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Topic: IT Employment

DEC's 40 years of innovation

Summary: Digital Equipment Corporation changed the business, the technology and the experience of computing. In memory of founder Ken Olsen, who died recently, we present this tour of DEC's 40-year life

Rupert Goodwins

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DEC Rainbow 1001

If the VAX 11/780 was the high-water mark of DEC's dominance, the Rainbow 100 was a bad omen for the future. An idiosyncratic design that married a Z80 chip with an 8088, it managed to be compatible with very little and annoy users very much.

Taken as a stand-alone computer, the hardware was built to DEC's usual high standards; in the PC market, it was a bad fit. The user couldn't format floppy disks, which had to be bought pre-formatted from DEC. It wasn't PC compatible, so it couldn't run much software. It had an odd keyboard layout. It cost $3,000.

There are many signs that DEC itself wasn't too keen on the Rainbow, as little marketing was done and the sales teams got more money for less work by selling minicomputers. Plus, it was mostly built around technologies that DEC hadn't invented, which, in a fiercely proud engineering company, rarely endears a product.

The result, in the end, was that DEC missed the microcomputer revolution and was buried, much as most of the mainframe manufacturers had dismissed minicomputers 20 years before.

Photo credit: David Alcubierre/Wikimedia

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Topic: IT Employment

About

Rupert started off as a nerdy lad expecting to be an electronics engineer, but having tried it for a while discovered that journalism was more fun. He ended up on PC Magazine in the early '90s, before that evolved into ZDNet UK - and Rupert evolved with them into an online journalist.

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  • Yeh I remember the DEC Alpha chip being released towards the end of my Comp. Sci. degree (haha that dates me). Half (well almost!) the chip die area was taken up with a massive clock transistor. Revolutionary for it's time and very exciting!
    Bob Wya
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  • Plenty of Alpha's still about. I have a DS10L (1U server) myself still. Only for support purposes but I still support several other customers running Alphaservers!!!
    leemason
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  • I'd forgotten about the Alpha's enormous clock transistor! I remember thinking at the time that it was an heroic way to deal with clock skew - and then wondering what on earth the gate capacitance of such a monster would be like. DEC came up with a few clever skew schemes, especially for multiple chips, and Intel now employs some of the people who thought them up - I guess now that the mad dash for extra MHz has finished, it's a done deal. For now.

    As for Alphas in the wild: I hear a rumour that one place was sold a bunch of Alpha servers not so long ago as part of what was undoubtedly called 'a complete solution' for a particular engineering task. Said place is now suffering somewhat for having to keep the things going and fed with extra storage. As I told my informant - pictures, or we can't print the name. But it seems very plausible.
    rupert.goodwins@...
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  • Yes, DEC & HP in the 70s vied with each other in the mini market. HP physically separated data from code in memory. DEC with RSTS created the base code for all subsequent command code, CP-M, MSDOS, the works.
    daveheasmannew
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  • Let's not forget Data General Corporation, and their Eagle MV/8000, the design and development of which was immotalised in The Soul Of A New Machine

    But certainly, I have extremely fond memories of the PDP-11 with RSTS-E at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University) in England when I first became interested in computers as a result of the school having been given an Olivetti Programma 101.
    And then the PDP-8 at Manchester University where we learned to programme in assembler.

    Damn, but I miss those days...
    hgrainger
    Reply Vote
  • Soul Of A New Machine is a terrific book. Made me want to be a microcoder, but there's not much call for that these days...
    rupert.goodwins@...
    Reply Vote
  • The man did a great work, and making public the techno,a+.
    anonymous
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