154-478: Interactive Application System (IAS) was a DEC operating system for the PDP-11 . It was a fork from RSX-11D . The last major release, Version 3.0, began distribution late 1979; the final version, 3.4, came out May 1990. DEC's RSX-11A and C were paper tape based, B had limited disk support, "D" was for disk, and the "M" designation was for "small Memory requirement" /later "Multi-user" (with RSX-11M Plus being
308-426: A 19-inch rack . The backplanes allowed 25 modules in a single 5-1/4 inch section of rack, and allowed the high densities needed to build a computer. The original laboratory and system module lines were offered in 500 kilocycle, 5 megacycle and 10 megacycle versions. In all cases, the supply voltages were -15 and +10 volts, with logic levels of -3 volts (passive pull-down) and 0 volts (active pull-up). DEC used
462-437: A version number as part of a file's identifier: MYFILE.DAT;3 was retained by IAS. The batch facility 's command files used the same syntax as the indirect command files available to interactive users; multiple batch jobs could run concurrently. The system could be tuned to either leave unused CPU cycles to batch, or to guarantee a minimum level (without taking from Real Time requirements). DEC's Sort/Merge utility program
616-472: A $ 50 billion company by the year 2000, or to beat I.B.M. – but they didn't have anything to do with customers. The new C.E.O. should look at everything Eckhard acquired and ask: did the customer benefit from that. If the answer isn't yes, they should get rid of it." On one hand, Compaq had previously dominated the PC market with its price war but was now struggling against Dell , which sold directly to buyers, avoiding
770-453: A $ 71 million loss for that quarter, their first loss as a company, while the stock had dropped by over two-thirds. An analyst stated that "Compaq has made a lot of tactical errors in the last year and a half. They were trend-setters, now they are lagging". Canion initially believed that the 1990s recession was responsible for Compaq's declining sales but insisted that they would recover once the economy improved, however Pfeiffer's observation of
924-610: A VAX CPU was the VAX-11/780 , announced in October 1977, which DEC referred to as a superminicomputer . Although it was not the first 32-bit minicomputer, the VAX-11/780's combination of features, price, and marketing almost immediately propelled it to a leadership position in the market after it was released in 1978. VAX systems were so successful that in 1983, DEC canceled its Jupiter project , which had been intended to build
1078-440: A chain of Mexican restaurants. Each invested $ 1,000 to form the company, which was founded with the temporary name Gateway Technology. The name "COMPAQ" was said to be derived from "Compatibility and Quality" but this explanation was an afterthought. The name was chosen from many suggested by Ogilvy & Mather , it being the name least rejected. The first Compaq PC was sketched out on a placemat by Ted Papajohn while dining with
1232-437: A followup). IAS was designed to a mix of "concurrent timesharing, real-time and batch." A looking back described it as "bare basics .. handled interrupts .. scheduled processes, and provided interprocess communications" without being "all things to all people." Another description, rather than focusing on taking away overhead, wrote "IAS (Interactive Application System) was created by adding two things to 11D." RSX-11's use of
1386-502: A foodservice distributor based in Chicago, and he informed Compaq's board that he accepted the offer. Rose, senior vice president and general manager of Compaq's Enterprise Computing group, resigned effective as of June 3 and was succeeded by Tandem veteran Enrico Pesatori. Rose was reportedly upset that he was not considered for the CEO vacancy, which became apparent once Michael Capellas
1540-429: A low-priced PC could be made in half the time and at lower cost than Canion's initiative. It was also believed that Canion's consensus-style management slowed the company's ability to react in the market, whereas Pfeiffer's autocratic style would be suited to price and product competition. Rosen initiated a 14-hour board meeting, and the directors also interviewed Pfeiffer for several hours without informing Canion. At
1694-583: A new virtual memory system, and would also improve performance by processing twice as much data at a time. The system would, however, maintain compatibility with the PDP-11, by operating in a second mode that sent its 16-bit words into the 32-bit internals, while mapping the PDP-11's 16-bit memory space into the larger virtual 32-bit space. The result was the VAX architecture, where VAX stands for Virtual Address eXtension (from 16 to 32 bits). The first computer to use
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#17327835492391848-476: A new device to be added easily, generally only requiring plugging a hardware interface board into the backplane and possibly adding a jumper to the wire wrapped backplane, and then installing software that read and wrote to the mapped memory to control it. The relative ease of interfacing spawned a huge market of third party add-ons for the PDP-11, which made the machine even more useful. The combination of architectural innovations proved superior to competitors and
2002-513: A price war that they started." Subsequent earnings releases from Compaq's rivals, Dell, Gateway, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard suggested that the problems were not affecting the whole PC industry as Pfeiffer had suggested. Dell and Gateway sold direct, which helped them to avoid Compaq's inventory problems and compete on price without dealer markups, plus Gateway sold web access and a broad range of software tailored to small businesses. Hewlett-Packard's PC business had similar challenges like Compaq but this
2156-467: A profit at the end of its first year. The original Laboratory Modules were soon supplemented with the "Digital System Module " line, which were identical internally but packaged differently. The Systems Modules were designed with all of the connections at the back of the module using 22-pin Amphenol connectors, and were attached to each other by plugging them into a backplane that could be mounted in
2310-472: A religious education program at the University of St. Thomas. Murto had helped to organize the company's marketing and authorized-dealer distribution strategy, and held the post of senior vice president of sales since June 1985. Murto was succeeded by Ross A. Cooley, director of corporate sales. Cooley would report to Michael S. Swavely, vice president for marketing, who was given increased responsibility and
2464-438: A selection of System Building Blocks to implement a small 12-bit machine, and attached it to a variety of analog-to-digital (A to D) input/output (I/O) devices that made it easy to interface with various analog lab equipment. The LINC proved to attract intense interest in the scientific community, and has since been referred to as the first real minicomputer , a machine that was small and inexpensive enough to be dedicated to
2618-485: A self-sustaining business, the company would be free to use them to develop a complete computer in their Phase II. The newly christened "Digital Equipment Corporation" received $ 70,000 from AR&D for a 70% share of the company, and began operations in a Civil War -era textile mill in Maynard, Massachusetts , where plenty of inexpensive manufacturing space was available. In early 1958, DEC shipped its first products,
2772-511: A separate input/output processor for further performance gains. Over 400 PDP-15's were ordered in the first eight months of production, and production eventually amounted to 790 examples in 12 basic models. However, by this time other machines in DEC's lineup could fill the same niche at even lower price points, and the PDP-15 would be the last of the 18-bit series. In 1962, Lincoln Laboratory used
2926-412: A shakeup, which saw Eckhard Pfeiffer appointed president and CEO, serving through the 1990s. Ben Rosen provided the venture capital financing for the fledgling company and served as chairman of the board for 17 years from 1983 until September 28, 2000, when he retired and was succeeded by Michael Capellas , who served as its last chairman and CEO until its merger. Compaq was overtaken by Dell as
3080-493: A significant markup for more profits or discount for more sales, dealers had a major incentive to advertise Compaq. During its first year of sales (second year of operation), the company sold 53,000 PCs for sales of $ 111 million , the first start-up to hit the $ 100 million mark that fast. Compaq went public in 1983 on the NYSE and raised $ 67 million . In 1986, it enjoyed record sales of $ 329 million from 150,000 PCs, and became
