Digital Equipment Corporation

» see digital.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the engineering students who ran the building i was in at university in ankara had used vax terminals in the mid 90s, the year before i got there. that was not my crowd. dec made hardware for research labs and government datacenters and the engineering offices that paid a hundred thousand dollars for a single machine. my computing life started on a 386 clone running ms-dos at home, then a 233 mhz pentium ii with ttnet dial-up. the closest i got to a vax was reading about it in unix history books years later.

ken olsen and harlan anderson started dec in 1957 in the old wool mill in maynard massachusetts on seventy thousand dollars from georges doriot at arda, which was the first proper venture-capital firm. olsen had come from mit's lincoln lab and wanted to build interactive computers for engineers at a price below the ibm mainframe tier. the pdp-1 in 1959 was the first computer for one person at a time. spacewar, the first arcade-style game, was written for it in 1962. the pdp-8 in 1965 sold over 300,000 units across its lifetime and made the minicomputer a category.

the vax-11 in 1977 was the machine that established dec as the second-largest computer company in the world. it ran vms, an os that university computer labs and corporate research divisions standardized on for the next fifteen years. by 1988 dec had about 121,000 employees and 14 billion dollars in annual sales. ken olsen had made the company by understanding that scientists and engineers wanted their own computer instead of sharing time on a mainframe. by the mid 80s a generation of engineers had figured out they wanted that computer on their desk instead of in a closet down the hall, and dec did not have an answer.

the alpha cpu arrived in 1992 as a 64-bit risc chip running at 200 mhz when the fastest intel pentium was at 60. it was the fastest single-thread processor on the market for several years. it also arrived three years after sun had locked in the unix-workstation market with sparc, and at a price point that did not let dec sell into the new pc-server tier microsoft was building with windows nt. ken olsen was forced out in july 1992 by the board. robert palmer ran the company for the next six years as a series of asset sales and restructurings. on january 26 1998 compaq announced it was buying what was left for 9.6 billion dollars. the deal closed on june 11. compaq was acquired by hewlett-packard four years later.

~ the case file ~

~ the personal-computer quote ~

the line that gets attached to ken olsen most often, "there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home," was something he said at a 1977 world future society meeting. the context was about a centrally-controlled home automation computer, not about a desktop pc. olsen spent decades pointing out that he had owned multiple personal computers and that the quote had been stripped of its context. it stuck anyway. dec did ship a personal computer line called the rainbow in 1982, which was incompatible with the ibm pc and failed in the market.

~ what got buried with it ~

the alpha cpu went to compaq, then to intel as part of a 2001 settlement that bought intel a chunk of dec's risc intellectual property for the itanium roadmap. itanium itself failed. the strongarm, which dec had built as a partnership with advanced risc machines, was sold to intel in 1997 and turned into the xscale line. that lineage went on to ship in palm and blackberry hardware and is downstream of the arm cores that run every smartphone in 2026. ethernet, which dec helped develop with intel and xerox in the late 70s, became the networking layer of every office building. nothing in 2026 carries the dec name. several pieces of the world it built are load-bearing under every modern stack.

~ the long tail ~

the maynard mill that dec ran out of from 1957 to 1998 is a mixed-use building now with offices and a small museum exhibit on the ground floor. the alphaservers that dec sold into research labs in the mid 90s ran for fifteen or twenty years after the company that made them was gone, with end-of-support announcements trickling out through 2015. dec's voice survived in its mailing-list culture and in the engineering practices that staffers carried into compaq and then into hp, and in the unix code that came out of the corporate research lab in palo alto. the company that made the hardware has been gone since the summer of 1998.

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