I believe they began as a low-profile supplier of "flip chip" modules; using discrete transistors to implement simple logic functions on small circuit cards of a standard dimension. So for a while, they didn't sell computers; although I presume they had it mind to use those same logic cards, now in volume production, to cobble together computers under their own name. And of course, that's what they soon did, borrowing concepts from MIT one-off computers for machines like the PDP-1, PDP-7, LINC, and (most famously) the PDP-8, the first widely sold minicomputer.
About the time that DEC was introducing minicomputers based on MSI chips (roughly, chips containing on the order of 100-1000 transistors), there was this group engaged in a swiss navy project designing what was to become a major microprocessor. They badly needed some local computational resources.
Their batch and timesharing IBM/RCA/GE beasts just would not do for their purposes. But yet the Corporation's IT suits had a seemingly unbreakable stranglehold on computing power, and nobody anywhere in the company had been able to get a computer approved for department, or even plant-wide use, that was more than a remote batch job terminal or a minicomputer for direct use in production test and support.
The project leaders got creative. They listed the capital investment as "test equipment." In reality, it was a DEC PDP-11/70 with 256K memory, 170 MB removable disks, half-inch tape drive, and a couple dozen CRTs, which they had the, umm, audacity, to plan to put on the engineers' desks. They even specified 1200 baud (!) modems so engineers could work from home (this was a few years before Hayes or even US Robotics).
Well, they got it approved. And the operating system they chose was a commercially-supported version of Unix PWB/ver 6.5. This was the first departmental multi-user and the first Unix system in the Corporation.
That MPU chip would not likely ever have seen the light of day without that DEC computer, and the graphics-based computers of a couple of former west coast garage hackers would not have been what they were or appeared when they did, if ever.
even the DEC VT100 became the system standard
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About the time that DEC was introducing minicomputers based on MSI chips (roughly, chips containing on the order of 100-1000 transistors), there was this group engaged in a swiss navy project [...]
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Should read
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About the time that DEC was introducing minicomputers based on MSI chips (roughly, chips containing on the order of 100-1000 transistors), there was this group at a major semiconductor house engaged in a swiss navy project [...] "