3234-485: A single large mainframe case, with a hexagonal control panel containing switches and lights mounted to lie at table-top height at one end of the mainframe. Above the control panel was the system's standard input/output solution, a punched tape reader and writer. Most systems were purchased with two peripherals , the Type 30 vector graphics display, and a Soroban Engineering modified IBM Model B Electric typewriter that
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#17327835492393388-659: A single task even in a small lab. Seeing the success of the LINC, in 1963 DEC took the basic logic design but stripped away the extensive A to D systems to produce the PDP-5 . The new machine, the first outside the PDP-1 mould, was introduced at WESTCON on August 11, 1963. A 1964 ad expressed the main advantage of the PDP-5, "Now you can own the PDP-5 computer for what a core memory alone used to cost: $ 27,000". 116 PDP-5s were produced until
3542-653: A successor to the PDP-10 mainframe, and instead focused on promoting the VAX as the single computer architecture for the company. Supporting the VAX's success was the VT52 , one of the most successful smart terminals . Building on earlier less successful models, the VT05 and VT50 , the VT52 was the first terminal that did everything one might want in a single inexpensive chassis. The VT52
3696-483: A table to write a letter to the president, someone has to write the letter. Compaq is sitting down at the typewriter". Michael S. Swavely, president of Compaq's North American division since May 1989, took a six-month sabbatical in January 1991 (which would eventually become retirement effective on July 12, 1991). Eckhard Pfeiffer , then president of Compaq International, was named to succeed him. Pfeiffer also received
3850-433: A then-industry record of $ 9.6 billion. The merger made Compaq, at the time, the world's second largest computer maker in the world in terms of revenue behind IBM. Digital Equipment, which had nearly twice as many employees as Compaq while generating half the revenue, had been a leading computer company during the 1970s and early 1980s. However, Digital had struggled during the 1990s, with high operating costs. For nine years,
4004-440: A turn to use the stripped-down TX-0, while largely ignoring a faster IBM machine that was also available. The two decided that the draw of interactive computing was so strong that they felt there was a market for a small machine dedicated to this role, essentially a commercialized TX-0. They could sell this to users where the graphical output or real-time operation would be more important than outright performance. Additionally, as
4158-677: Is most famous as the machine for which the Unix operating system was originally written. Unix ran only on DEC systems until the Interdata 8/32 . A more dramatic upgrade to the PDP-1 series was introduced in August 1966, the PDP-9 . The PDP-9 was instruction-compatible with the PDP-4 and −7, but ran about twice as fast as the −7 and was intended to be used in larger deployments. At only $ 19,900 in 1968,
4312-522: Is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home." Unsurprisingly, DEC did not put much effort into the microcomputer area in the early days of the market. In 1977, the Heathkit H11 was announced; a PDP-11 in kit form. At the beginning of the 1980s, DEC built the VT180 (codenamed "Robin"), which was a VT100 terminal with an added Z80 -based microcomputer running CP/M , but this product
4466-438: Is the best way to merchandise those products. You remove the freedom from the dealers to really merchandise when you bundle in software. It is perceived by a lot of people as a marketing gimmick. You know, when you advertise a $ 3,000 computer with $ 3,000 worth of free software, it obviously can't be true. The software should stand on its merits and be supported and so should the hardware. Why should you be constrained to use
4620-576: The Deskpro , a 16-bit desktop computer using an Intel 8086 microprocessor running at 7.14 MHz . It was considerably faster than an IBM PC and was, like the original Compaq Portable , also capable of running IBM software. It was Compaq's first non-portable computer and began the Deskpro line of computers. In 1986, Compaq introduced the Deskpro 386 , the first PC based on Intel 's new 80386 microprocessor. Bill Gates of Microsoft later said
4774-727: The SAGE system for the US Air Force , which used large screens and light guns to allow operators to interact with radar data stored in the computer. When the Air Force project wound down, the Lab turned their attention to an effort to build a version of the Whirlwind using transistors in place of vacuum tubes . In order to test their new circuitry, they first built a small 18-bit machine known as TX-0 , which first ran in 1956. When
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4928-677: The UnixWare NonStop Clusters product in 1998. Minor acquisitions centered around building a networking arm and included NetWorth (1998) based in Irving, Texas and Thomas-Conrad (1998) based in Austin, Texas. In 1997, Microcom was also acquired, based in Norwood, MA, which brought a line of modems, Remote Access Servers (RAS) and the popular Carbon Copy software. In 1998, Compaq acquired Digital Equipment Corporation for
5082-520: The minicomputer market starting in the early 1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis in history. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through
5236-399: The trademark Digital , was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until he was forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in
5390-700: The " Gang of Nine ", to develop EISA. Development of a truly mobile successor to the Portable line began in 1986, the company releasing two stopgap products in the meantime, the SLT (Compaq's first laptop ) and the Compaq Portable III (a lighter-weight, lunchbox-sized entry in the Portable line). In 1989, they introduced the LTE , their first notebook-sized laptop which competed with NEC 's UltraLite and Zenith Data Systems 's MinisPort . However, whereas
5544-802: The "11" architecture was soon the industry leader, propelling DEC back to a strong market position. The design was later expanded to allow paged physical memory and memory protection features, useful for multitasking and time-sharing . Some models supported separate instruction and data spaces for an effective virtual address size of 128 KB within a physical address size of up to 4 MB. Smaller PDP-11s, implemented as single-chip CPUs, continued to be produced until 1996, by which time over 600,000 had been sold. 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 , DSM-11, and RSTS/E . Many early PDP-11 applications were developed using standalone paper-tape utilities. DOS-11
5698-514: The "A team", who controlled access to Pfeiffer. Gutsch was said to be a "master of corporate politics, pitting senior vice presidents against each other and inserting himself into parts of the company that normally would not be under his purview". Gutsch, who oversaw security, had an extensive security system and guard station installed on the eight floor of CCA-11, where the company's senior vice presidents worked. There were accusations that Gutsch and others sought to divide top management, although this
5852-543: The "Digital Laboratory Module" line. The Modules consisted of a number of individual electronic components and germanium transistors mounted to a circuit board , the actual circuits being based on those from the TX-2. The Laboratory Modules were packaged in an extruded aluminum housing, intended to sit on an engineer's workbench, although a rack-mount bay was sold that held nine laboratory modules. They were then connected together using banana plug patch cords inserted at
6006-544: The "IAS heuristic timesharing scheduler" and "subtasking support at the Kernel Executive level via the SPAWN system directive." The heuristic timesharing scheduler tracks "history of performance and degree of interaction." Some failure recovery is built into both the DEC hardware and IAS software. Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC / d ɛ k / ), using
6160-439: The "sandbox" for a rising generation of engineers and computer scientists. Large numbers of PDP-11/70s were deployed in telecommunications and industrial control applications. AT&T Corporation became DEC's largest customer. RT-11 provided a practical real-time operating system in minimal memory, allowing the PDP-11 to continue DEC's critical role as a computer supplier for embedded systems . Historically, RT-11 also served as
