Digital Equipment Corporation - Massachusetts 1950-1960's

Beautiful engraved RARE specimen certificate from the Digital Equipment Corporation . This historic document was printed by Security-Columbian Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of an eagle. This item has the printed signatures of the Company's President, Ken Olson and Secretary.

Archival production copy with notations for alterations of certificate. Historic certificate of one of the computer age pioneers. Company was acquired by Compaq Computer which was eventually acquired by HP. Came from banknote company archives.


Certificate Vignette

Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering American company in the computer industry. It is often referred to within the computing industry as DEC. (This acronym was once officially used by Digital itself, [1] but the official name was always DIGITAL.) Its PDP and VAX products were arguably the most popular mini-computers for the scientific and engineering communities during the 1970s and 1980s. DEC was acquired by Compaq in June 1998, which subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. As of 2006 its product lines were still produced under the HP name. From 1957 until 1992 its headquarters was in an old woolen mill in Maynard, Massachusetts.

Digital Equipment Corporation should not be confused with Digital Research; the two were unrelated, separate entities; or with Western Digital (despite the fact that they made the LSI-11 chipsets used in Digital Equipment Corporation's low end PDP-11/03 computers). Note, however, that there were Digital Research Laboratories where DEC did its corporate research.

The company was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, two engineers who had been working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on the TX-2 project. The TX-2 was a transistor-based computer using the then-huge amount of 64K 36-bit words of core memory. When that project ran into difficulties, Olsen and Anderson left MIT to form DEC. Venture capital of about $70,000 was provided by Georges Doriot and his American Research and Development Corporation. AR&D later sold its investment in Digital for approximately $450 million, certainly the best VC return ever at the time. At the time the VC market was hostile to computer companies, and investors shied from their plans. The original business plan named the company "Digital Computer Corporation", but AR&D required that the name be changed to DEC. Instead DEC started building small digital "modules" (flip flops, gates, transformer drivers, etc.) that could be combined together to run scientific and engineering experiments. In 1959 Ben Gurley started design of their first computer, the PDP-1 (PDP being an initialism for Programmable Data Processor). DEC begain its operations in an old Civil War era woolen mill in Maynard, MA where there was plenty of inexpensive manufacturing space.

System Building Blocks 1103 hex-inverter card (both sides)The first modules were the free-standing "laboratory modules", placing one or two gates inside an extruded aluminum housing. These modules could be stacked up in a pre-configured 19" rack shelf that supplied power to the modules; the logic circuits were then established using banana plug patch cords installed at the front of the modules. The same circuits were then packaged as "System Building Blocks", which were used to build the PDP-1.

A "B" (blue) series Flip Chip module containing 9 transistors, 1971The same circuits were then packaged as the first "R" (red) series "Flip-Chip®" modules. Later, other module series provided additional speed, much higher logic density, and industrial I/O capabilities. Digital published extensive data about the modules in free catalogs that became very popular.

In the 1980s, DEC built the VT180 (codenamed "Robin"), which was a VT100 terminal with a Z80-based microcomputer running CP/M.

This evolved into the Rainbow 100, which had both Z80 and 8088 CPUs and was capable of running CP/M, CP/M-86, and MS-DOS.

DEC also used Intel 8-bit microprocessors as embedded processors within larger systems, for example, as the console processor in PDP-11/04, 11/34, and 11/44 systems and as the main processor within the VT100 family of video terminals.

A PDP-8 on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.. This example is from the first generation of PDP-8s, built with discrete transistors and later known as the Straight 8.To serve laboratories at a lower cost, DEC provided the PDP-5, an early minicomputer in 1963. True success followed with the introduction of the famous PDP-8 in 1964. It was a smaller, 12-bit word machine that sold for about $16,000. The PDP-8 was small enough to fit on a cart. It was simple enough to be used for many roles, and they soon started being sold in huge numbers to new market niches, labs, railways, and all sorts of industrial applications.

The PDP-8 was important historically because it was the first computer that was regularly purchased by a handful of end users as an alternative to using a larger system in a data center. Because of their low cost and portability, these machines could be purchased to fill a specific need, unlike the mainframe systems of the day that were nearly always shared among diverse users. Today the PDP-8 is generally regarded as the first minicomputer. The PDP-8 spawned a cousin, the PDP-12, which merged data acquisition and display capabilities developed with the NIH-sponsored LINC computers into the PDP-8 architecture.

