Digital: The revolution overtook it

Maynard, Mass. - They were going against every established idea in the computer industry. But a small group of engineers had a vision, and they refused to let the "facts" get in their way.

Starting in some rented space in a derelict old woolen mill, they produced computers smaller and, in some ways, more powerful than any that had come before. From these humble beginnings, they spawned a computing revolution that wrested control of data processing from the wizards of the glass house.

The Digital clock tower is a Maynard landmark.

But like many revolutionaries, the engineers of Digital Equipment Corp. couldn't keep ahead of what they started. Just as they blindsided the IBMs and Honeywells of the world with their revolutionary minicomputers, so, too did Digital get left behind by personal computers.

Blinded by the huge profit margins of their proprietary VAX systems, Digital (in particular, Chairman Ken Olsen), dismissed those tiny, underpowered little personal computers that started coming out in the late 1970s.

By the time Digital figured out that the future was, indeed, networked PCs connected by open standards, it was too late: Digital, for all its superior technology and long networking history, had been passed by.

In the beginning

From The Digital Timeline

DEC's first customer: Bolt, Berenek and Newman, another computing pioneer that couldn't adjust to the next paradigm. In 1962, BBN and MIT wrote the world's first time-sharing operating system on the PDP-1. In 1969, two AT&T scientists used a PDP-7 to develop an operating system they called Unix.

In 1975, Digital began working on a PDP replacement called the VAX - and rolled out a new networking technology, DECnet, that featured the ability to run distributed applications.

Planet VAX All things VAX.

The first VAX, the 11/780, shipped in 1977. Its name comes from Virtual Address Extension, which referred to the way it doubled the address space from 16 to 32 bits. That same year, Digital became the first company to connect to a small government research network called ARPAnet (it later became better known as the Internet).

The VAX propelled Digital into the stratosphere, letting it grow to become the second largest computer company. At its height, Digital helped drive the Massachusetts economy and made grand gestures such as hiring the Queen Elizabeth II for one of its biannual DECWorld trade shows.

But while Digital was stretching the VAX into a mainframe and developing VAX clusters, IBM was springing the PC on the world. Digital responded half-heartedly at best (anybody remember the DEC Rainbow?). Its profit margins began to slow - and eventually decline as the company started hemorrhaging money. In 1991, Digital even signed a deal with Microsoft to connect Windows clients to Digital machines. The introduction of the Alpha chip in 1992 failed to stem the Wintel surge. Digital at times seemed reduced to just another clone maker, albeit one with a chip more powerful than those used by the others.

Online Researcher Jason Rakitin contributed to this report.