6314-433: The 1950s, wiped out when new technical developments rendered their platforms obsolete, and even large companies like RCA and General Electric were failing to make a profit in the market. The only serious expression of interest came from Georges Doriot and his American Research and Development Corporation (AR&D). Worried that a new computer company would find it difficult to arrange further financing, Doriot suggested
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6468-399: The 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially with the introduction of RISC -based workstation machines, the performance niche of the minicomputer was rapidly eroded. By the early 1990s, the company was in turmoil as their mini sales collapsed and their attempts to address this by entering
6622-572: The 1980s, culminating in the NVAX microprocessor implementation and VAX 7000/10000 series in the early 1990s. When a DEC research group demonstrated two prototype microcomputers in 1974—before the debut of the MITS Altair —Olsen chose to not proceed with the project. The company similarly rejected another personal computer proposal in 1977. At the time these systems were of limited utility, and Olsen famously derided them in 1977, stating "There
6776-450: The CPU which allowed one to easily see the logic modules plugged into the wire-wrapped backplane of the CPU. Sold standard with 4 kWords of 12-bit core memory and a Teletype Model 33 ASR for basic input/output, the machine listed for only $ 18,000. The PDP-8 is referred to as the first real minicomputer because of its sub-$ 25,000 price. Sales were, unsurprisingly, very strong, and helped by
6930-567: The Compaq Plus with a 10 MB hard drive, PC Magazine wrote of "the reputation for compatibility it built with its highly regarded floppy disk portable". Compaq computers remained the most compatible PC clones into 1984, and maintained its reputation for compatibility for years, even as clone BIOSes became available from Phoenix Technologies and other companies that also reverse engineered IBM's design, then sold their version to clone manufacturers. On June 28, 1984, Compaq released
7084-537: The European market noted that it was competition as rivals could match Compaq at a fraction of the cost. Under pressure from Compaq's board to control costs as staff was ballooning at their Houston headquarters despite falling U.S. sales, while the number of non-U.S. employees had stayed constant, Compaq made its first-ever layoffs (1400 employees which was 12% of its workforce) while Pfeiffer was promoted to EVP and COO. Rosen and Canion had disagreed about how to counter
7238-585: The IBM PC, to other computer manufacturers. The only part which had to be duplicated was the BIOS , which Compaq did legally by using clean room design at a cost of $ 1 million . Unlike other companies, Compaq did not bundle application software with its computers. Vice President of Sales and Service H. L. Sparks said in early 1984: We've considered it, and every time we consider it we reject it. I don't believe and our dealer network doesn't believe that bundling
7392-458: The Internet had overtaken Compaq's management team, saying "As a company engaged in transforming its industry for the Internet era, we must have the organizational flexibility necessary to move at Internet speed." In a statement, Pfeiffer said "Compaq has come a long way since I joined the company in 1983" and "under Ben's guidance, I know this company will realize its potential." Rosen's priority
7546-589: The LTE was the first commercially successful notebook computer, helping launch the burgeoning industry. It was a direct influence on both Apple and IBM for the development of their own notebook computers, the PowerBook and ThinkPad , respectively. By 1989, The New York Times wrote that being the first to release a 80386-based personal computer made Compaq the leader of the industry and "hurt no company more - in prestige as well as dollars - than" IBM. The company
7700-607: The PC chassis at its plant in Shenzhen , China to cut costs. In 1996, instead of expanding its own plant, Compaq asked a Taiwanese supplier to set up a new factory nearby to produce the mechanicals, with the Taiwanese supplier owning the inventory until it reached Compaq in Houston. Pfeiffer also introduced a new distribution strategy, to build PCs made-to-order which would eliminate the stockpile of computers in warehouses and cut
7854-469: The PC, but was more expensive than, and completely incompatible with IBM PC hardware and software, offering far fewer options for customizing a system. Unlike CP/M and DOS microcomputers, every copy of every program for the Professional had to be provided with a unique key for the particular machine and CPU for which it was bought. At that time this was mainstream policy, because most computer software
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#17327835492398008-630: The PDP-8, all in software. Although not a huge seller, 142 LINC-8s were sold starting at $ 38,500. Like the original LINC to PDP-5 evolution, the LINC-8 was then modified into the single-processor PDP-12 , adding another 1000 machines to the 12-bit family. Newer circuitry designs led to the PDP-8/I and PDP-8/L in 1968. In 1975, one year after an agreement between DEC and Intersil , the Intersil 6100 chip
8162-459: The PDP-9 was a big seller, eventually selling 445 machines, more than all of the earlier models combined. Even while the PDP-9 was being introduced, its replacement was being designed, and was introduced as 1969's PDP-15 , which re-implemented the PDP-9 using integrated circuits in place of modules. Much faster than the PDP-9 even in basic form, the PDP-15 also included a floating point unit and
8316-700: The Professional was a superior machine, running inferior software. In addition, a new user would have to learn an awkward, slow, and inflexible menu-based user interface which appeared to be radically different from PC DOS or CP/M , which were more commonly used on the 8080- and 8088-based microcomputers of the time. A second offering, the DECmate II was the latest version of the PDP-8-based word processors, but not really suited to general computing, nor competitive with Wang Laboratories ' popular word processing equipment. The most popular early DEC microcomputer
8470-511: The Rainbow, and in its standard form was the first widely marketed diskless workstation . In 1984, DEC launched its first 10 Mbit/s Ethernet . Ethernet allowed scalable networking, and VAXcluster allowed scalable computing. Combined with DECnet and Ethernet-based terminal servers ( LAT ), DEC had produced a networked storage architecture which allowed them to compete directly with IBM. Ethernet replaced Token Ring , and went on to become
8624-492: The System Modules to build their "Memory Test" machine for testing core memory systems, selling about 50 of these pre-packaged units over the next eight years. The PDP-1 and LINC computers were also built using System Modules (see below). Modules were part of DEC's product line into the 1970s, although they went through several evolutions during this time as technology changed. The same circuits were then packaged as
8778-469: The TX-0 successfully proved the basic concepts, attention turned to a much larger system, the 36-bit TX-2 with a then-enormous 64 kWords of core memory . Core was so expensive that parts of TX-0's memory were stripped for the TX-2, and what remained of the TX-0 was then given to MIT on permanent loan. At MIT, Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson noticed something odd: students would line up for hours to get
8932-412: The U. S. such that European dealers were more qualified to handle its increasingly complex products. During the 1980s, under Canion's direction Compaq had focused on engineering, research, and quality control, producing high-end, high-performance machines with high profit margins that allowed Compaq to continue investing in engineering and next-generation technology. This strategy was successful as Compaq
9086-584: The UltraLite and MinisPort failed to gain much uptake due to their novel but nonstandard data storage technologies, the LTE succeeded on account of its use of the conventional floppy drive and spinning hard drive, allowing users to transfer data to and from their desktop computers without any hassle. As well, Compaq began offering docking stations with the release of the LTE/386s in 1990, providing performance comparable to then-current desktop machines. Thus,
