realitista, (edited )

I remember using a DEC Alpha back in the late '90s. It was the fastest computer I had ever used by a long shot and I had access to most of the hardware from IBM, Sun, HP, etc at the time. It was an absolute monster.

Also my first connection to the internet in 1993 was via a VAX.

I will always have fond memories of DEC.

toned_chupacabra,

My first compsci course was on a PDP/11. On RSTS/E. On a paper teleprinter console.

Good times.

spauldo,

Ah, DEC. Some really cool stuff came out of Maynard, MA.

A few notable things about DEC:

  • They made computers that were affordable by smaller businesses and universities.
  • The PDP-10 - one of DEC’s only mainframes - was where the bulk of early Lisp development occurred, mostly for AI research.
  • UNIX originated on DEC hardware (before VMS).
  • The team that developed the Alpha (the successor to the VAX) was hired by AMD to develop the 64-bit Athlon architecture (what became X86_64 - i.e. what your computer is probably based on).
  • Intel chose a little-endian architecture for the 8086 because that’s what the VAX used.
  • TCP/IP was developed on UNIX running on a VAX.
  • After the minicomputer market crashed, DEC was bought by Compaq, taken out behind the woodshed, and shot like a dog.
davefischer,
@davefischer@beehaw.org avatar

TCP/IP was… part of the BSD project? PDP-11 or VAX?

Our museum mostly collects minis from science & academia, so it leans REALLY heavily DEC.

Image

spauldo,

If I remember right, it was sponsored by DARPA. It was in the early 80s, so it would have been on VAX. It wasn’t the first implementation (there were several prototypes), but it’s the design that stuck; all the major OS implementations of TCP/IP today use the sockets API (if not the source code directly; several identical network vulnerabilities on different OSs are due to the fact that BSD code was free to use and copy).

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