Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC (this acronym was frequently officially used by Digital itself, but the trademark was always DIGITAL). Its PDP and VAX products were arguably the most popular minicomputers for the scientific and engineering communities during the 1970s and 1980s. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, which subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. As of 2007 its product lines were still produced under the HP name. From 1957 until 1992 its headquarters was located in an old wool 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.
Closing DEC's business
New 1993 corporate logoIn June 1992, Ken Olsen was replaced by Robert Palmer as the company's president. Digital's board of directors also granted Palmer the title of chief executive officer ("CEO"), a title that had never been used during Digital's 35-year existence. Palmer had joined DEC in 1985 to run Semiconductor Engineering and Manufacturing. His relentless campaign to be CEO, and success with the Alpha microprocessor family, made him a candidate to succeed Olsen. At the same time a more modern logo was designed. However, Palmer was unable to stem the tide of red ink. More rounds of layoffs ensued and many of DEC's assets were spun off:
Worldwide training was spun off to form an independent/new company called Global Knowledge Network.
Their database product, Rdb, was sold to Oracle.
The DLT tape technology was sold to Quantum Corporation in 1994.
Text terminal business (VT100 and its successors) was sold in August 1995 to Boundless Technologies.
In March 1997, DEC's CORBA-based product, ObjectBroker, and its messaging software, MessageQ, was sold to BEA Systems, Inc.
In May 1997, DEC sued Intel for allegedly infringing on its Alpha patents in designing the Pentium chips. As part of a settlement, DEC's chip business was sold to Intel. This included DEC's StrongARM implementation of the ARM computer architecture, which Intel sold as the XScale processors commonly used in Pocket PCs.
In 1997, the printer business was sold to GENICOM (now TallyGenicom), which then produced models bearing the Digital logo.
At about the same time, the networking business was sold to Cabletron Systems, and subsequently spun off as Digital Network Products Group.
The DECtalk and DECvoice voice products were spun off, and eventually arrived at Fonix.
The rights to the PDP-11 line and several PDP-11 operating systems were sold to Mentec in 1994.
Eventually, on January 26, 1998, what remained of the company (including Digital's multivendor global services organization and customer support centers) was sold to Compaq, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. Compaq, and later HP, continued to sell many of the former Digital products but rebranded with their own logos. For example, HP now sells what were formerly Digital's StorageWorks disk/tape products, as a result of the Compaq acquisition.
The Digital logo survived for a while after the company ceased to exist, as the logo of Digital GlobalSoft, an IT services company in India (which was a 51 percent subsidiary of Compaq). Digital GlobalSoft was later renamed "HP GlobalSoft" (also known as the "HP Global Delivery India Center" or HP GDIC) and no longer uses the Digital logo.
The digital.com and DEC.com domain names are now owned by Hewlett-Packard and redirect to their US website.
The Digital Federal Credit Union (DCU), which was chartered in 1979 for employees of DEC, is now open to essentially everyone, with over 700 different sponsors, including the companies that acquired pieces of DEC.
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MC-36 Multi-Function Remote Cord
Variable Height Plunger Switches
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