9240-436: The ability to address more memory, often by extending the address format to 18 or 24-bits in machines were otherwise similar to their earlier 16-bit designs. In contrast, DEC decided to make a more radical departure. In 1976, they began the design of a machine whose entire architecture was expanded from the 16-bit PDP-11 to a new 32-bit basis. This would allow the addressing of very large memories, which were to be controlled by
9394-451: The acquisition of Digital as the cultural differences between both companies were too great, and complained that he was placed on the "B team" as a result. Compaq entered 1999 with strong expectations. Fourth-quarter 1998 earnings reported in January 1999 beat expectations by six cents a share with record 48 percent growth. The company launched Compaq.com as the key for its new direct sales strategy, and planned an IPO for AltaVista toward
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#17327835492399548-515: The adoption of "\" for pathnames in MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows as opposed to "/" in Unix . The evolution of the PDP-11 followed earlier systems, eventually including a single-user deskside personal computer form, the MicroPDP-11. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, and a wide variety of third-party peripheral vendors had also entered the computer product ecosystem. It
9702-460: The basis for the new design, although when they first viewed the proposal, management was not impressed and almost cancelled it. The result was the PDP-11 , released in 1970. It differed from earlier designs considerably. In particular, the new design did not include many of the addressing modes that were intended to make programs smaller in memory, a technique that was widely used on other DEC machines and CISC designs in general. This would mean
9856-451: The better-established vendors like IBM or Honeywell , in spite of its low cost around $ 300,000. Only 23 were sold, or 26 depending on the source, and unlike other models the low sales meant the PDP-6 was not improved with successor versions. However, the PDP-6 is historically important as the platform that introduced "Monitor", an early time-sharing operating system that would evolve into
10010-475: The cheaper Asian PC imports, as Canion wanted Compaq to build lower cost PCs with components developed in-house in order to preserve Compaq's reputation for engineering and quality, while Rosen believed that Compaq needed to buy standard components from suppliers and reach the market faster. While Canion developed an 18-month plan to create a line of low-priced computers, Rosen sent his own Compaq engineering team to Comdex without Canion's knowledge and discovered that
10164-514: The combined companies should do, or indeed how the three dramatically different cultures could work as a single entity, and Compaq struggled from strategy indecisiveness and lost focus, as a result being caught in between the low end and high end of the market. Mark Anderson, president of Strategic News Service, a research firm based in Friday Harbor, Wash. was quoted as saying, "The kind of goals he had sounded good to shareholders – like being
10318-521: The combined company would have to lay off 2,000 employees from Compaq and 15,000 from Digital which would potentially hurt morale. Furthermore, Compaq fell behind schedule in integrating Digital's operations, which also distracted the company from its strength in low-end PCs where it used to lead the market in rolling out next-generation systems which let rival Dell grab market share. Reportedly Compaq had three consulting firms working to integrate Digital alone. However, Pfeiffer had little vision for what
10472-665: The company had lost money or barely broke even, and had recently refocused itself as a "network solutions company". In 1995, Compaq had considered a bid for Digital but only became seriously interested in 1997 after Digital's major divestments and refocusing on the Internet. At the time of the acquisition, services accounted for 45 percent of Digital's revenues (about $ 6 billion) and their gross margins on services averaged 34 percent, considerably higher than Compaq's 25% margins on PC sales and also satisfying customers who had demanded more services from Compaq for years. Compaq had originally wanted to purchase only Digital's services business but that
10626-463: The company should no longer use profits from high-margin businesses to carry marginally profitable ones, as instead each unit must show a return on investment. Pfeiffer's vision was to make Compaq a full-fledged computer company, moving beyond its main business of manufacturing retail PCs and into the more lucrative business services and solutions that IBM did well at, such as computer servers which would also require more "customer handholding" from either
10780-459: The company's annual meeting for selling stock before reporting the sales slowdown. Rose was succeeded by SVP Enrico Pesatori, who had previously worked as a senior executive at Olivetti , Zenith Data Systems , Digital Equipment Corporation , and Tandem Computers . Capellas was appointed COO after pressure mounted on Rosen to find a permanent CEO, however it was reported that potential candidates did not want to work under Rosen as chairman. Around
10934-587: The company's field sales organization after starting up the Western U.S. Area of Operations. These executives, along with other key contributors, including Kevin Ellington, Douglas Johns, Steven Flannigan, and Gary Stimac, helped the company compete against the IBM Corporation in all personal computer sales categories, after many predicted that none could compete with the behemoth. The soft-spoken Canion
11088-774: The company's first computer, the PDP-1 . In keeping with Doriot's instructions, the name was an initialism for " Programmable Data Processor ", leaving off the term "computer". As Gurley put it, "We aren't building computers, we're building 'Programmable Data Processors'." The prototype was first shown publicly at the Joint Computer Conference in Boston in December 1959. The first PDP-1 was delivered to Bolt, Beranek and Newman in November 1960, and formally accepted
11242-588: The company's meteoric growth in the late 1980s and early 1990s were Ross A. Cooley, another former IBM associate, who served for many years as SVP of GM North America; Michael Swavely, who was the company's chief marketing officer in the early years, and eventually ran the North America organization, later passing along that responsibility to Cooley when Swavely retired. In the United States, Brendan A. "Mac" McLoughlin (another long time IBM executive) led
11396-411: The compatible DECSYSTEM-20 , along with a TOPS-20 operating system that included virtual memory support. The Jupiter Project was supposed to continue the mainframe product line into the future by using gate arrays with an innovative Air Mover Cooling System, coupled with a built-in floating point processing engine called "FBOX". The design was intended for a top tier scientific computing niche, yet
11550-457: The components inventory down to two weeks, with the supply chain from supplier to dealer linked by complex software. Vice-president for Corporate Development Kenneth E. Kurtzman assembled five teams to examine Compaq's businesses and assess each unit's strategy and that of key rivals. Kurtzman's teams recommended to Pfeiffer that each business unit had to be first or second in its market within three years—or else Compaq should exit that line. Also,
11704-508: The conclusion, the board was unanimous in picking Pfeiffer over Canion. As Canion was popular with company workers, 150 employees staged an impromptu protest with signs stating "We love you, Rod." and taking out a newspaper ad saying "Rod, you are the wind beneath our wings. We love you." Canion declined an offer to remain on Compaq's board and was bitter about his ouster as he did not speak to Rosen for years, although their relationship became cordial again. In 1999, Canion admitted that his ouster
11858-486: The critical performance measurement was based upon COBOL compilation which did not fully utilize the primary design features of Jupiter technology. When the Jupiter Project was cancelled in 1983, some of the engineers adapted aspects of the 36-bit design into a forthcoming 32-bit design, releasing the high-end VAX8600 in 1985. DEC's successful entry into the computer market took place during a fundamental shift in
12012-655: The dealer channel and its markup, and built each machine to order to keep inventories and costs at a minimum. At the same time, Compaq, through its acquisitions of the Digital Equipment Corporation in 1998 and Tandem Computers in 1997, had tried to become a major systems company, like IBM and Hewlett-Packard. While IBM and HP were able generate repeat business from corporate customers to drive sales of their different divisions, Compaq had not yet managed to make its newly acquired sales and services organizations work as seamlessly. In early 1998, Compaq had
