DEC gave rise to a number of minicomputer companies along Massachusetts Route 128, including Data General, Wang Laboratories, Apollo Computer, and Prime Computer.
The company later developed another product line of brain-scanning or computed tomography equipment based on the Lockheed SUE 16-bit minicomputer (see also Pluribus); later designs included an optional vector processor using AMD Am2900 bipolar bit-slices to speed tomographic reconstruction calculations.
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.
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.
It was originally created in 1983 by Jonathan Payne while at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts, USA on a PDP-11 minicomputer.
In 1975, KDUN's owners were frustrated by the volume of paperwork then required for scheduling advertising, billing advertisers, and producing each day's commercial lineup, they purchased a Wang Laboratories minicomputer and, along with engineer Wes Lockard, invented software to handle these traffic and billing tasks.
In the mid-1980s Kubota, looking for new opportunities, provided funding for Ardent Computer Corporation, an American company that produced graphics minicomputers based on the MIPS architecture.
In late 1979, the FWS purchased a Data General computer (AOS Operating System) and required MOSS to be ported from the CDC mainframe to the DG minicomputer.
PACE had four general-purpose accumulators, with an instruction set architecture loosely based on the earlier IMP-16 architecture, which in turn had been inspired by the Data General Nova minicomputer.
In the 1960s, Brinch Hansen worked at the Danish computer company Regnecentralen, first in the compiler group headed by Peter Naur and Jørn Jensen, and, later, as the chief architect of the RC 4000 minicomputer and its renowned operating system kernel (RC 4000 Multiprogramming System).
The name 'PDP' intentionally avoided the use of the term 'computer' because, at the time of the first PDPs, computers had a reputation of being large, complicated, and expensive machines, and the venture capitalists behind Digital (especially Georges Doriot) would not support Digital's attempting to build a "computer"; the word "minicomputer" had not yet been coined.
The project originated in an initiative within the hi-fi manufacturer Linn Products to improve its manufacturing automation systems, which at the time ran on a DEC VAX minicomputer.
Her company required access to minicomputers and she persuaded employees at a nearby Hewlett-Packard plant to allow her company to use one of the company's HP 3000 minicomputers outside of normal working hours.
It was based on Prime minicomputers running Dialcom software (ITT Dialcom was later acquired by BT in 1986).
The TMS9900 was designed as a single chip version of the TI 990 minicomputer series, much like the Intersil 6100 was a single chip PDP-8 (12 bit), and the Fairchild 9440 and Data General mN601 were both one-chip versions of Data General's Nova.
Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University (BYU) graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General minicomputer system in 1979.