Talk:Digital Equipment Corporation

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Feb 2002—Dec 2005

Why did DEC fall?

One reason that DEC fell was its inability to hold its senior executives accountable for financial performance after the abolition of the Product Lines in the early 1980's. Ken Olsen was very proud of creating the Product Lines after the problems with the PDP-6 that almost killed the company in the early 1960's. Each Product Line had responsibility for a computer system (PDP-8,9/15, 11, DEC-10's) and the GM/Managers were held accountable for profit, revenue growth, and to a lesser extent customer satisfaction.

It knew early in the mid 1980's that it needed to cut its cost structure by about 1/3 if it was to compete in the 1990's. However, Ken Olsen absolutely forbid layoffs, so little happened until the situation became so desparate that he had to relent.

Instead it attempted to grow its way out of the problem through a massive re-deployment of resources to the field that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars.

Another major reason the company failed was that it did not adjust to the restructuring of the computer industry from full service highly integrated systems suppliers to areas of horizontal expertise - Intel for micros, Oracle for database, etc. DEC had the technologies to compete in many areas but the corporate strategy was to only sell systems.

It was a great company that could not adjust to a dramatically changing business environment that meant tightening its belt and changing what it sold and how it sold... until it was too late. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 69.182.238.233 (talk • contribs) 20:45, January 14, 2006.

When I worked at DEC in the mid-80s, there was an article in a business magazine (Forbes? Fortune?) about how DEC was trying to sell computers to farmers with a slogan that described the company as the "Second-largest computer company in the world" - to which farmers would ask, "so what's the biggest computer company?" I think it's funny that the article repeats this mistake: "At its peak in the late 1980s, Digital was the second-largest computer company in the world, with over 100,000 employees."129.55.27.4

One might argue that DEC failed because "cheap" always trumps "good". DEC products were good, PCs were cheap, the rest is history. (One might also wryly observe that this was exactly how DEC built its business against competitors like IBM, but I'd like to believe that many DEC products were both cheap and good.)

Atlant 15:10, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Didn't DEC go bankrupt due to its own inept sales force pushing Pentium machines over the AlphaPC? I once heard someone complain that DEC was a company you couldn't give money away to (his words).

website

The reason I came to this page was because I read (on a web history page) that DEC put up the first commercial website. In this article it says they were amongst the first .com websites. Were there any .com websites before DEC that weren't commercial? I thought if it was one it would be the other as well, but it'd seem strange to refer to the first ever as one of the first... sheridan 03:30, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Polycenter?

I believe one of the other items DEC divested was their management software known as Polycenter. This software went to Computer Associates. Yes it was one of the first generation of enterprise management offers in the market.

Soviets

Is it worth noting that an 11/782 was seized in 1983 as part of a contraband shipment to the Soviets? --Gadget850 ( Ed) 13:48, 27 May 2006 (UTC)

Intel processors inspired by DEC PDP-8?

Without a citation, I don't buy the idea that any of the early Intel 4-bit or 8-bit microprocessors were "inspired by the PDP-8". There is no significant architectural similarity between the PDP-8 and the 4004, 8008, or 8080. On the other hand, there are very clear similarities between the PDP-8, DG Nova, and HP 2116 family (of which the HP 2100 is a member). If no citation is forthcoming in the near future, I will remove the 4004 and 8080 references in that section. --Brouhaha 18:43, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

That also leads to some questionable assertions in the next sentence: "Machines based on the PDP-8 can be characterized by a small number of accumulators (such as AX or BX) rather than a series of regular registers (such as R1-R8) like the PowerPC and PDP-11, so it might be said that it was the descendents of the PDP-8, not the later PDP-11, that inherited the dominant processor status of the 2000s." If the 4004 and 8080 don't resemble the PDP-8 that closely, than the 8080's x86 descendents can't be said to descend from the PDP-8 either.

The PDP-11 and its successor, the VAX, were CISC processors, while most modern processors are RISC-based. The difference between CISC and RISC designs probably accounts for more architectural differences between the PDP-11 and today's processors than the differences between the PDP-8 and PDP-11 do. -- CWesling 01:17, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't buy it, either. The PDP-8 was, at least from the point of view of a programmer, a beautiful, clean, economical design. I did quite a lot of programming in PDP-1 assembly language and LINC assembly language, both considerably richer in instructions than the PDP-8. Yet the PDP-8 seemed to be just as expressive and easy to program.

For several years, I did quite a lot of programming about equally divided between the PDP-8 and the PDP-11. It always astonished me how easy the PDP-8 was to program, and how little you seemed to be cramped by the seemingly severe limitations (only six addressable instructions). When I first saw the PDP-11 instruction set I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Well, when I actually started writing code, sure, the PDP-11 was nicer than the PDP-8, but not nearly as much nicer as I expected. Who'd have thought that eight silly little autoincrementing memory locations could be at least 3/4 as effective as real index registers? And I could swear that it always took significantly more core to write the same program on a PDP-11 as on a PDP-8.

