Digital Equipment Corporation: A Blast from the Past

The other day, I was talking to my son Jake about my 30-year career as a marketing consultant for tech giants: IBM, H-P, Motorola, Fujitsi, Sony, Western Digital, Philips Electronics, and DEC, to name a few.

“DEC?” Jake asked.  “What’s that?”

I explained the now-foreign IT world in which Digital Equipment Corporation made mid-sized computers called minicomputers, and that I had performed 26 different marketing projects for them, here and all over Europe, promoting their hardware and the application software that ran on it to large corporate end-users.

“What happened to them?”

I described how the PC revolution of the early 1980’s began to put the bite on DEC, who minicomputers were replaced by these much smaller computers, networked with wires, as this was long before WiFi.  DEC never got on board with all this, though the handwriting was on the wall for the entire world to see.  They shriveled up, and were finally subsumed by H-P.  In other words, fashions changed, but they didn’t.

Speaking of fashion, these guys are DEC engineers of the 1970s, working on a machine called a PDP-11.  Hopefully, they’re not still wearing pants like the guy’s in the foreground, but considering it’s DEC, one never knows.