DEC
More info
- Founded
- Founders
- Ken Olsen, Harlan Anderson
- Headquarters
- Maynard, Massachusetts
- Type
- Computer manufacturer (acquired 1998)
The inventor of the minicomputer — the company whose PDP and VAX put computers within reach of individual departments, and which then missed the personal computer.
Before DEC, a computer was something an entire company shared and fed with punch cards. The PDP series cost a fraction and could sit in a lab. The PDP-7 and PDP-11 were the machines Unix was born and grew up on, and the VAX with its VMS operating system dominated technical computing through the 1980s.
Ken Olsen is frequently quoted as saying nobody would want a computer in their home — a remark that in context concerned home automation, but which became a symbol of the company's failure to take the personal computer seriously. Compaq bought DEC in 1998 and HP bought Compaq in 2002. The Alpha processor survived a few years longer.