DEC PDP and VAX Systems

Digital Equipment Corporation, known as DEC, built a series of computer systems known as the PDP line beginning in the late 1950s, followed by the VAX family of systems beginning in 1977. The PDP-8, introduced in 1965, was among the most successful minicomputers in history, prized for its low cost and simple instruction set that brought computing within reach of laboratories and small businesses for the first time. Its successor the PDP-11 offered a much more complete instruction set, though it was not backward compatible with the PDP-8, and became one of the most widely used minicomputer architectures of the 1970s. DEC's later VAX systems, described by the company as supermini computers, extended DEC's minicomputer architecture into 32 bit virtual memory computing and became DEC's most commercially successful product line, surpassing even the PDP-8 and PDP-11 in market impact.