In June 1992, Ken Olsen was replaced by Robert Palmer as the company's president. Digital's board of directors also granted Palmer the title of chief executive officer ("CEO"), a title that had never been used during Digital's 35-year existence. 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. At the same time a more modern logo was designed^[5]. 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.^[6]
• Their database product, Rdb, was sold to Oracle.
• The DLT tape technology was sold to Quantum Corporation in 1994.
• Text terminal business (VT100 and its successors) was sold in August 1995 to Boundless Technologies.
• In March 1997, DEC's CORBA-based product, ObjectBroker, and its messaging software, MessageQ, was sold to BEA Systems, Inc.
• 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.
• The rights to the PDP-11 line and several PDP-11 operating systems were sold to Mentec in 1994.^[7]

Eventually, on January 26, 1998, what remained of the company (including Digital's multivendor global services organization and customer support centers) was sold to Compaq, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. Hewlett-Packard now sells what were formerly Digital's StorageWorks disk/tape products,^[8] as a result of 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 percent 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.^[9]

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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:

• Western Research Laboratory (WRL) in Palo Alto, California
• Systems Research Center (SRC) in Palo Alto, California
• Network Systems Laboratory (NSL) in Palo Alto, California
• Cambridge Research Laboratory (CRL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Paris Research Laboratory (PRL) in Paris, France
• MetroWest Technology Campus (MTC) in Maynard, Massachusetts

Some of the former employees of Digital's Research Labs or Digital's R&D in general include:

• Gordon Bell
• Henry Burkhardt III, co-founder of Data General Corporation and Kendall Square Research
• Mike Burrows
• Luca Cardelli
• Dave Cutler
• Ed deCastro, co-founder of Data General Corporation
• Henri Gouraud
• Jim Gray
• Alan Kotok
• Leslie Lamport
• Butler Lampson
• Jeffrey Mogul
• Louis Monier
• Brian Reid
• Paul Vixie

Some of the work of the Research Labs was published in the Digital Technical Journal,^[10] published until 1998.^[11]

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Accomplishments

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 among 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.^{[citation needed]}

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".

Digital also invented clustering, an operating system technology that treated multiple machines as one logical entity. Clustering permitted sharing of pooled disk and tape storage via the HSC50/70/90 and later series of Hierarchical Storage Controllers. HSCs 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). In the early 1990s, when asked directly about this, Cutler quipped "What took you so long ?", leaving open the possibility that VMS becoming WNT was a very unlikely coincidence. However, as noted in the article on Windows NT, the order of events does not support 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 with dec.com, registered in 1985,^[12] 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.^[13] 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), formerly known as CompacTape, which began as a compact backup medium for MicroVAX systems, and later grew to capacities of 800 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.)

DEC's Western Research Lab created the Itsy Pocket Computer. This was developed into the Compaq iPaq line of PDAs, which replaced the Compaq Aero PDA.

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Anecdotes

• The first spam in computer history was sent on May 3, 1978 by a Digital employee. Over 400 people received his promotional message via the ARPANET network.
• Ken Olsen's primary concern about customers and employees "Our Employees are our greatest Asset" was distributed on a coffee mug, to encourage all employees.
• Ken Olsen is famously quoted as having said in 1977: "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
• Back in 1960 DEC engineers realized that locating connectors, where numbers are used for the card slot location and letters for the connector on the card, handwriting was confusing, as with the number 1 the letter I. Thus the letters G, I, O, and Q were dropped to avoid confusion with C, 1, 0, and O. The remaining 22 letters were since known as the DEC alphabet. Today, the pins on V.35 connector still has DEC alphabet, as well as seat numbering on airlines and VIN used for vehicle ID.

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User organizations

Originally the users' group was called DECUS during the 1960s - 1980's. When Compaq acquired Digital in 1998, the users group was baptised into CUO, the Compaq Users' Organisation. When HP acquired Compaq in 2002, CUO was renamed into HP-Interex, although there are still DECUS groups in several countries. In the USA, the organization is represented by the Encompass organization.

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Notes

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References

• Edgar H. Schein, Peter S. DeLisi, Paul J. Kampas, and Michael M. Sonduck, DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation (San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler, 2003), ISBN 1-57675-225-9.
• C. Gordon Bell, J. Craig Mudge, and John E. McNamara, Computer Engineering - A DEC View of Hardware Systems Design; Digital Press, 1978, ISBN 0-932376-00-2.
• Alan R. Earls, Digital Equipment Corporation; Arcadia Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-7385-3587-7.

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External links

• Digital Equipment Computer Users Society Proceedings and Publications, 1962-1992 Charles Babbage Institute Digital Equipment Computer Users Society (DECUS), a worldwide computer users group, was established in March of 1961. Collection includes proceedings for DECUS annual symposia and DECUS publications, including DECUSOPE newsletter, DECUS Program Library and pamphlets.
• OpenVMS.org: OpenVMS Community Portal
• Tru64.org: Tru64 UNIX News and Information Portal
• Pictures of DEC chips at chipdb.org
• A LinkedIn group for DEC enthusiasts
• LinkedIn group for DEC Alumni
• The Mouse That Roared: PDP-1 Celebration Event panel, 15 May 2006.

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