DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC

onePurpose and Overview

The story of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) is fundamentally a forty-year saga encompassing the creation of a new technology, the building of a company that became the number two computer company in the United States with $14 billion in sales at its peak, the decline and ultimate sale of that company to the Compaq Corporation in 1998, and the preservation in its many alumni of the values that were the essence of the culture of that company. (The company’s official name was Digital Equipment Corporation, and its logo was “D.I.G.I.T.A.L.” or “Digital,” but common usage around the company was typically “DEC,” so we will adopt that usage throughout this book.) That culture was an almost pure model of what we can think ...