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Archives
Feb 2002—Dec 2005

Why did DEC fall?

One reason that DEC fell was its inability to hold its senior executives accountable for financial performance after the abolition of the Product Lines in the early 1980's. Ken Olsen was very proud of creating the Product Lines after the problems with the PDP-6 that almost killed the company in the early 1960's. Each Product Line had responsibility for a computer system (PDP-8,9/15, 11, DEC-10's) and the GM/Managers were held accountable for profit, revenue growth, and to a lesser extent customer satisfaction.

It knew early in the mid 1980's that it needed to cut its cost structure by about 1/3 if it was to compete in the 1990's. However, Ken Olsen absolutely forbid layoffs, so little happened until the situation became so desparate that he had to relent.

Instead it attempted to grow its way out of the problem through a massive re-deployment of resources to the field that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars.

Another major reason the company failed was that it did not adjust to the restructuring of the computer industry from full service highly integrated systems suppliers to areas of horizontal expertise - Intel for micros, Oracle for database, etc. DEC had the technologies to compete in many areas but the corporate strategy was to only sell systems.

It was a great company that could not adjust to a dramatically changing business environment that meant tightening its belt and changing what it sold and how it sold... until it was too late. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.182.238.233 (talk • contribs) 20:45, January 14, 2006.

When I worked at DEC in the mid-80s, there was an article in a business magazine (Forbes? Fortune?) about how DEC was trying to sell computers to farmers with a slogan that described the company as the "Second-largest computer company in the world" - to which farmers would ask, "so what's the biggest computer company?" I think it's funny that the article repeats this mistake: "At its peak in the late 1980s, Digital was the second-largest computer company in the world, with over 100,000 employees."129.55.27.4

One might argue that DEC failed because "cheap" always trumps "good". DEC products were good, PCs were cheap, the rest is history. (One might also wryly observe that this was exactly how DEC built its business against competitors like IBM, but I'd like to believe that many DEC products were both cheap and good.)

Atlant 15:10, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Didn't DEC go bankrupt due to its own inept sales force pushing Pentium machines over the AlphaPC? I once heard someone complain that DEC was a company you couldn't give money away to (his words).

I can tell you why they fell into disfavor at one NASA center: they were too expensive for what they were providing. The fact they could be heavily hardware-configured in days when hardware was very expensive indeed was a great advantage, but it was an advantage that whittled away when cheaper "general purpose" computers came out, because then buyers could afford to buy components which they really were not going to use. Also, of course managers loved the idea that whole computers could be "plug compatible" the way employees were held to be. I.e., if something goes wrong with a project, a manager can shuffled in or out computer equipment -- putting a lot less emphasis on long-term planning. (And...hiding management miscalculations.)

The incredible cost of configuring digital computers is shown by a statement, after giving their paper at an AI conference, by one of the DEC speakers that the AI configuration program cost $1,000,000 a year to maintain. Not to write, just to maintain. 24.130.13.180 (talk) 09:33, 1 September 2008 (UTC)

website

The reason I came to this page was because I read (on a web history page) that DEC put up the first commercial website. In this article it says they were amongst the first .com websites. Were there any .com websites before DEC that weren't commercial? I thought if it was one it would be the other as well, but it'd seem strange to refer to the first ever as one of the first... sheridan 03:30, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Polycenter?

I believe one of the other items DEC divested was their management software known as Polycenter. This software went to Computer Associates. Yes it was one of the first generation of enterprise management offers in the market.

Soviets

Is it worth noting that an 11/782 was seized in 1983 as part of a contraband shipment to the Soviets? --Gadget850 ( Ed) 13:48, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

There should be a lot more to say about this. I read that many Soviet bloc computers were modeled on (or clones of) PDP's and Micro-VAXes. Hrcohen (talk) 01:16, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

Intel processors inspired by DEC PDP-8?

