Talk:DECstation

Photo
We might want to replace the picture as it is very grainy. 66.191.19.217 15:16, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Trade-in from Rainbows
Not sure if this is worthy of including in the article, but, just in case someone's interested, here's a USEnet article describing a trade-in program DEC offered in 1989 for Rainbow owners to "move to industry-standard personal computers":

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.dec.micro/msg/1cc8569632ef20c7

--NapoliRoma (talk) 14:39, 26 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Considering that DECstations are ARC-compatible, I would assume that they were more "industry-standard" than the x86-based, but non-IBM-compatible Rainbow. I do intend to cover this at a eventually. Rilak (talk) 09:13, 28 July 2008 (UTC)


 * OK, dumb mistake, the link was referring to x86-based DECstations. Please disregard previous comment. This is what happens when you've spent a while researching and editing without taking any breaks. Rilak (talk) 09:18, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

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Commentary on "DECstation RISC workstations: History"
The second paragraph of this section ends with the statement "At the time DEC was mostly known for their CISC systems including the successful PDP and VAX lines.", where "VAX" is a link to the appropriate article. What I would like to point out is that there is no such thing as "the PDP line" when speaking of computers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and that some of the systems named PDP-n (n = defined as a small integer ≤ 16) meet many of the RISC definitions. Prior to the VAX family, DEC produced computer systems architectures based on word sizes of 18 (PDP-1, PDP-4/7/9/15 family), 12 (PDP-5, PDP-8 family), 36 (PDP-6/10 family), and 16 (PDP-11 family) bits. The 12-bit systems had no memory-to-memory instructions in a repertoire of 8 opcodes, only accumulator (register) load-store, though subroutine calls modified memory by storing the return address in the first word of the called routine. The 36-bit instruction set did allow operations directly on memory, but did not require their use; the most common subroutine call mechanisms were stack based. I realize that this may seem esoteric, but many people not familiar with the different product lines, including professionals in the computer industry, have been misled by the DEC naming convention prior to 1971 (when later PDP-10 systems were called the DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20) into believing that every PDP-n system was architecturally related to every other PDP-n system. Does anyone have a suggestion for a short edit (I'm terribly longwinded on this topic) to disambiguate this page?

Rmaldersoniii (talk) 19:38, 10 October 2016 (UTC)


 * Fixed, changed to PDP-11 specifically. The sentence does say “include”, so it’s not necessary to list every PDP family member. Vt320 (talk) 09:20, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

The reality of how the decstation 3100 came to be
The article is wrong as I was there and majorly responsible for how it happened. The seems to be written by someone who knew a bit about the HW but nothing about the SW nor how the project actually got traction. I did the SW and that was the reason it even came to be. Companies don't build HW for fun (well not too much) and it needed a SW story to get funded. I can tell that story as I was the SW Architect for the Decstation 3100 and I wrote the bulk of the code (like 90%) and I can tell you the true story here. As I read the article it does seem that you want to know the truth about how this came about and I can elaborate a whole bunch.

The short paragraph I had added previously is just a tiny synopsis of the project about the beginnings of the SW. And I specifically detest the fact that the SW is totally ignored in this article. To repeat, DEC would never have built the machine without the SW I did. I should be allowed to explain the full story of what happened and how it came about. I can write many pages if you would allow it. I don't know why you wouldn't want to hear the truth about how it happened.

Drrr9999 (talk) 20:19, 29 April 2021 (UTC)Drrr9999


 * Your addition had at least two problems:
 * 1) It is written in the first person, Wiki is not intended for autobiographical material
 * 2) It does not have citations to external sources.
 * If you want to add your story, please write it in a netural manner, and provide references. No one is trying to supress the truth here. Vt320 (talk) 21:19, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

Modifications of Quoted Text
I just wanted to point out that in this edit, some quoted text was changed from "DEC/OSF/1" to "OSF/1". Although no other source that I have seen uses the "DEC/OSF/1" naming, I am not convinced it is appropriate to change what is effectively a quotation to read something that wasn't originally written. I don't know what the Wikipedia policy is on editing quotations, but I would be surprised if it were favourable without adopting existing conventions for elision or embellishment. Also, I think that the obscure form of the name communicates something about the perspective of the author and publication, also indicating that the DEC product was a flavour of a more generic product. --PaulBoddie (talk) 13:59, 16 January 2022 (UTC)