The History of Computer Viruses

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we’re able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC.

DEC was based in Maynard Massachusetts and a major player in the computer industry from the 1950s through the 1990s. They made computers, software, and things that hooked into computers. My first real computer was a DEC Alpha. And it would be over a decade before I used 64-bit technology again.

DEC was started in 1957 by Ken Olsen, Stan Olsen, and Harlan Anderson of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory using a $70,000 loan because they could sell smaller machines than the big mainframes to users where output and realtime operation were more important than performance. Technology was changing so fast and there were so few standards for computers that investors avoided them. So they decided to first ship modules, or transistors that could be put on circuit boards and then ship systems. They were given funds and spent the next few years building a module business to fund a computer business.

IBM was always focused on big customers. In the 1960s, this gave little DEC the chance to hit the smaller customers with their PDP-8, the first successful mini-computer, at the time setting customers back around $18,500. The “Straight-8” as it was known was designed by Edson de Castro and was about the size of a refrigerator, weighing in at 250 pounds. This was the first time a company could get a computer for less than $20k and DEC sold over 300,000 of them! The next year came the 8/s. No, that’s not an iPhone model. It only set customers back $10k. Just imagine the sales team shows up at your company talking about the discrete transistors, the transistor-transistor logic, or TTL. And it wouldn’t bankrupt you like that IBM. The sales pitch writes itself. Sign me up!

What really sold these though, was the value engineering. They were simpler. Sure, programming was a little harder, and more code. Sure, sometimes that caused the code to overflow the memory. But at the cost savings, you could hire another programmer! The rise of the compiler kinda’ made that a negligible issue anyway. The CPU had only four 12-bit registers. But it could run programs using the FORTRAN compiler anruntime, or DECs FOCAL interpreter. Or later you could use PAL-III Assembly, BASIC, or DIBOL.

DEC also did a good job of energizing their user base. The Digital Equipment Corporation User Society was created in 1961 by Edward Fredkin and was subsidized by DEC. Here users could trade source code and documentation, with two DECUS US symposia per year - and there people would actually trade code and later tapes. It would later merge with HP and other groups during the merger era and is alive today as the Connect User Group Community, with over 70,000 members! It is still independent today. The User Society was an important aspect of the rise of DEC and of the development of technology and software for mini computers. The feeling of togetherness through mutual support helped keep the costs of vendor support down while also making people feel like they weren’t alone in the world. It’s also important as part of the history of free software, something we’ll talk about in more depth in a later episode.

The PDP continued to gain in popularity until 1977, when the VAX came along. The VAX brought with it the virtual address extension for which it derives its name. This was really the advent of on-demand paged virtual memory, although that had been initially adopted by Prime Computer without the same level of commercial success. This was a true 32-bit CISC, or Complex Instruction Set Computer. It ran Digital’s VAX/VMS which would later be called OpenVMS; although some would run BSD on it, which maintained VAX support until 2016. This thing set standards in 1970s computing. You know Millions of instructions per second (MIPS) - the VAX was the benchmark. The performance was on par with the IBM System/360.

The team at DEC was iterating through chips at a fast rate. Over the next 20 years, they got so good that Soviet engineers bought them just to try and reverse engineer the chips. In fact it got to the point that “when you care enough to steal the very best” was etched into microprocessor die. DEC sold another 400,000 of the VAX. They must have felt on top of the world when they took the #2 computer company spot! DEC was the first computer company with a website, launching dec.com in 85.

The DEC Western Research Library started to build a RISC chip called Titan in 1982, meant to run Unix. Alan Kotok and Dave Orbits started designing a 64-bit chip to run VMS (maybe to run Spacewar faster). Two other chips, HR-32 and CASCADE were being designed in 1984. And Prism began in 1985. With all of these independent development efforts, tu...