About Digital (DEC)
Digital Equipment Corporation played a major roll in computer systems industry, software and peripheral equipment from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was also known as DEC and DIGITAL. Digital’s PDP and VAX products were the most successful minicomputers.
DEC was headquartered in a wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts from 1957 to 1992. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq. Compaq merged with HP in 2002. Parts of DEC, including the Hudson, Massachusetts facility, were eventually sold to Intel.
DEC AlphaSystems
Digital Equipment Corporation developed 64-bit microprocessor Alpha Systems designed to replace the 32-bit VAX systems. Alpha microprocessors were most prominently used in a variety of Digital Equipment Corp. workstations and servers until 2007. DEC manufactured Alpha processors in Hudson, Massachusetts.
Operating Systems
OpenVMS, Tru64 UNIX, Windows NT GNU/Linux, BSD UNIX operating systems all run on DEC Alpha Systems.
Acquisition History
The DEC Alpha architecture was sold to Compaq in 1998 with the intent to phase out Alpha. Intel purchased AlphaServer intellectual property in 2001. HP purchased Compaq in 2001, continued development until 2004, and planned to continue selling Alpha-based systems and intended develop software until April 2007. Negotiations between DEC and Compaq started in 1995 but plans for a merger in 1996 were unsuccessful. On January 26th 1998 financially struggling DEC was purchased outright by Compaq. DEC ratified the agreement on February 2nd, 1998.
Similar Systems
DEC also produced the DEC 2000 AXP / DECpc AXP 150, DEC 3000 AXP, the Digital Personal Workstation a-Series and au-Series and the Alpha XL/Alpha XLT line. Eventually AlphaStation models became workstation configurations of the corresponding AlphaServer model.
VAX Systems
VAX was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation through the mid-1970s. It was designed to extend and replace Digital’s PDP ISAs. “VAX” was also used by DEC for a family of computer systems based on this processor architecture. The name VAX stands for “Virtual Address eXtension”.
The VAX architecture featured virtual addressing and orthogonal instruction set.
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