X-Nico

8 unusual facts about Digital Equipment Corporation


Ampersand

BASIC-PLUS on the DEC PDP-11 uses the ampersand as a short form of the verb PRINT.

Antics 2-D Animation

From the DEC platforms of 1980 (Digital Equipment Corporation), then to Silicon Graphics in 1984, and then Apple Macintosh in 1989, Antics software supported all these platforms, and many new Antics studios sprang up in Europe, USA, and beyond.

ASK Group

Lower-priced minicomputers from Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the product's two hardware platforms, made this possible.

I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus

Clem is one of the first "computer hackers" mentioned in pop culture, and his dialog with the fair's computer includes messages found in the DEC PDP-10, a popular mainframe computer at the time.

Measurex

Starting with the MX2002 systems in 1980, Measurex started to use the DEC LSI 11.

Monika Henzinger

She then became an assistant professor of computer science at the Cornell University, a research staff at Digital Equipment Corporation, an associate professor at the University of the Saarland, a director of research at Google, and a full professor of computer science at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

Multiplayer video game

Digital Equipment Corporation soon distributed another multi-user version of Star Trek called Decwars though not featuring real-time screen updating.

Steven J. Morello

After leaving the Judge Advocate General's Corps, Morello worked as an attorney for Digital Equipment Corporation and the Northrop Corporation.


AlphaStation

AlphaStation was the name given to a series of computer workstations, produced from 1994 onwards by Digital Equipment Corporation, and later by Compaq and HP.

Binary large object

Blobs were originally just amorphous chunks of data invented by Jim Starkey at DEC, who describes them as "the thing that ate Cincinnati, Cleveland, or whatever".

CMX 600

The first rack contained the interface electronics for the system, monitoring equipment, and a Digital PDP-11 minicomputer with 32 kilobytes of RAM, which controlled the system.

David Maier

Maier has consulted with Tektronix, Inc., Servio Corporation, the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), Digital Equipment Corporation, Altair, Honeywell, Texas Instruments, IBM, Microsoft, Informix, Oracle Corporation, NCR, and Object Design, as well as several governmental agencies.

DEC BATCH-11/DOS-11

BATCH-11/DOS-11, also known simply as DOS-11, was an operating system by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts.

Diablo Data Systems

The company was best known for the HyType I, HyType II, and Diablo 630 daisywheel printers, but also produced the hard disk drives that were resold by DEC as the RK02 and RK03.

IBM 3480 Family

Various models of these tape drives were also marketed under other brands, including DEC, MP Tapes, Philips, Plasmon, Qualstar, Tandem, and Xcerta.

IBM Series/1

The IBM Series/1 computer is a 16-bit minicomputer, introduced in 1976, that in many respects competed with other minicomputers of the time, such as the PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corporation and similar offerings from Data General and HP.

IFPS

IFPS was available for a variety of platforms, including IBM mainframes (VM/CMS), DEC VAX, various flavors of Unix, DOS-based PCs and Macintosh Computers (named "Mindsight"- running on two floppies).

InterBase

Jim Starkey was working at DEC on their Datatrieve network database product when he came up with an idea for a system to manage concurrent changes by many users.

Jupiter project

The Jupiter project was to be a successor to Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10 mainframe computer model.

Kai Li

Prior to joining Data Domain, he served as an industry consultant of AT&T, Bell Labs, Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and NEC.

Kienzle Computer

In the 1980s it was merged with Mannesmann as Mannesmann-Kienzle, and in 1991 it was sold to the Digital Equipment GmbH and was renamed Digital-Kienzle Computer Systeme.

Living Computer Museum

Using vintage Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) systems and XKL systems, it provides registered users with the opportunity to telnet into these devices and experience computing on "antique" mainframes.

Mac Hack

Mac Hack was written in MIDAS macro assembly language on the PDP-6 computer DEC donated to MIT (the first working PDP-6, serial number 2).

Massachusetts Miracle

Some notable companies at the time of the Miracle were Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General, Wang Laboratories, Prime Computer, and Apollo Computer.

MCP-1600

Used in the Pascal MicroEngine, the original Alpha Microsystems AM-100, and the DEC LSI-11 microcomputer, a cost-reduced and compact implementation of the DEC PDP-11.

MetaCrawler

By early 1995, MetaCrawler was running on four DEC AlphaStations and handling several hundred thousand queries per day.

Michael Burrows

Upon leaving Cambridge, he worked at the Systems Research Center (SRC) at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where, with Louis Monier, he was one of the two main creators of AltaVista.

OpenGL Performer

However after the first beta release of Cosmo 3D, SGi joined with Intel and IBM (and later DEC) to create OpenGL++, essentially a cleaned up version of Cosmo.

OpenGL++

The project started as the result of a partnership between SGI, IBM and Intel (and later Digital Equipment Corporation as well) to provide a higher level API than the "bare metal" support of OpenGL, as well as being an implementation for Java3D.

Sequence And Batch Language

The Sequence And Batch Language (SABL) is used on Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) systems running OpenVMS.

Steven Kropper

His father, Jon Kropper, was an executive with prominent technology firms like Polaroid Corporation, Digital Equipment, Wang Labs and HADCO.

Stuart Pugh

Pugh also carried out consultation work, field research and seminars in design method implementation for product success for firms across Europe and North America, including the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and General Motors.

Telex

One of the largest such switches was operated by Royal Dutch Shell as recently as 1994, permitting the exchange of messages between a number of IBM Officevision, Digital Equipment Corporation ALL-IN-1 and Microsoft Mail systems.

VAX 9000

The VAX 9000, code named Aridus or Aquarius, was a family of Supercomputer and mainframe computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA).


see also

DEC Professional

DEC Professional, a now-defunct magazine for administrators and managers of computer systems from Digital Equipment Corporation

MSCP

Mass Storage Control Protocol, a software protocol developed by Digital Equipment Corporation

Strongarm

StrongARM, a RISC microprocessor created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)