In contrast, virtually all the microprocessors were ugly, asymmetrical, ad hoc monstrosities. No doubt it all had to do with how they could run the microscopic data paths on a plane, or whatever. The Motorola 68000 does "feel" a little like a PDP-11, but the 8080 and the 6502 never felt the slightest bit like a PDP-8 to me. Dpbsmith (talk) 01:36, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

dpbsmith, see orthogonal instruction set for an explanation of why your PDP-11 programs always seemed bigger than your PDP-8 programs. It's the nature of the beast that a highly-orthogonal instruction set (such as the PDP-11's) is always far less bit-efficient than a non-orthonal instruction set (such as the PDP-8's). (And I say this as an experienced assembly-language programmer on both systems.) Both systems were joys to program, though, compared to the baroque 8080 and x86 architectures.

Atlant 12:03, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

VMS++ = WNT

The article discusses how one can get the acronym "W/NT" by incrementing each letter in "VMS". Someone just edited in "Cutler later verified this."

AFAIK, Cutler has never actually made any affirmative statement such as "Yes, I did that intentionally." Instead, he's always said something coy like "Did you just notice that?". (That is, he makes it clear that it was deliberate while not actually saying so.)

Have I got this right?

If so, we should edit the article.

Atlant 16:28, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

That's how it looked to me, too, when I Googled for this. So yes, we should probably reword that a little. -- CWesling 23:21, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Microprocessors influenced by PDP-8?

I still don't buy it. "Machines based on the PDP-8 can be characterized by a small number of accumulators?" No, this is hardly a defining characteristic that makes an architecture PDP-8-like. Broadly speaking, small numbers of accumulators (and small numbers of registers with somewhat specialized, asymmetrical functions) are found in any situation in which registers aren't cheap. Many, many early machines have an "accumulator" and an "accumulator extension," for example. I think the (original) Illiac did. Certainly the PDP-1 did.

The advantages of having many registers are obvious, and they appeared whenever the economic balance for that particular machine permitted it. Conversely, any machine that was cheap or otherwise constrained to have minimal hardware, had a few.

Here are a list of PDP-8-specific characteristics. I'd like to see an architecture match a handful of these before I'd call it "PDP-8-like." I'm not very familiar with the 8080, but I don't think it matches any of them.

• Absence of any provision in hardware for moving more than one word at a time.
• Fixed word length.
• Absence of any hardware support for a stack.
• Addressing architecture in which the address space is divided into pages, and every addressable instruction can address: directly within the current page; directly within page 0; indirectly within the current page; indirectly within page 0.
• Absence of any conditional branches; that is, branches that have a target address. All conditional operations are implemented by a single "skip" instruction, which transfers control to either PC+1 or PC+2, on conditions microprogrammed by individual bits within the skip instruction.
• Extreme economy of instruction set; only six addressable instructions in the case of the PDP-8
• Word length that is not a power of 2.

Any similaries between microprocessors and the PDP-8--other than the Intersil 6100, of course!--are simply the result of having to solve the same problems, i.e. build a very small computer with limited hardware resources. The PDP-8 and 8080 are no more similar than the PDP-8 and the LINC, or the PDP-8 and the CDC-160.

This is quite different from the situation with respect to, say, Digital operating systems like OS/8 and CP/M and MS-DOS. If you compare these three, you notice things like

• the strange use of CTRL-Z to mark the end of a text file, particularly strange because according to the ASCII spec "end of medium" is CTRL-Y, not CTRL-Z--probably a mistake on Digital's part, but certainly an idiosyncrasy
• the use of the CR-LF pair to separate lines
• the use of file names consisting of a name and an extension separated by a dot
• the prohibition of space characters within file names

All of these characteristics are shared by OS/8, CP/M, and (early) MS-DOS. None of these characteristics are shared by the Apple ][ DOS 3.3; only one of them is possessed by UNIX.

Thus, I think it is very reasonable to see evidence of Digital OS influence in microcomputer OSes. I do not see any obvious influence of the PDP-8 on microprocessors. Dpbsmith (talk) 20:51, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

P. S. And, regardless of what I or anyone else might have to say, in any case the verifiability and no original research policies mean that anything said on this topic, however well-founded, must be traceable to a published source, not stated without attribution. Dpbsmith (talk) 20:54, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I can assure you that the 8080 and PDP-8 ISPs (and their respective assembly languages) have damned little in common, aside from the facts that they're both (basically) accumulator-oriented load/store architectures.

Atlant 22:53, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

Logo

Just thought I'd add a pointer to a query about the logo here. I'm probably wrong, but anybody know for certain? I'm intrigued now, and don't have any DEC logos handy to leer at. Chris 23:06, 25 July 2006 (UTC)

Personal computers

DEC did sell Intel-based Windows compatible computers under their logo (for example, Prioris, Celebris and Venturis product lines). --195.218.145.14 16:59, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

  The question of the "dots" verses the "squares" above the "I's" in the red logo is correct.

When Bob Palmer took over, the advertising company he hired made the change. They changed it to red and replaced the squares with dots. It was something like DB Neadham agency. They also tried to give DEC a modern feel by playing a fast changing graphic commercial to Lenny Kravitz Are you going to go my way.