Talk:DECstation

Computing High‑importance

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.ComputingWikipedia:WikiProject ComputingTemplate:WikiProject ComputingComputing articles
High	This article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.

Tip: Anchors are case-sensitive in most browsers.

This article links to one or more target anchors that no longer exist.

[[Free software#Operating systems|free operating systems]]

Please help fix the broken anchors. You can remove this template after fixing the problems. | Reporting errors

Photo

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

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

Blacklisted Links Found on the Main Page

Cyberbot II has detected that page contains external links that have either been globally or locally blacklisted. Links tend to be blacklisted because they have a history of being spammed, or are highly innappropriate for Wikipedia. This, however, doesn't necessarily mean it's spam, or not a good link. If the link is a good link, you may wish to request whitelisting by going to the request page for whitelisting. If you feel the link being caught by the blacklist is a false positive, or no longer needed on the blacklist, you may request the regex be removed or altered at the blacklist request page. If the link is blacklisted globally and you feel the above applies you may request to whitelist it using the before mentioned request page, or request it's removal, or alteration, at the request page on meta. When requesting whitelisting, be sure to supply the link to be whitelisted and wrap the link in nowiki tags. The whitelisting process can take its time so once a request has been filled out, you may set the invisible parameter on the tag to true. Please be aware that the bot will replace removed tags, and will remove misplaced tags regularly.

Below is a list of links that were found on the main page:

http://www.cbronline.com/news/dec_launches_decstation_family_of_ms_dos_desktop_computers
Triggered by \bcbronline\.com\b on the local blacklist

If you would like me to provide more information on the talk page, contact User:Cyberpower678 and ask him to program me with more info.

From your friendly hard working bot.—cyberbot II ^Notify_Online 15:54, 8 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved This issue has been resolved, and I have therefore removed the tag, if not already done. No further action is necessary.—cyberbot II ^Notify_Online 00:12, 4 March 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Resolved This issue has been resolved, and I have therefore removed the tag, if not already done. No further action is necessary.—^{cyberbot II}_{Talk to my owner:Online} 00:02, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Blacklisted Links Found on DECstation

Cyberbot II has detected links on DECstation which have been added to the blacklist, either globally or locally. Links tend to be blacklisted because they have a history of being spammed or are highly inappropriate for Wikipedia. The addition will be logged at one of these locations: local or global If you believe the specific link should be exempt from the blacklist, you may request that it is white-listed. Alternatively, you may request that the link is removed from or altered on the blacklist locally or globally. When requesting whitelisting, be sure to supply the link to be whitelisted and wrap the link in nowiki tags. Please do not remove the tag until the issue is resolved. You may set the invisible parameter to "true" whilst requests to white-list are being processed. Should you require any help with this process, please ask at the help desk.

Below is a list of links that were found on the main page:

http://www.cbronline.com/news/dec_launches_decstation_family_of_ms_dos_desktop_computers
Triggered by \bcbronline\.com\b on the local blacklist

If you would like me to provide more information on the talk page, contact User:Cyberpower678 and ask him to program me with more info.

From your friendly hard working bot.—^{cyberbot II}_{Talk to my owner:Online} 01:11, 23 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]

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[reply]

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)[reply]

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)[reply]