Dec

DEC, Digital Equipment Corporation, was an American company manufacturing computers and peripherals. DEC is perhaps best known for its PDP and VAX products, which were amongst the popular minicomputers for scientific and engineering communities in the 1970s and 1980s. Compaq acquired DEC in June 1998, and after Compaq merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002, DEC became a part of HP.

DEC was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, and the company initially manufactured small digital "modules" like flip flops, gates, transformer drivers, etc. The company made its first computer, PDP-1, in the year 1959. IN 1963, the company launched the PDP-5, which was followed by the PDP-8 in 1964. DEC launched the PDP-11 16-bit computer in the late 1960s. In 1976, the company extended the PDP-11 architecture to 32 bits, and launched this "super-mini" in the market as VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) 11/780 in 1978. In the 1980s, DEC built the VT180 (codenamed "Robin"), a VT100 terminal which featured a Z80-based microcomputer running CP/M. VT100 evolved into the Rainbow 100, which came with both the Z80 and 8088 CPUs, and supported CP/M, CP/M-86, and MS-DOS. In 1992, DEC launched Alpha, one of the first 64-bit microprocessor designs.