Without a citation, I don't buy the idea that any of the early Intel 4-bit or 8-bit microprocessors were "inspired by the PDP-8". There is no significant architectural similarity between the PDP-8 and the 4004, 8008, or 8080. On the other hand, there are very clear similarities between the PDP-8, DG Nova, and HP 2116 family (of which the HP 2100 is a member). If no citation is forthcoming in the near future, I will remove the 4004 and 8080 references in that section. --Brouhaha 18:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

That also leads to some questionable assertions in the next sentence: "Machines based on the PDP-8 can be characterized by a small number of accumulators (such as AX or BX) rather than a series of regular registers (such as R1-R8) like the PowerPC and PDP-11, so it might be said that it was the descendents of the PDP-8, not the later PDP-11, that inherited the dominant processor status of the 2000s." If the 4004 and 8080 don't resemble the PDP-8 that closely, than the 8080's x86 descendents can't be said to descend from the PDP-8 either.

The PDP-11 and its successor, the VAX, were CISC processors, while most modern processors are RISC-based. The difference between CISC and RISC designs probably accounts for more architectural differences between the PDP-11 and today's processors than the differences between the PDP-8 and PDP-11 do. -- CWesling 01:17, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't buy it, either. The PDP-8 was, at least from the point of view of a programmer, a beautiful, clean, economical design. I did quite a lot of programming in PDP-1 assembly language and LINC assembly language, both considerably richer in instructions than the PDP-8. Yet the PDP-8 seemed to be just as expressive and easy to program.

For several years, I did quite a lot of programming about equally divided between the PDP-8 and the PDP-11. It always astonished me how easy the PDP-8 was to program, and how little you seemed to be cramped by the seemingly severe limitations (only six addressable instructions). When I first saw the PDP-11 instruction set I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Well, when I actually started writing code, sure, the PDP-11 was nicer than the PDP-8, but not nearly as much nicer as I expected. Who'd have thought that eight silly little autoincrementing memory locations could be at least 3/4 as effective as real index registers? And I could swear that it always took significantly more core to write the same program on a PDP-11 as on a PDP-8.

In contrast, virtually all the microprocessors were ugly, asymmetrical, ad hoc monstrosities. No doubt it all had to do with how they could run the microscopic data paths on a plane, or whatever. The Motorola 68000 does "feel" a little like a PDP-11, but the 8080 and the 6502 never felt the slightest bit like a PDP-8 to me. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:36, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

dpbsmith, see orthogonal instruction set for an explanation of why your PDP-11 programs always seemed bigger than your PDP-8 programs. It's the nature of the beast that a highly-orthogonal instruction set (such as the PDP-11's) is always far less bit-efficient than a non-orthonal instruction set (such as the PDP-8's). (And I say this as an experienced assembly-language programmer on both systems.) Both systems were joys to program, though, compared to the baroque 8080 and x86 architectures.

Atlant 12:03, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

VMS++ = WNT

The article discusses how one can get the acronym "W/NT" by incrementing each letter in "VMS". Someone just edited in "Cutler later verified this."

AFAIK, Cutler has never actually made any affirmative statement such as "Yes, I did that intentionally." Instead, he's always said something coy like "Did you just notice that?". (That is, he makes it clear that it was deliberate while not actually saying so.)

Have I got this right?

If so, we should edit the article.

Atlant 16:28, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

That's how it looked to me, too, when I Googled for this. So yes, we should probably reword that a little. -- CWesling 23:21, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Microprocessors influenced by PDP-8?

I still don't buy it. "Machines based on the PDP-8 can be characterized by a small number of accumulators?" No, this is hardly a defining characteristic that makes an architecture PDP-8-like. Broadly speaking, small numbers of accumulators (and small numbers of registers with somewhat specialized, asymmetrical functions) are found in any situation in which registers aren't cheap. Many, many early machines have an "accumulator" and an "accumulator extension," for example. I think the (original) Illiac did. Certainly the PDP-1 did.

The advantages of having many registers are obvious, and they appeared whenever the economic balance for that particular machine permitted it. Conversely, any machine that was cheap or otherwise constrained to have minimal hardware, had a few.

Here are a list of PDP-8-specific characteristics. I'd like to see an architecture match a handful of these before I'd call it "PDP-8-like." I'm not very familiar with the 8080, but I don't think it matches any of them.

