Digital Equipment Corporation

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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