designs. The Alpha offered class-leading performance at its launch, and
subsequent variants continued to do so into the 2000s.
Alpha-based computers (the DEC AXP series, later the AlphaStation
and AlphaServer
series) superseded both the VAX architecture and the MIPS-based
DECstation
line, and could run VMS, DEC's 4.2BSD-based
Unix
variant called Ultrix
and Microsoft's new server operating system Windows
NT. DEC tried to compete in the Unix market by marketing the
VMS operating system as "OpenVMS"
and by selling their own Unix (OSF/1
AXP, later renamed Digital UNIX, and even later 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 market share from Alpha-based computers. DEC's workstation and
server line never gained much popularity beyond former DEC customers. Digital responded to the challenge of the IBM-PC with not one, but three machines, tied to proprietary
architectures. One machine was for "professionals", barely hiding CEO
Ken Olsen's contempt for the IBM PC. One was for word processing only, and one
was "almost" IBM compatible. All 3 were commercial failures. Packaging
was based on the new VT220
terminals. The DEC
Professional Series Model 350 (380) was based on the PDP-11/23 (11/73)which, running RSX-11M+ derived the
menu-driven P/OS, was software incompatible with the base of largely CP/M
and 8080
based microcomputers. The 'Pro' provided 64K 16-bit addresses windowing into 2
MB of physical memory, compared to 1 MB capacity of the Intel
8086. The DecMate
I and II was the latest version of the PDP-8 based word processors,
but not really suited to general computing, nor competitive with Wang
Laboratories word processing which was becoming popular. The Rainbow
100 ran an 8086 implementation of CP/M,
so applications could in theory be recompiled, but by this time, users were
expecting custom-built applications such as Lotus
1-2-3, which was eventually ported along with MS-DOS V2.0 and
introduced in late 1983. Users objected to having to buy preformatted floppy
disks, though this is now commonplace. DEC
was initially resistant to even supporting MS-DOS,
and did not produce a true IBM-PC
compatible computer for many years, though the VAXmate
came close, introduced in 1986 along with MS-Windows
V1.0 and a VAX/VMS
based (file and print) server for Microsoft's network protocols (such as SMB and
NetBIOS) along with integration into DEC's
own DECnet-family, providing LAN/WAN connection from PC to
mainframe (supermini). The lines of DECs personal computers peaked with the
Alpha-based 64-bit RISC workstations introduced in the early 90s. DEC later
produced a range of true IBM-PC compatible computers, including the Starion,
Venturis, Celebris and Digital PC desktop lines, the HiNote series of laptops
and the Digital Server and Prioris ranges of servers.[1] Beyond DECsystem-10/20, PDP, VAX and Alpha, Digital was
well respected for its communications sub-system designs, such as DNA (Digital
Network Architecture - predominantly DECnet products), DSA (Digital Storage
Architecture - disks/tapes/controllers), and its "dumb terminal"
subsystems including VT100 and DECserver products. For in-depth articles
regarding Digital technologies, refer to the archived Digital
Technical Journal. In June of 1992, Ken Olsen was replaced by Robert
Palmer as the company's CEO. Palmer had joined DEC in 1985 to run
Semiconductor Engineering and Manufacturing. His relentless campaign to be CEO
and success with the Alpha microprocessor family made him a candidate to succeed
Olsen. However, Palmer was unable to stem the tide of red ink. More rounds of
layoffs ensued and many of DEC's assets were spun off: ·
Worldwide
training was spun off to form an independent/new company called Global Knowledge
Network [2].
·
Their
database product, Rdb,
was sold to Oracle.
·
The TK-series
tape technology was sold to Quantum
Corporation as the basis for today's DLT
and SuperDLT technology. ·
Text
terminal business (VT100
and its successors) was sold in August 1995 to Boundless
Technologies. ·
In May
1997, DEC sued Intel
for allegedly infringing on its Alpha patents in designing the Pentium
chips. As part of a settlement, DEC's chip business was sold to Intel. This
included DEC's StrongARM
implementation of the ARM
computer architecture, which Intel sold as the XScale
processors commonly used in Pocket
PCs. ·
In
1997, the printer business was sold to GENICOM
(now TallyGenicom), which then produced models bearing the Digital logo. ·
At
about the same time, the networking business was sold to Cabletron
Systems, and subsequently spun off as Digital
Network Products Group. ·
The DECtalk
and DECvoice
voice products were spun off, and eventually arrived at Fonix.
·
RT-11
is now supported and distributed by Mentec
company. Eventually, on January
26, 1998,
what remained of the company was sold to Compaq. Compaq itself was acquired by Hewlett-Packard
in 2002. Hewlett-Packard now sells what were Digital's StorageWorks disk/tape
products [3],
made possible through the Compaq acquisition. The Digital logo survived for a while after the company
ceased to exist, as the logo of Digital GlobalSoft, an IT services company in
India (which was a 51% subsidiary of DEC). Digital GlobalSoft was later renamed
"HP GlobalSoft" (also known as the "HP Global Delivery India
Center" or HP GDIC) and no longer uses the Digital logo. The digital.com and DEC.com domain names are now owned by
Hewlett-Packard and redirect to their US website www.digital.com,
www.DEC.com. [edit]
Research DEC's Research Laboratories (or Research Labs, as they
were commonly known) conducted Digital's corporate research. Some of them were
operated by Compaq
and are still operated by Hewlett-Packard.