• Absence of any provision in hardware for moving more than one word at a time.
• Fixed word length.
• Absence of any hardware support for a stack.
• Addressing architecture in which the address space is divided into pages, and every addressable instruction can address: directly within the current page; directly within page 0; indirectly within the current page; indirectly within page 0.
• Absence of any conditional branches; that is, branches that have a target address. All conditional operations are implemented by a single "skip" instruction, which transfers control to either PC+1 or PC+2, on conditions microprogrammed by individual bits within the skip instruction.
• Extreme economy of instruction set; only six addressable instructions in the case of the PDP-8
• Word length that is not a power of 2.

Any similaries between microprocessors and the PDP-8--other than the Intersil 6100, of course!--are simply the result of having to solve the same problems, i.e. build a very small computer with limited hardware resources. The PDP-8 and 8080 are no more similar than the PDP-8 and the LINC, or the PDP-8 and the CDC-160.

This is quite different from the situation with respect to, say, Digital operating systems like OS/8 and CP/M and MS-DOS. If you compare these three, you notice things like

• the strange use of CTRL-Z to mark the end of a text file, particularly strange because according to the ASCII spec "end of medium" is CTRL-Y, not CTRL-Z--probably a mistake on Digital's part, but certainly an idiosyncrasy
• the use of the CR-LF pair to separate lines

I think this was typical for many computer models using dumb printers / terminals / teletypewriters as peripherals in the 1970s. Bold characters and underlines on a printer were the consequence of using CR and overprinting the line. A new line REQUIRED an LF. An LF without a CR continued the text on the next column in the next line. Unix was the first place I encountered the simplification to a single character. Hrcohen (talk) 02:00, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

• the use of file names consisting of a name and an extension separated by a dot

This is a convention also followed in Honeywell/GE GCOS and Burroughs MCP mini-computers and I think was incorporated in the conventional ASCII tape format. I would also note that the file name never required an extension. Only that extensions were desirable for several reasons.

• the prohibition of space characters within file names

All of these characteristics are shared by OS/8, CP/M, and (early) MS-DOS. None of these characteristics are shared by the Apple ][ DOS 3.3; only one of them is possessed by UNIX.

Thus, I think it is very reasonable to see evidence of Digital OS influence in microcomputer OSes. I do not see any obvious influence of the PDP-8 on microprocessors. Dpbsmith (talk) 20:51, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

P. S. And, regardless of what I or anyone else might have to say, in any case the verifiability and no original research policies mean that anything said on this topic, however well-founded, must be traceable to a published source, not stated without attribution. Dpbsmith (talk) 20:54, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I can assure you that the 8080 and PDP-8 ISPs (and their respective assembly languages) have damned little in common, aside from the facts that they're both (basically) accumulator-oriented load/store architectures.

Atlant 22:53, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Logo

Just thought I'd add a pointer to a query about the logo here. I'm probably wrong, but anybody know for certain? I'm intrigued now, and don't have any DEC logos handy to leer at. Chris 23:06, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

The question of the "dots" verses the "squares" above the "I's" in the red logo is correct.

When Bob Palmer took over, the advertising company he hired made the change. They changed it to red and replaced the squares with dots. It was something like DB Neadham agency. They also tried to give DEC a modern feel by playing a fast changing graphic commercial to Lenny Kravitz, Are you gonna go my way. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 71.79.156.222 (talk • contribs) .

Personal computers

DEC did sell Intel-based Windows compatible computers under their logo (for example, Prioris, Celebris and Venturis product lines). --195.218.145.14 16:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

450 or 350 million dollar?

"AR&D later sold its investment in Digital for approximately $450 million, certainly the best VC return ever at the time"

http://www.computinghistorymuseum.org/teaching/lectures/pptlectures/10-dec.ppt

"When Doriot sold his share in 1972, it was worth $350,000,000"

The word "Computer" banned.

It is quite interesting that Digital excluded the word "Computer" from their product and brand names, both, as an early way to get funds, so that investor were not afraid to give money to a company that would compete against giant IBM (besides other large computer companies were losing money at that time), and as an early marketing strategy to sell their products to engineering teams in companies where the accountants would reject computers.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 158.116.112.10 (talk • contribs) .

