Equipment
Digital Equipment Corporation was an American pioneering company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC. (This acronym was once officially used by Digital itself, [1] but the official name was always DIGITAL. ) Its PDP and VAX products were arguably the most popular mini-computers for the scientific and engineering communities during the 70s and 80s. DEC was acquired by Compaq, which subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard. As of 2006 its product lines were still produced under the HP name. Farm Equipment-Heavy Equipment-Construction-Grounds Care-Material Handling-ELS. From 1957 until 1992 its headquarters was in an old woolen mill in Maynard, Massachusetts.
Digital Equipment Corporation should not be confused with Digital Research; the two were unrelated, separate entities; or with Western Digital (despite the fact that they made the LSI-11 chipsets used in Digital Equipment Corporation's low end PDP-11/03 computers). Note, however, that there were Digital Research Laboratories where DEC did its corporate research.
History
The company was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, two engineers who had been working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the TX-2 project. The TX-2 was a transistor-based computer using the then-huge amount of 64K 36-bit words of core memory. When that project ran into difficulties, Olsen and Anderson left MIT to form DEC. Equipment Trader Online.