12166-587: The dealers or Compaq staff themselves. Unlike IBM and HP, Compaq would not build up field technicians and programmers in-house as those could be costly assets, instead Compaq would leverage its partnerships (including those with Andersen Consulting and software maker SAP) to install and maintain corporate systems. This allowed Compaq to compete in the "big-iron market" without incurring the costs of running its own services or software businesses. Most of Compaq's server sales were for systems that would be running Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, and indeed Compaq
12320-409: The dominant networking model in use today. In September 1985, DEC became the fifth company to register a .com domain name (dec.com). Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being
12474-536: The end of 1999 in order to capitalize on the dotcom bubble. However, by February 1999, analysts were sceptical of Compaq's plan to sell both direct and to resellers. Compaq was hit with two class-action lawsuits, as a result of CFO Earl Mason, SVP John Rose, and other executives selling US$ 50 million of stock before a conference call with analysts, where they noted that demand for PCs was slowing down. On April 17, 1999, just nine days after Compaq reported first-quarter profit being at half of what analysts had expected,
12628-473: The fact that several competitors had just entered the market with machines aimed directly at the PDP-5's market space, which the PDP-8 trounced. This gave the company two years of unrestricted leadership, and eventually 1450 "straight eight" machines were produced before it was replaced by newer implementations of the same basic design. DEC hit an even lower price-point with the PDP-8/S, the S for "serial". As
12782-470: The fastest-growing part of the computer hardware market. Compaq also built up a network engineering and marketing staff. In 1996, despite record sales and profits at Compaq, Pfeiffer initiated a major management shakeup in the senior ranks. John T. Rose, who previously ran Compaq's desktop PC division, took over the corporate server business from SVP Gary Stimac who had resigned. Rose had joined Compaq in 1993 from Digital Equipment Corporation where he oversaw
12936-475: The first "R" (red) series " Flip-Chip " modules. Later, other Flip-Chip module series provided additional speed, much higher logic density, and industrial I/O capabilities. DEC published extensive data about the modules in free catalogs that became very popular. With the company established and a successful product on the market, DEC turned its attention to the computer market once again as part of its planned "Phase II". In August 1959, Ben Gurley started design of
13090-406: The first CPU change to the PC platform that was not initiated by IBM. Compaq had concluded, according to PC , that it could do so because "IBM's DOS standard is now bigger than IBM"; IBM could not make changes to the PC architecture it had created to hurt Compaq, without also obsoleting millions of real IBM PCs. An IBM-made 386 machine reached the market almost a year later, but by that time Compaq
13244-409: The first day of trading after the first-quarter announcement and closed the following Friday at $ 23.62 . During three out of the last six quarters of Pfeiffer's tenure, the company's revenues or earnings had missed expectations. While rival Dell had 55% growth in U.S. PC sales in the first quarter of 1999, Compaq could only manage 10%. Rosen suggested that the accelerating change brought about by
13398-487: The fledgling company change its business plan to focus less on computers, and even change their name from "Digital Computer Corporation". The pair returned with an updated business plan that outlined two phases for the company's development. They would start by selling computer modules as stand-alone devices that could be purchased separately and wired together to produce a number of different digital systems for lab use. Then, if these "digital modules" were able to build
13552-422: The folks at IBM didn't trust the 386. They didn't think it would get done. So we encouraged Compaq to go ahead and just do a 386 machine. That was the first time people started to get a sense that it wasn't just IBM setting the standards, that this industry had a life of its own, and that companies like Compaq and Intel were in there doing new things that people should pay attention to. The Compaq 386 computer marked
13706-599: The founders in a pie shop, (named House of Pies in Houston). Their first venture capital came from Benjamin M. Rosen and Sevin Rosen Funds , who helped the fledgling company secure $ 1.5 million to produce their initial computer. Overall, the founders managed to raise $ 25 million from venture capitalists, as this gave stability to the new company as well as providing assurances to the dealers or middlemen. Unlike many startups, Compaq differentiated its offerings from
13860-411: The front of the modules. Three versions were offered, running at 5 MHz (1957), 500 kHz (1959), or 10 MHz (1960). The Modules proved to be in high demand by other computer companies, who used them to build equipment to test their own systems. Despite the recession of the late 1950s, the company sold $ 94,000 worth of these modules during 1958 alone (equivalent to $ 992,700 in 2023), turning
14014-512: The high-end market with machines like the VAX 9000 were market failures. After several attempts to enter the workstation and file server market, the DEC Alpha product line began to make successful inroads in the mid-1990s, but was too late to save the company. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. During
14168-413: The inspiration for many microcomputer OS's, as these were generally being written by programmers who cut their teeth on one of the many PDP-11 models. For example, CP/M used a command syntax similar to RT-11's, and even retained the awkward PIP program used to copy data from one computer device to another. As another historical footnote, DEC's use of "/" for "switches" (command-line options) would lead to
14322-490: The lab's various computer projects. The Lab is best known for their work on what would today be known as "interactivity", and their machines were among the first where operators had direct control over programs running in real-time. These had started in 1944 with the famed Whirlwind , which was originally developed to make a flight simulator for the US Navy , although this was never completed. Instead, this effort evolved into
14476-436: The latest in a string of earnings disappointments, Pfeiffer was forced to resign as CEO in a coup led by board chairman Ben Rosen . Reportedly, at the special board meeting held on April 15, 1999, the directors were unanimous in dismissing Pfeiffer. The company's stock had fallen 50 percent since its all-time high in January 1999. Compaq shares, which traded as high as $ 51.25 early in 1999, dropped 23 percent on April 12, 1999,
14630-548: The limited information available, they used it to process radar cross section data for the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft . Gordon Bell remembered that it was being used in Oregon some time later, but could not recall who was using it. In November 1962, DEC introduced the $ 65,000 PDP-4 . The PDP-4 was similar to the PDP-1 and used a similar instruction set, but used slower memory and different packaging to lower
14784-441: The lines were shut down in early 1967. Like the PDP-1 before it, the PDP-5 inspired a series of newer models based on the same basic design that would go on to be more famous than its parent. On March 22, 1965, DEC introduced the PDP-8 , which replaced the PDP-5's modules with the new R-series modules using Flip Chips. The machine was re-packaged into a small tabletop case, which remains distinctive for its use of smoked plastic over
14938-496: The machine would cost much less than the larger systems then available, it would also be able to serve users that needed a lower-cost solution dedicated to a specific task, where a larger 36-bit machine would not be needed. In 1957, when the pair and Ken's brother Stan sought capital, they found that the American business community was hostile to investing in computer companies. Many smaller computer companies had come and gone in
15092-438: The machine would spend more time accessing memory, which would slow it down. However, the machine also extended the idea of multiple "General Purpose Registers" (GPRs), which gave the programmer flexibility to use these high-speed memory caches as they needed, potentially addressing the performance issues. A major advance in the PDP-11 design was DEC's Unibus , which supported all peripherals through memory mapping . This allowed
