[Info-vax] DEC Large Systems

[Aron Insinga]

By way of introduction, my first job out of college was at DEC in the Large Systems Diagnostics Group.  I now work at VSI in the compiler group.

FWIW:

I was told that the name was changed from PDP-10 to DECsystem-10 when they started selling into the data processing market, and then the capitalization changed for the DECSYSTEM-20 to avoid/settle a trademark conflict.

Gordon Bell once mentioned that the PDP-11 word length was chosen for them to be a multiple of 8 bits by IBM marketing, which had convinced the world that memory is sold in quantities of 8-bit bytes.  That started the path away from n*6-bit words to n*8-bit words.

I've heard that he wanted Bell Labs to port the then-new Unix operating system from the PDP-11 to the PDP-10, but their response was that they weren't interested in a 1964 architecture.

He describes the origin of the VAX product strategy here:
https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/bell.htm#VAX%20Strategy

He has a lot more retrospection here:
https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/Digital/Minicomputers_The_DEC_aka_Digital_Story.ppt