Thoughts on DEC

seeknuance.com

7 pointsnjrc3 comments

O Ozymandias. Once a titan astride the minicomputer world. What companies of comparable size today could have the same fate?

Dropbox? Github? They are so much smaller than DEC. HP perhaps.

DEC had about 200,000 employees at its peak. HP, of course, bought Compaq who bought DEC, not that there was much left at that point. If you're interested, there's a book by Edgar H Schein and Paul J Kampas entitled, "DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation".

Also check out out Bob Supnik's site, the Computer History Simulation Project, http://simh.trailing-edge.com, which has emulators for most DEC hardware: PDP-1, PDP-4, PDP-7, PDP-8, PDP-9, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-15, VAX. Most DEC OS's are available there as well. I have successfully run VMS on SimH on OS X.

I guess I'm old. I remember most of that, and I didn't work for DEC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com