The PDP-8 was used as the "brains" for many, specific scientific and research projects. Once such adaptation was the "Durrum Instruments D-500 Amino Acid Analyzer wherein a PDP-8 was used for process control.

Many 8 and 16 bit machine architectures are said to be inspired by the PDP-8, including the HP 2100 and Data General Nova, and to a lesser extent the National Semiconductor IMP, PACE, and INS8900 microprocessors and the Signetics 2650 microprocessor. Machines based on the PDP-8 can be characterized by a small number of accumulators (such as AC and MQ, or A and B), or a small number of general registers (R0-R3) rather than a relatively large number of regular registers (such as R0-R7 or R15), and by memory addressing in terms of a base page and a current page (related to PC value).

The design of the 4 bit Intel 4004 was also inspired by the PDP-8, although it has a series of regular registers (R0-R15), because Ted Hoff while evaluating the Busicom designed calculator chipset for production by Intel realized that the PDP-8 sitting in the corner of the room was far more powerful than these chips yet the circuitry was much simpler. Therefore he proposed that Intel not make the chips designed by Busicom, but instead design a "computer chipset" for them that they could program as a calculator.

Data General was formed by a group of DEC engineers in May,1968 and rapidly brought the 16-bit NOVA minicomputer to market, based on a proposed architecture that DEC management had rejected. DEC immediately found itself behind in the industry transition to 8-bit bytes. The PDP-11 16-bit computer was designed in a crash program by Harold McFarland, Gordon Bell, Roger Cady, and others. Its numerous architectural innovations, including the UNIBUS, proved superior to all competitors and the "11" architecture was soon the industry leader. The first model was the PDP-11/20 and was followed by higher performance models such as the 11/45 and 11/70. When improvements to integrated circuits enabled the single-chip microprocessor, 11s eventually were packaged into systems no larger than a modern PC.

The PDP-11 supported several operating systems, including Bell Labs' new Unix operating system as well as DEC's DOS-11, RSX-11, IAS, RT-11, and RSTS/E. Many early PDP-11 applications were developed using standalone paper-tape utilities. DOS-11 was the PDP-11's first disk operating system, soon supplanted by more capable systems. RT-11 provided a practical real-time operating system, allowing the PDP-11 to continue Digital's critical role as a computer supplier for embedded systems. RSX provided a general-purpose multitasking environment, and supported a wide-variety of programming languages. IAS was a time-sharing version of RSX-11D. Both RSTS and Unix were time-sharing systems available to educational institutions at little or no cost, and these PDP-11 systems were destined to be the sandbox for a generation of engineers and computer scientists. Large numbers of 11/70's were deployed in telecommunications and industrial control applications. AT&T became DEC's largest customer.

The PDP-11's 16-bit, byte-oriented architecture provided a 64KB virtual address space. Most models had a paged physical memory architecture and memory protection features, useful for multitasking and time-sharing, and some supported separate Instruction & Data spaces for an effective virtual address size of 128KB within a physical address size of up to 4MB.

Another significant innovation of the PDP's architecture (PDP-11 in particular, but also to some degree the other PDPs) was that all peripheral device interfaces were memory mapped: rather than using special I/O instructions to work with peripherals, programmers accessed device registers by reading and modifying the contents of specific physical memory addresses.

PDP operating systems were the model for many other operating systems. CP/M used a command syntax similar to RT-11's, and even retained the awkward PIP program which was used to copy programs. DEC's use of '/' for "switches" (command-line options) would lead to the adoption of '\' for pathnames in Windows as opposed to '/' in Unix.

Through the 1960s DEC produced a series of machines aimed at a price/performance point below IBM's mainframe machines, typically based on an 18-bit word, using core memory: the PDP-1, the PDP-4 (1963), the PDP-7 (the first to use their Flip-Chip® technology) and PDP-9 (1965), and finally the PDP-15 series (starting in 1970 and later sold as the "XVM" series). The PDP-15 was an early user of TTL integrated circuits. These computers were moderately powerful computers for their time, mainly used in industrial, scientific, and medical laboratories.

According to Gordon Bell, the second PDP (PDP-2) was reserved for a 24-bit computer that was never developed.

In addition to the VAX below, DEC collaborated with ARM Limited to produce the StrongARM processor. This processor, based in part on ARM7 and in part on DEC technologies like Alpha, was highly compatible with the ARMv4 architecture and set the standard for microprocessors intended for mobile applications, virtually destroying the market for technologies such as MIPS and SuperH in these markets. Microsoft subsequently dropped PocketPC support for these architectures, largely as a result of the extremely broad appeal of StrongARM. When DEC ceased to trade, the StrongARM intellectual property was sold to Intel, who continued to manufacture StrongARM, as well as developing it into XScale.

