Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing (arstechnica.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[-] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

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).

this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023

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