Another version of this story, is that because computers were on one General Services Administration schedule and electronic equipment on another, that it would be easier for government-funded agencies and schools to buy DEC products if they were called something other than computers for purchasing approval. patsw (talk) 18:50, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Mis-use of ARCHITECT as a verb

I dispute the use of the word 'architect' as a verb in this otherwise well-written article, because it is not a verb. http://en.wiktionary.org/en/architect http://www.google.com.au/search?q=define%3A+architect There are plenty of other verbs that can be used in place of 'architecting' and 'architected': construct, design, create, devise, invent, plan, produce. JeffreyMeunier 01:05, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Writable control store

Atlant removed the information on writable control store, and in the edit summary asked which models supported it. WCS was optional on the 11/780, and standard on the 11/785, 11/750, 8600, 8650, 9000 series, and possibly other models. Microcode development tools were offered as a product for the 11/78x. Most of the later VAX implementations based on VLSI processors had small a on-chip WCS intended to patch microcode bugs. --Brouhaha 00:35, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

T11?

Could someone add information on this chip? Drutt 08:35, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

The word "computer"

In the '70s I was a DEC customer. I was told that the PDP line (Programmable Digital Processor) and the DEC name (Digital Equipment Corporation) avoided the word "computer" because government procurement procedures for "computers" were far more complex than the procedures for almost anything else... by avoiding the word "computer" procurement of DEC products was easier. Could be urban legend?

RobertTaylor21 21:00, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

If you can find a cite for this, we can include it in the article --rogerd 21:24, 13 June 2007 (UTC)

The original venture captitalists wouldn't fund a company that intended to make computers, believing that there was no room in the market for another competitor to IBM and the "BUNCH". So Digital built "Programmed Data Processors" instead of computers. I think Digital at Work contains this story; I'll try to remember to look.

Atlant 13:59, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Name of the Company

I was hired by Digital just before its acquisition by Compaq, and all the legal documents that we changed over to "Compaq Computer Corporation" had used the name "Digital Equipment Company" [not Corporation]. Digital was indeed a corporation, but the formal name needs to be verified -- especially since "Corporation" is used in the title of the article. --NameThatWorks 18:43, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

Well, I'm looking at the "2211 Memory Exerciser Manual", copyright 1962, and it very clearly says "DIGITAL EQUIPMENT CORPORATION". (It's a cool manual because it has the old bi-color "|d|i|g|i|t|a|l|" logo where the d, g, t, and l are white on black rectangles while the i,i, and a are on grey rectangles.) Even earlier than that, I'm holding in my hand a "103" Laboratory Module (yes, the original product) and it says "digital equipment corporation" along with two big, bold "dec" logos.

Of course, by the time you were hired, GQ Bob had been running the joint and it wouldn't surprise me one bit that he'd didn't even know what the name of the company was.

Atlant 22:40, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

I guess I wouldn't rely on the company name in marketing pubs or tech manuals from 1962. The acquisition by Compaq occurred in 1998, and a lot of restructuring happened between 1962 and then. As I said, ALL the legal documents that were included in our bids and proposals gave the legal name as Digital Equipment Company. --NameThatWorks 17:36, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

The above claim is spurious. The stock certificates, the SEC documents, annual reports, etc. all refer to the actual name, Digital Equipment Corporation. patsw (talk) 19:33, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Details...

I noticed a few details that maybe should be corrected/cleared up. First of all, I don't believe the DECtape was created for the PDP-10. I think the DECtape actually predates the PDP-10. If I remember correctly, the DECtape was pretty much based straight off from the LINKtape, with a few changes. It definitely exists for PDP-8, PDP-10 and PDP-11 systems (since I've observed those), but I think it was used on 18-bit systems as well.

Second, the C language didn't originate on the PDP-7. It might just be that I'm reading too much into that section, but to me it appears as if that is claimed. Unix ran on the PDP-7, yes, but that was written in assembler. The same is true for the early versions of Unix on the PDP-11. It was only rewritten in C after a few iterations on the PDP-11 had already been done.

