Digital Equipment Corporation - Reflective Statement

In the tutorial 5, we have discussed the Digital Equipment Corporation. It is a major prominence in the computer industry in 20th century. The product lines of DEC are greatly diversified. Apart from being the vendor of computer systems, it also created some need products such as minicomputer and Alpha systems which target on the users doing different specific tasks.

 Its positive influence on the information technology can be divided into three parts :
Firstly, the Digital Equipment Corporation has indirectly enhanced the popularize of information technology and make the electronic products more affordable to the public. One point that we discussed in the class is that at its peak in the late 1980s, Digital had $14 billion in sales. It has sold a large variety range of electronic products, including computers, software and peripherals. Therefore, during this period, the electronic devices have transformed from ‘’luxury goods ’’ to ‘’necessity goods’’.

Secondly, the interactive operating systems, such as OS-8, TOPS-10 were widely applied to its products. Because of the extensiveness of using different operating systems, it has inspired a generation of programmers and software developers to further improve the operating systems of computers. As a result, some of the advanced operating systems are based on these systems and they are used in control and monitor factories, transportations systems or even nuclear plants nowadays.

Not to mention, Digital Equipment Corporation has also invented a lots of new products and technology, its product serve a variety of applications, such as scientific analysis, industrial control, time-sharing, commercial data processing, graphic arts, word processing, office automation, health care, instrumentation, engineering and simulation. The application of its technology has widely covered various kinds of industries. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the related technologies and make them more and more mature.

For the laboratories and research institutions, the company has created a new line of low-cost computers known as minicomputers and also digital laboratory module. They are consist of electronic component and germanium transistor mounted on a circuit board and packaged in an aluminium case. The use of newly invented germanium transistors rather than old vaccum triode make it more reliable and compact for laboratory use.

As for different working environments, the company has invented multiple storage technologies. These technologies were the forerunner to architectures such as Network of Workstations which are used for massively cooperative tasks such as web-searches and drug research. And also for the PDP family, it acted as a programmable general-purpose computer and was used in the time-sharing operating system. With these new technologies, employees has changed the way of how do they search for different information?