A paper design for the third PDP (PDP-3) was developed, and a single computer was produced from the specification by a DEC customer using DEC System Building Blocks.

For larger scientific applications DEC produced first the PDP-6 in 1964, using a 36-bit architecture. Using the same word length as the IBM 701-7094 series scientific computers, which were being replaced by the 32-bit IBM System/360 series, and the UNIVAC 1107, which was replaced by the successor UNIVAC 1108 the next year, provided an alternative growth path for scientific customers. The successor was the PDP-10 series, eventually being sold as the DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20.

One of the most unusual peripherals produced for the PDP-10 was the DECtape. The DECtape was a length of standard magnetic tape wound on 5" reels. However, the recording format was a 10-track approach using fixed-length numbered 'blocks' organized into a standard file structure, including a directory. Files could be written, read, changed and deleted on a DECtape as through it were a hard drive. In fact, some PDP-10 systems had no hard drives at all, using DECtapes alone for their primary data storage. For greater efficiency, the DECtape drive could read and write to a DECtape in both directions.

A representative VAX-11/780 system configurationIn 1976 DEC decided to extend the PDP-11 architecture to 32 bits, creating the first 32-bit minicomputer which they referred to as a super-mini. This was launched as the VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) 11/780 in 1978, and immediately took over the vast majority of the minicomputer market. Desperate attempts by competitors such as Data General (which had been formed in 1968 by Ed DeCastro and 8 other DEC engineers who had worked on a 16-bit design that DEC had rejected) to win back market share failed, due not only to DEC's successes, but the emergence of the microcomputer and workstation into the lower-end of the minicomputer market. In 1983, DEC canceled their "Jupiter" project, which had been intended to build a successor to the PDP-10, and instead focused on promoting the VAX as their the single computer architecture for the company. It was believed that microprocessor technology at the low end and networking of larger systems could produce a 1:1000 range of computing power from one architecture.

The VAX series had an instruction set that is rich even by today's standards (as well as an abundance of addressing modes). In addition to the paging and memory protection features of the PDP series, the VAX supported virtual memory. The VAX could use both Unix and DEC's own VMS operating system.

At its peak in the late 1980s, Digital was the second-largest computer company in the world, with over 100,000 employees. It was during this time that they appeared to gain a feeling of invincibility, and branched out into software, producing products for almost every then "hot" niche. This included their own networking system, DECnet, file and print sharing, relational database, and even transaction processing. Although many of these products were well designed, most of them were DEC-only or DEC-centric, and customers frequently ignored them and used third party products instead. This problem was further magnified by Olsen's aversion to traditional advertising and his belief that well-engineered products would sell themselves. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on these projects, at the same time that workstations based on RISC architecture were starting to approach the VAX in performance. Constrained by their huge success of the VAX/VMS products, which followed the proprietary model, the company was very late to respond to commodity hardware in the form of Intel-based personal computers and standards-based software such as Unix and Internet protocols such as TCP/IP. In the early 1990s DEC found its sales faltering, and its first layoffs followed. The company that created the minicomputer and arguably the first computers for personal use did not effectively respond to the significant restructuring of the computer industry.

Inside view of AlphaServer 2100.During the 1980s DEC made several attempts at designing a RISC (reduced instruction set) processor to replace the VAX architecture. Eventually, in 1992 DEC launched the Alpha processor (initially named Alpha AXP, the "AXP" was later dropped). This was a 64-bit RISC architecture (as opposed to the 32-bit CISC architecture used in the VAX) and one of the first 64-bit microprocessor designs. The Alpha offered class-leading performance at its launch, and subsequent variants continued to do so into the 2000s. Alpha-based computers (the DEC AXP series, later the AlphaStation and AlphaServer series) superseded both the VAX architecture and the MIPS-based DECstation line, and could run VMS, DEC's 4.2BSD-based Unix variant called Ultrix and Microsoft's new server operating system Windows NT.

DEC tried to compete in the Unix market by marketing the VMS operating system as "OpenVMS" and by selling their own Unix (OSF/1 AXP, later renamed Digital UNIX, and even later Tru64), and it began to advertise more aggressively. DEC was simply not prepared to sell into a crowded Unix market however, and furthermore the low end PC-servers running NT (based on Intel processors) took market share from Alpha-based computers. DEC's workstation and server line never gained much popularity beyond former DEC customers.

