Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was a United States manufacturer best known for designing a new family of low-priced minicomputers that were created for use in scientific laboratories and research organizations. At its apex in 1990, Digital employed over 120,000 people internationally, with revenues of more than $14 billion.

Digital was founded in 1957 by Kenneth Olsen (1926- ) and Harlan Anderson, graduates in electronics engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). An article in the business magazine Fortune that claimed few companies were making money selling computers was their initial motivation. The two men thought that selling computers could be a profitable venture, and so a business plan was developed in order to attract investors to their company for the purpose of manufacturing electronic "modules." Their proposal was based on the idea of creating a family of high-performance, low-cost computers that could combine and analyze data...