Under the list of what happened to various DEC produects, I'm missing the disk manufacturing. Sure, DEC retained StorageWorks, but the actual disks was sold. If I remember, that went to Seagate.

Oh, and could someone find a proper logo? Blue, that is, not the (pretty recent) burgundy or whatever the color was called... :-)

/bqt@softjar.se 213.115.50.13 (talk) 17:19, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Our DECtape article claims that it dates back to the PDP-6. It was certainly sold on at least some members of the 18-bit family, probably as old as the PDP-9.

The bulk of the storage group (i.e., "Colorado Springs") was sold to Quantum (which itself was subsequently sold).

Atlant (talk) 02:09, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Other innovations and achievements

Having just finished reading Ed Schein's book on DEC (DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC - Schein 2003) I wonder whether this article might be enhanced by some additional emphasis on DEC's role as one of the first learning organisations. As well as the technology legacy, Schein observes that DEC was one of the first companies to explore democratic management, and made significant innovations in community relations and corporate social responsibility, affirmative action, people development and human resource practices, leadership and management, team building (including virtual teams supported by the internal network Easynet), sales methods and practices, and even marketing innovations such as DECworld.

Redwaterjug (talk) 21:06, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Structure of article

This article severely needs to be restructured in chronological sequence. Grouping products by the architecture type does not really accurately reflect how this company developed, unlike, say, Intel. Also, one tidbit that should be added -- DEC produced some very hard drives for a long time. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were among the best (if not the best) in the business. As part of the dismantling of the company in the early 1990s, that group was sold to Quantum. The Quantum Atlas line was the result. This facility passed through Maxtor, and then to Seagate. The DEC Shrewsbury facility still operational. 66.92.132.155 (talk) 05:27, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

ftp.digital.com

It seems that HP has retired the server that runs ftp.digital.com. The announcement can be found here: http://h18002.www1.hp.com/alphaserver/options/asgs1280/asgs1280_options.html

The ftp service is now inaccessible. The ftp.digital.com link(s) at the bottom of this page should be replaced with another link that provides the same information if possible, or removed. Rilak (talk) 08:08, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Closing DEC's business

The sentence "However, Palmer was unable to stem the tide of red ink." has been bothering me for some time, and I was wondering if anybody had any comments about this: I know we need to keep away from anything that's perhaps largely based on opinion and possibly rather subjective, which is why I'm not inclined to change anything myself since I'm not certain the exact facts of the matter, but wasn't Palmer actually responsible for much (most?) of the red ink in question? I do recall that the number of vice presidents doubled (or more) under Palmer and the number of managers appeared to rise exponentially during the swathes of layoffs; and Palmer's own bio here on Wikipedia does indicate his fondness for restructuring, something that was a constant blight on the company to the point where many people were simply unable to do their jobs. And apart from anything, "was unable to" seems a curiously disempowering statement for the man who was in total control of the organisation.

I'm aware that we must be neutral and not allow personal feelings to negatively influence what's documented, but I think that the article goes much too far the other way, it's far too favourable and actually exonerates Palmer of his responsibilities. While I think that Wikipedia's account is far less inaccurate than other versions of DEC's demise, some of which are just blatantly untrue (though I figure it probably isn't helpful to comment further!) I think that this section could probably do with some attention. —Chris (blather • contribs) 15:29, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

"DEC alphabet"

I think it's incorrect to credit DEC with the idea of not using letters which are homoglyphs or near-homoglyphs. I expect there are several examples of prior art - one that springs to my mind are United Kingdom military aircraft serials, which have omitted the letters C, I, O, Q, U and Y since 1940. Letdorf (talk) 09:56, 9 October 2008 (UTC).

Citation for Assertion about the X Window System

Besides tons of messages in mail archives, I gave an invited talk at Usenix some years ago to cover (some of X's) history. I leave it to someone who knows wiki markup better than me to add it to the main article JimGettys (talk) 21:31, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix2000/invitedtalks/gettys_html/