Digital responded to the challenge of the IBM-PC with not one, but three machines, tied to proprietary architectures. One machine was for "professionals", barely hiding CEO Ken Olsen's contempt for the IBM PC. One was for word processing only, and one was "almost" IBM compatible. All 3 were commercial failures. Packaging was based on the new VT220 terminals. The DEC Professional Series Model 350 (380) was based on the PDP-11/23 (11/73)which, running RSX-11M+ derived the menu-driven P/OS, was software incompatible with the base of largely CP/M and 8080 based microcomputers. The 'Pro' provided 64K 16-bit addresses windowing into 2 MB of physical memory, compared to 1 MB capacity of the Intel 8086. The DecMate I and II was the latest version of the PDP-8 based word processors, but not really suited to general computing, nor competitive with Wang Laboratories word processing which was becoming popular. The Rainbow 100 ran an 8086 implementation of CP/M, so applications could in theory be recompiled, but by this time, users were expecting custom-built applications such as Lotus 1-2-3, which was eventually ported along with MS-DOS V2.0 and introduced in late 1983. Users objected to having to buy preformatted floppy disks, though this is now commonplace.

DEC was initially resistant to even supporting MS-DOS, and did not produce a true IBM-PC compatible computer for many years, though the VAXmate came close, introduced in 1986 along with MS-Windows V1.0 and a VAX/VMS based (file and print) server for Microsoft's network protocols (such as SMB and NetBIOS) along with integration into DEC's own DECnet-family, providing LAN/WAN connection from PC to mainframe (supermini). The lines of DECs personal computers peaked with the Alpha-based 64-bit RISC workstations introduced in the early 90s. DEC later produced a range of true IBM-PC compatible computers, including the Starion, Venturis, Celebris and Digital PC desktop lines, the HiNote series of laptops and the Digital Server and Prioris ranges of servers.

Beyond DECsystem-10/20, PDP, VAX and Alpha, Digital was well respected for its communications sub-system designs, such as DNA (Digital Network Architecture - predominantly DECnet products), DSA (Digital Storage Architecture - disks/tapes/controllers), and its "dumb terminal" subsystems including VT100 and DECserver products. For in-depth articles regarding Digital technologies, refer to the archived Digital Technical Journal.

In June of 1992, Ken Olsen was replaced by Robert Palmer as the company's CEO. Palmer had joined DEC in 1985 to run Semiconductor Engineering and Manufacturing. His relentless campaign to be CEO and success with the Alpha microprocessor family made him a candidate to succeed Olsen. However, Palmer was unable to stem the tide of red ink. More rounds of layoffs ensued and many of DEC's assets were spun off:

Worldwide training was spun off to form an independent/new company called Global Knowledge Network [2]. Their database product, Rdb, was sold to Oracle. The TK-series tape technology was sold to Quantum Corporation as the basis for today's DLT and SuperDLT technology. Text terminal business (VT100 and its successors) was sold in August 1995 to Boundless Technologies. In May 1997, DEC sued Intel for allegedly infringing on its Alpha patents in designing the Pentium chips. As part of a settlement, DEC's chip business was sold to Intel. This included DEC's StrongARM implementation of the ARM computer architecture, which Intel sold as the XScale processors commonly used in Pocket PCs. In 1997, the printer business was sold to GENICOM (now TallyGenicom), which then produced models bearing the Digital logo. At about the same time, the networking business was sold to Cabletron Systems, and subsequently spun off as Digital Network Products Group. The DECtalk and DECvoice voice products were spun off, and eventually arrived at Fonix. RT-11 is now supported and distributed by Mentec company. Eventually, on January 26, 1998, what remained of the company was sold to Compaq. Compaq itself was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002. Hewlett-Packard now sells what were Digital's StorageWorks disk/tape products [3], made possible through the Compaq acquisition.

The Digital logo survived for a while after the company ceased to exist, as the logo of Digital GlobalSoft, an IT services company in India (which was a 51% subsidiary of DEC). Digital GlobalSoft was later renamed "HP GlobalSoft" (also known as the "HP Global Delivery India Center" or HP GDIC) and no longer uses the Digital logo.

The digital.com and DEC.com domain names are now owned by Hewlett-Packard and redirect to their US website www.digital.com, www.DEC.com.

History from Wikipedia and OldCompanyResearch.com.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

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These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.