Digital Equipment Company moved into the big time when it invented the minicomputer, back in the early 1960's. The legendary PDP 8 wasn't much of a computer, only 12 bits wide, the largest number it could handle was only 4096, not much. And it could only address 4096b words of magnetic core memory, RAM had not been invented yet. But it was a computer, it was small compared to the only other computers available that year, namely mainframes costing in the millions and filling an entire room.
The PDP8 only cost $8000 (1960 dollars) and was smart enough to do a fair number of things. A whole bunch of automatic test sets were built, with a PDP8 built in and running the show. So many were sold that DEC became rich and famous. All looked well until the micro processor came on the scene in the early 1970's. One of my first projects coming out of engineering school was to design a microprocessor board to run a test set. My board had plenty of punch and only cost $200, parts. That pretty much killed the $8000 PDP8 for that role.
DEC recovered, they juiced up their minicomputer and sold it for timesharing. A PDP11-35 could support a couple of dozen timesharing terminals, enough to run a small company. The later PDP11-70 and the VAX were even stronger. And the timesharing rig, with disk drives and mag tapes might cost $100,000. Still cheap compared to a mainframe. This kept DEC going thru the 1980's.
Then the desktop computers appeared. The IBM PCs, and the Compaqs. These sold for $3000 or so, and were every bit as good as the the DEC minicomputers, and they were cheap enough for every engineer to have one for his very own.
And that was the end of DEC. Compaq bought them up, and then HP bought Compaq, and now there is hardly a trace of DEC left.
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