DECstation
DECstation was the name of various series of computer systems from the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC for short). These can be grouped into three areas. The first of these was a word-only system released in 1978 . The second and third areas were brought onto the market in 1989 and included workstations with MIPS - RISC processors (the best known of the three areas) as well as a whole range of IBM PC-compatible computers .
DECstation 78
The first computer system called DECstation was a word processing system based on the PDP-8 and built into a VT52 terminal. It was also known as the VT78 .
DECstation RISC workstations
Towards the end of the 1980s, DEC tried to cover almost every area in the computer industry and since the company had not yet had any RISC-based computers in its portfolio, this was on the one hand in the workstation area through the DECstations, in the server area through new systems with the name DECsystem, which both worked with MIPS processors and are essentially divided into the following three series:
- DECstation 3100 and DECstation 2100
- Personal DECstation 5000 series
- DECstation 5000 Model 100 and 200
These systems were quite successful commercially and are therefore much better known than the other two areas, so that with DECstation these systems are usually meant. In contrast to the predecessor system VAX and the successor Alpha , all systems were delivered exclusively with DEC's own BSD- based operating system Ultrix . Since the hardware was quite robust, some systems are still running today. Because the operation with Ultrix is no longer up to date, you can also operate it with NetBSD or Linux .
DECstation PCs
At the same time as the RISC workstations, DEC also brought PC-compatible systems for operation with MS-DOS onto the market, which can be divided into three series, each with 3-digit type designations. The first digit stood for the respective generation of the corresponding Intel processors, i.e. 2xx with 80286 , 3xx with 80386 and 4xx with 80486 processors.