15246-465: The many other IBM PC clones by not focusing mainly on price, but instead concentrating on new features, such as portability and better graphics displays as well as performance—and all at prices comparable to those of IBM's PCs. In contrast to Dell and Gateway 2000 , Compaq hired veteran engineers with an average of 15 years experience, which lent credibility to Compaq's reputation of reliability among customers. Due to its partnership with Intel , Compaq
15400-418: The monitors that they offered to customers of their Deskpro and Presario lines as standalone units to third-party resellers, including their popular 171FS monitor. On June 26, 1995, Compaq reached an agreement with Cisco Systems, Inc. , in order to get into networking, including digital modems, routers, and switches favored by small businesses and corporate departments, which was now a $ 4 billion business and
15554-425: The name implies the /S used a serial arithmetic unit, which was much slower but reduced costs so much that the system sold for under $ 10,000. DEC then used the new PDP-8 design as the basis for a new LINC, the two-processor LINC-8 . The LINC-8 used one PDP-8 CPU and a separate LINC CPU, and included instructions to switch from one to the other. This allowed customers to run their existing LINC programs, or "upgrade" to
15708-458: The next April. The PDP-1 sold in basic form for $ 120,000 (equivalent to $ 9,269,291 in 2023). By the time production ended in 1969, 53 PDP-1s had been delivered. The PDP-1 was supplied standard with 4096 words of core memory , 18-bits per word, and ran at a basic speed of 100,000 operations per second. It was constructed using many System Building Blocks that were packaged into several 19-inch racks . The racks were themselves packaged into
15862-508: The original AT bus—which it renamed ISA —instead of licensing IBM's MCA. Prior to developing EISA Compaq had invested significant resources into reverse engineering MCA, but its executives correctly calculated that the $ 80 billion already spent by corporations on IBM-compatible technology would make it difficult for even IBM to force manufacturers to adopt the new MCA design. Instead of cloning MCA, Compaq led an alliance with Hewlett Packard and seven other major manufacturers, known collectively as
16016-492: The personal computer division and worldwide engineering, while Stimac had been with Compaq since 1982 and was one of the longest-serving executives. Senior Vice-president for North America Ross Cooley announced his resignation effective at the end of 1996. CFO Daryl J. White, who joined the company in January, 1983 resigned in May, 1996 after 8 years as CFO. Michael Winkler, who joined Compaq in 1995 to run its portable computer division,
16170-581: The price. Like the PDP-1, about 54 PDP-4s were eventually sold, most to a customer base similar to the original PDP-1. In 1964, DEC introduced its new Flip Chip module design, and used it to re-implement the PDP-4 as the PDP-7 . The PDP-7 was introduced in December 1964, and about 120 were eventually produced. An upgrade to the Flip Chip led to the R series, which in turn led to the PDP-7A in 1965. The PDP-7
16324-562: The problem of bloated PC inventories. By summer 1998, Compaq was suffering from product-quality problems. Robert W. Stearns, SVP of Business Development, said "In [Pfeiffer's] quest for bigness, he lost an understanding of the customer and built what I call empty market share—large but not profitable", while Jim Moore, a technology strategy consultant with GeoPartners Research in Cambridge, Mass., says Pfeiffer "raced to scale without having economies of scale." The "colossus" that Pfeiffer built up
16478-665: The purchase, some parts of DEC were sold to other companies; the compiler business and the Hudson Fab were sold to Intel . At the time, Compaq was focused on the enterprise market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence. However, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. Compaq subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard (HP) in May 2002. Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson were two engineers who had been working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory on
16632-625: The release of Windows 3.0 in 1990.) Compaq's technical leadership and the rivalry with IBM was emphasized when the SystemPro server was launched in late 1989 – this was a true server product with standard support for a second CPU and RAID , but also the first product to feature the EISA bus, designed in reaction to IBM's MCA ( Micro Channel Architecture ) which was incompatible with the original AT bus. Although Compaq had become successful by being 100 percent IBM-compatible, it decided to continue with
16786-571: The retail computer market with the Compaq Presario as one of the first manufacturers in the mid-1990s to market a sub-$ 1000 PC. In order to maintain the prices it wanted, Compaq became the first first-tier computer manufacturer to utilize CPUs from AMD and Cyrix . The two price wars resulting from Compaq's actions ultimately drove numerous competitors from the market, such as Packard Bell and AST Research . From third place in 1993, Compaq had overtaken Apple Computer and even surpassed IBM as
16940-607: The same design. During construction of the prototype PDP-1, some design work was carried out on a 24-bit PDP-2, and the 36-bit PDP-3. Although the PDP-2 never proceeded beyond the initial design, the PDP-3 found some interest and was designed in full. Only one PDP-3 appears to have been built, in 1960, by the CIA's Scientific Engineering Institute (SEI) in Waltham, Massachusetts . According to
17094-559: The second company after Columbia Data Products to legally reverse engineer the BIOS of the IBM Personal Computer . It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s. The company was initially based in Harris County, Texas . The company was formed by Rod Canion , Jim Harris , and Bill Murto , all of whom were former Texas Instruments senior managers. All three had left by 1991 under
17248-414: The separate position of Compaq president. The board complained that Pfeiffer was too removed from management and the rank-and-file, as he surrounded himself with a "clique" of Chief Financial Officer Earl Mason, Senior Vice-President John T. Rose, and Senior Vice-President of Human Resources Hans Gutsch. Current and former Compaq employees complained that Gutsch was part of a group of senior executives, dubbed
17402-452: The software that comes with a piece of hardware? I think it can tend to inhibit sales over the long run. Compaq instead emphasized PC compatibility, of which Future Computing in May 1983 ranked Compaq as among the "Best" examples. "Many industry observers think [Compaq] is poised for meteoric growth", The New York Times reported in March of that year. By October, when the company announced
17556-416: The time of Rando's departure, Compaq Services ranked third behind those of IBM and EDS, while slightly ahead of Hewlett-Packard 's and Andersen Consulting , however customers switched from Digital technology-based workstations to those of HP, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. Mason, senior vice president and chief financial officer, had previously been offered the job of chief executive of Alliant Foodservice, Inc.,
17710-474: The title of chief operating officer, with responsibility for the company's operations on a worldwide basis, so that Canion could devote more time to strategy. Swavely's abrupt departure in January led to rumors of turmoil in Compaq's executive suite, including friction between Canion and Swavely, likely as Swavely's rival Pfeiffer had received the number two leadership position. Swavely's U.S. marketing organization
17864-546: The title of vice president for sales and marketing. In November 1982, Compaq announced their first product, the Compaq Portable , a portable IBM PC compatible personal computer . It was released in March 1983 at $ 2,995 . The Compaq Portable was one of the progenitors of today's laptop ; some called it a "suitcase computer" for its size and the look of its case. It was the second IBM PC compatible, being capable of running all software that would run on an IBM PC . It
18018-455: The top PC manufacturer in 1994, as both IBM and Apple were struggling considerably during that time. Compaq's inventory and gross margins were better than that of its rivals which enabled it to wage the price wars. Compaq had decided to make a foray into printers in 1989, and the first models were released to positive reviews in 1992. However, Pfeiffer saw that the prospects of taking on market leader Hewlett-Packard (who had 60% market share)