The laboratories were:
Some of the former employees of Digital's Research Labs or
Digital's R&D in general include:
Some of the work of the Research Labs was published in the
Digital
Technical Journal, published until 1998. At least some of the
research reports are available online at ftp.digital.com,
in the subdirectories WRL, SRC, NSL, CRL, PRL (see above) (verified July
2006) Digital supported the ANSI
standards, especially the ASCII
character set, which survives in Unicode
and the ISO
8859 character set family. Digital's own Multinational
Character Set also had a large influence on ISO
8859-1 (Latin-1) and, by extension, Unicode. The first versions of the C
programming language and the UNIX
operating 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,
although for several years Digital itself did not encourage the use of Unix. Digital also produced the popular VAX
computer family, the first pure 64-bit microprocessor architecture, Alpha
AXP, the first commercially successful workstation (the VT-78), and
some commercially unsuccessful personal computers. The central computing system
of the Soviet reusable Buran
spaceship was based on two microVAX computers. Digital produced widely used interactive operating
systems, including OS-8,
TOPS-10,
TOPS-20,
RSTS/E,
RSX-11, RT-11,
and OpenVMS.
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 to
control and monitor factories, transportation systems and nuclear plants.
Digital was an early champion of time-sharing
systems. Digital was to the command-line interface (CLI) what Apple
was to the GUI: there was history before and innovation after, but it was
Digital's operating systems that put it together in a complete and definitive
form. The command-line interfaces found in Digital's systems, eventually
codified as DCL,
would look familiar to any user of modern microcomputer CLIs; those used in
earlier systems, such as CTSS,
IBM's
JCL,
or Univac's time-sharing systems, would look utterly alien.
Many features of the CP/M and MS-DOS CLI show a recognizable family resemblance
to Digital's OSes, including command names such as DIR and HELP and the
"name-dot-extension" file naming conventions. VAX and MicroVAX
computers (very widespread in the 1980s) running VMS
formed one of the most important proprietary networks, DECnet, which linked business and research facilities.
The DECnet
protocols formed one of the first peer-to-peer networking standards. Email, file
sharing, and distributed collaborative projects existed within the company long
before their value was recognized in the market. Digital, Intel and Xerox through their collaboration to
create the DIX standard, were champions of Ethernet,
but Digital is the company that made Ethernet commercially successful.
Initially, Ethernet based DECnet and LAT
protocols interconnected VAXes with DECserver terminal servers. Starting with
the UNIBUS to Ethernet adapter, multiple generations of Ethernet controllers
from Digital were the de facto standard. The CI "computer
interconnect" adapter was the industry's first network interface controller
to use separate transmit and receive "rings". These "rings"
were adopted shortly thereafter by Digital's Ethernet adpater for the UNIBUS,
and later by nearly all communication adapters. Clustering,
an operating system technology that treated multiple machines as one logical
entity, was invented by Digital. Clustering permitted sharing of pooled disk and
tape storage via the HSC50/70/90 and later series of Hierarchical Storage
Controllers. HSC's delivered the first hardware RAID 0 and 1 capabilities and
the first serial interconnects of multiple storage technologies. This technology
was the forerunner to systems like Network
of Workstations which are used for massively cooperative tasks such
as web-searches and drug research. The LA36 and LA120 dot matrix printers became industry
standards and may have hastened the demise of the Teletype
Corporation. The VT100
computer
terminal became the industry standard, implementing a useful subset
of the ANSI X3.64 standard, and even today terminal emulators such as HyperTerminal,
PuTTY
and Xterm
still emulate a VT100 (or its more capable successor, the VT220). The X
Window System, the first remote-windowing system, was developed by Project
Athena at MIT.
Digital was the primary sponsor for this project. Dave Cutler, who led the development of RSX-11M, RSX-11M+,
VMS
and then VAXeln,
left Digital in 1988
to lead the development of Windows
NT. A rumor circulated for a long time that WNT=VMS+1 (increment each
letter by one). Cutler has never confirmed nor denied this. Notes-11 and its follow-on product, VAXnotes, were two of
the first examples of online collaboration software, a category that has become
to be known as groupware.
Len
Kawell, one of the original Notes-11 developers later joined Lotus
Development Corporation and contributed to their Lotus
Notes product. Digital was one of the first businesses connected to the Internet,
dec.com (registered in 1985[4])
being one of the first of the now ubiquitous .com domains. gatekeeper.dec.com
was a well-known software repository during the pre-World
Wide Web days, but Digital was also the first computer vendor to open
a public website, on October
1, 1993
[5].
The popular AltaVista,
created by Digital, was one of the first comprehensive Internet search
engines. (Although Lycos
was earlier, it was much more limited.) DEC invented Digital
Linear Tape (DLT), which began as a 5.25" replacement for
refrigerator-sized reel-to-reel ˝" tape drives and grew to capacities in
excess of 30 gigabytes. Work on the first hard-disk-based MP3-player, the Personal
Jukebox, started at the DEC
Systems Research Center. (The project was started about a month
before the merger into Compaq
was completed.) PDA concepts created in DEC's Western Research Lab,
originally called Itsy
were incorporated into The iPaq
which was developed as a successor to Compaqs own PDA, the Aero, originally
developed to showcase WindowsCE using display and other technology from Nintendo
color GameBoy. |