18172-417: The top global PC maker in 1999, which took Compaq several months to take the top spot again in 2000 before eventually being overtaken by Dell again in 2001. Struggling to keep up in the price wars against Dell, as well as with a risky acquisition of DEC , Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) for US$ 25 billion in 2002. The Compaq brand remained in use by HP for lower-end systems until 2013 when it
18326-489: The underlying organization of the machines from word lengths based on 6-bit characters to those based on 8-bit words needed to support ASCII . DEC began studies of such a machine, the PDP-X, but Ken Olsen did not support it as he could not see how it offered anything their existing 12-bit or 18-bit machines didn't. This led the leaders of the PDP-X project to leave DEC and start Data General , whose 16-bit Data General Nova
18480-467: The widely used TOPS-10 . When newer Flip Chip packaging allowed the PDP-6 to be re-implemented at a much lower cost, DEC took the opportunity to refine their 36-bit design, introducing the PDP-10 in 1968. The PDP-10 was as much a success as the PDP-6 was a commercial failure; about 700 mainframe PDP-10s were sold before production ended in 1984. The PDP-10 was widely used in university settings, and thus
18634-507: The youngest-ever firm to make the Fortune 500 . In 1985, sales reached $ 504 million. In 1987, Compaq hit the $ 1 billion revenue mark, taking the least amount of time to reach that milestone. By 1991, Compaq held the fifth place spot in the PC market with $ 3 billion in sales that year. Two key marketing executives in Compaq's early years, Jim D'Arezzo and Sparky Sparks, had come from IBM's PC Group . Other key executives responsible for
18788-426: Was a commercial success, selling 53,000 units in its first year and generating $ 111 million in sales revenue. The Compaq Portable was the first in the range of the Compaq Portable series . Compaq was able to market a legal IBM clone because IBM mostly used "off the shelf" parts for their PC . Furthermore, Microsoft had kept the right to license MS-DOS , the most popular and de facto standard operating system for
18942-441: Was a key player during the merger discussions and the most senior executive from Digital to remain with Compaq after the acquisition closed and had been touted by some as the heir-apparent to Pfeiffer. Rando's division had performed strongly as it had sales of $ 1.6 billion for the first quarter compared to $ 113 million in 1998, which met expectations and was anticipated to post accelerated and profitable growth going forward. At
19096-436: Was able to maintain a technological lead in the market place as it was the first one to come out with computers containing the next generation of each Intel processor . Under Canion's direction, Compaq sold computers only through dealers to avoid potential competition that a direct sales channel would foster, which helped foster loyalty among resellers. By giving dealers considerable leeway in pricing Compaq's offerings, either
19250-502: Was at its height. CEO Pfeiffer boldly predicted that the Microsoft/Intel "Wintel" duopoly would be replaced by "Wintelpaq". Pfeiffer also made several major and some minor acquisitions. In 1997, Compaq bought Tandem Computers , known for their NonStop server line. This acquisition instantly gave Compaq a presence in the higher end business computing market. The alliance between Compaq and SCO took advantage of this to put out
19404-517: Was considered a trusted brand, while many other IBM clones were untrusted due to being plagued by poor reliability. However, by the end of the eighties many manufacturers had improved their quality and were able to produce inexpensive PCs with off-the-shelf components, incurring none of the R&;D costs which allowed them to undercut Compaq's expensive computers. Faced with lower-cost rivals such as Dell , AST Research , and Gateway 2000 , Compaq suffered
19558-599: Was discontinued. As of 2024 , the brand is currently licensed to third parties for use on electronics in Brazil and India. Compaq was founded in February 1982 by Rod Canion , Jim Harris , and Bill Murto, three senior managers from semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments . The three of them had left due to lack of faith and loss of confidence in TI's management, and initially considered but ultimately decided against starting
19712-615: Was distributed as part of IAS. The system can be operated in one of three modes : Real-Time, Multi-User, and Timesharing. Multi-User shares the system with Real-Time tasks; Timesharing adds effective concurrent use of batch processing alongside "noncritical real-time tasks" and interactive users. Timesharing also adds Timesharing Control Primitives (TCP), described as a "mechanism for timesharing tasks to invoke and communicate with other timesharing tasks." An evaluation by TRW 's Defense and Space Systems Group for Tactical Operations Analysis Support Facility at Langley AFB VA highlighted
19866-478: Was either bought from the company that built the computer or custom-constructed for one client. However, the emerging third-party software industry disregarded the PDP-11/Professional line and concentrated on other microcomputers where distribution was easier. At DEC itself, creating better programs for the Professional was not a priority, perhaps from fear of cannibalizing the PDP-11 line. As a result,
20020-507: Was even sold in kit form as the Heathkit H11 , although it proved too expensive for Heathkit 's traditional hobbyist market. The introduction of semiconductor memory in the early 1970s, and especially dynamic RAM shortly thereafter, led to dramatic reductions in the price of memory as the effects of Moore's Law were felt. Within years, it was common to equip a machine with all the memory it could address, typically 64 KB on 16-bit machines. This led vendors to introduce new designs with
20174-623: Was eventually ported along with MS-DOS 2.0 and introduced in late 1983. Although the Rainbow generated some press, it was unsuccessful due to its high price and lack of marketing and sales support. By late 1983 IBM was outselling DEC's personal computers by more than ten to one. A further system was introduced in 1986 as the VAXmate , which included Microsoft Windows 1.0 and used VAX/VMS-based file and print servers along with integration into DEC's own DECnet -family, providing LAN/WAN connection from PC to mainframe or supermini. The VAXmate replaced
20328-636: Was followed by the even more successful VT100 and its follow-ons, making DEC one of the largest terminal vendors in the industry. This was supported by a line of inexpensive computer printers , the DECwriter line. With the VT and DECwriter series, DEC could now offer a complete top-to-bottom system from computer to all peripherals, which formerly required collecting the required devices from different suppliers. The VAX processor architecture and family of systems evolved and expanded through several generations during
20482-476: Was given US$ 20,000 to start up Compaq Europe He started up Compaq's first overseas office in Munich in 1984. By 1990, Compaq Europe was a $ 2 billion business and number two behind IBM in that region, and foreign sales contributed 54 percent of Compaq's revenues. Pfeiffer, while transplanting Compaq's U.S. strategy of dealer-only distribution to Europe, was more selective in signing up dealers than Compaq had been in
20636-731: Was initially available only to DEC employees. It was only after IBM had successfully launched the IBM PC in 1981 that DEC responded with their own systems. In 1982, DEC introduced not one, but three incompatible machines which were each tied to different proprietary architectures. The first, the DEC Professional , was based on the PDP-11/23 (and later, the 11/73) running the RSX-11M+ derived, but menu-driven, P/OS ("Professional Operating System"). This DEC machine easily outperformed
20790-493: Was justified, saying "I was burned out. I needed to leave. He [Rosen] felt I didn't have a strong sense of urgency". Two weeks after Canion's ouster, five other senior executives resigned, including remaining company founder James Harris as SVP of Engineering. These departures were motivated by an enhanced severance or early retirement, as well as an imminent demotion as their functions were to be shifted to vice presidents. Under Pfeiffer's tenure as chief executive, Compaq entered
20944-498: Was launched, effectively a PDP-8 on a chip. This was a way to allow PDP-8 software to be run even after the official end-of-life announcement for the DEC PDP-8 product line. While the PDP-5 introduced a lower-cost line, 1963's PDP-6 was intended to take DEC into the mainframe market with a 36-bit machine. However, the PDP-6 proved to be a "hard sell" with customers, as it offered few obvious advantages over similar machines from
21098-592: Was losing ground with only 4% growth for Compaq versus 7% in the market, likely due to short supplies of the LTE 386s from component shortages, rivals that undercut Compaq's prices by as much as 35%, and large customers who did not like Compaq's dealer-only policy. Pfeiffer became president and CEO of Compaq later that year, as a result of a boardroom coup led by board chairman Ben Rosen that forced co-founder Rod Canion to resign as president and CEO. Pfeiffer had joined Compaq from Texas Instruments , and established operations from scratch in both Europe and Asia. Pfeiffer
21252-488: Was named COO. While Enterprise Computing, responsible for engineering and marketing of network servers, workstations and data-storage products, reportedly accounted for one third of Compaq's revenues and likely the largest part of its profits, it was responsible for the earnings shortfall in Q1 of 1999. In addition, Rose was part of the "old guard" close to former CEO Pfeiffer, and he and other Compaq executives had been criticized at
21406-417: Was not nimble enough to adapt to the fast-changing computer industry. That year Compaq forecast demand poorly and shipped too many PCs, causing resellers to dump them at fire sale prices, and since Compaq protected resellers from heavy losses it cost them two quarters of operating profits. Pfeiffer also refused to develop a potential successor, rebuffing Rosen's suggestion to recruit a few executives to create
21560-586: Was offset by HP's extremely lucrative printer business, while IBM sold PCs at a loss but used them to lock in multi-year services contracts with customers. After Pfeiffer's resignation, the board established an office of the CEO with a triumvirate of directors; Rosen as interim CEO and vice chairmen Frank P. Doyle and Robert Ted Enloe III. They began "cleaning house", as shortly afterward many of Pfeiffer's top executives resigned or were pushed out, including John J. Rando, Earl L. Mason, and John T. Rose. Rando, senior vice president and general manager of Compaq Services,
21714-543: Was popular with employees and the culture that he built helped Compaq to attract the best talent. Instead of headquartering the company in a downtown Houston skyscraper, Canion chose a West Coast-style campus surrounded by forests, where every employee had similar offices and no-one (not even the CEO) had a reserved parking spot. At semi-annual meetings, turnout was high as any employee could ask questions to senior managers. In 1987, company co-founder Bill Murto resigned to study at
21868-557: Was promoted to general manager of the new PC products group. Earl Mason, hired from Inland Steel effective in May 1996, immediately made an impact as the new CFO. Under Mason's guidance, Compaq utilized its assets more efficiently instead of focusing just on income and profits, which increased Compaq's cash from $ 700 million to nearly $ 5 billion in one year. Additionally, Compaq's return on invested capital (after-tax operating profit divided by operating assets) doubled to 50 percent from 25 percent in that period. Compaq had been producing
22022-523: Was regarded by others as sour grapes on the part of executives who were shut out of planning that involved the acquisitions of Tandem Computers and Digital Equipment Corp. Pfeiffer reduced the size of the group working on the deal due to news leaks, saying "We cut the team down to the minimum number of people—those who would have to be directly involved, and not one person more". Robert W. Stearns, Compaq's senior vice president for business development, with responsibility for mergers and acquisitions, had opposed
22176-539: Was released in 1969 and was a huge success. The success of the Nova finally prompted DEC to take the switch seriously, and they began a crash program to introduce a 16-bit machine of their own. The new system was designed primarily by Harold McFarland, Gordon Bell , Roger Cady, and others. The project was able to leap forward in design with the arrival of Harold McFarland, who had been researching 16-bit designs at Carnegie Mellon University . One of his simpler designs became
22330-477: Was so influential that observers and its executives spoke of "Compaq compatible". InfoWorld reported that "In the [ISA market] Compaq is already IBM's equal in being seen as a safe bet", quoting a sell-side analyst describing it as "now the safe choice in personal computers". Even rival Tandy Corporation acknowledged Compaq's leadership, stating that within the Gang of Nine "when you have 10 people sit down before
22484-471: Was the 386 supplier of choice and IBM had lost some of its prestige. For the first three months after announcement, the Deskpro 386 shipped with Windows/386. This was a version of Windows 2.1 adapted for the 80386 processor. Support for the virtual 8086 mode was added by Compaq engineers. (Windows, running on top of the MS-DOS operating system, would not become a popular "operating environment" until at least
22638-404: Was the PDP-11's first disk operating system, but was soon supplanted by more capable 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
22792-454: Was the basis of many advances in computing and operating system design during the 1970s. DEC later re-branded all of the models in the 36-bit series as the "DECsystem-10", and PDP-10s are generally referred to by the model of their CPU, starting with the "KA10", soon upgraded to the "KI10" (I:Integrated circuit); then to "KL10" (L:Large-scale integration ECL logic ); also the "KS10" (S: Small form factor ). Unified product line upgrades produced
22946-535: Was the dual-processor (Z80 and 8088) Rainbow 100 , which ran the 8-bit CP/M operating system on the Z80 and the 16-bit CP/M-86 operating system on the Intel 8088 processor. It could also run a UNIX System III implementation called VENIX . Applications from standard CP/M could be re-compiled for the Rainbow, but by this time users were expecting custom-built (pre-compiled binary) applications such as Lotus 1-2-3 , which
23100-630: Was the largest hardware supplier for Windows NT. However, some 20 percent of Compaq servers went for systems that would be running the Unix operating system . This was exemplified by a strategic alliance formed in 1997 between Compaq and the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), which was known for its server Unix operating system products on Intel-architecture-based hardware. Compaq was also the largest hardware supplier for SCO's Unix products, and some 10 percent of Compaq's ProLiant servers ran SCO's UnixWare . In January 1998, Compaq
23254-477: Was to have Compaq catchup as an E-commerce competitor, and he also moved to streamline operations and reduce the indecision that plagued the company. Roger Kay, an analyst at International Data Corporation, observed that Compaq's behavior at times seemed like a personal vendetta, noting that "Eckhard has been so obsessed with staying ahead of Dell that they focused too hard on market share and stopped paying attention to profitability and liquidity. They got whacked in
23408-505: Was tough, as that would force Compaq to devote more funds and people to that project than originally budgeted. Compaq ended up selling the printer business to Xerox and took a charge of $ 50 million. In 1994, Compaq formed a joint venture with ADI Corporation , a Taiwanese manufacturer who produced the bulk of Compaq's monitors, to raise multiple factories in Mexico, Brazil, and Europe to assemble and store ADI's monitors. Compaq sold many of
23562-465: Was turned down. When the announcement was made, it was initially viewed as a master stroke as it immediately gave Compaq a 22,000 person global service operation to help corporations handle major technological purchases (by 2001 services made up over 20% of Compaq's revenues, largely due to the Digital employees inherited from the merger), in order to compete with IBM. However it was also risky merger, as
23716-441: Was used as a printer . The Soroban system was notoriously unreliable, and often replaced with a modified Friden Flexowriter , which also contained its own punched tape system. A variety of more-expensive add-ons followed, including magnetic tape systems, punched card readers and punches, and faster punched tape and printer systems. When DEC introduced the PDP-1, they also mentioned larger machines at 24, 30 and 36 bits, based on
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