Just How Big a Difference is there Between Digital and Other Personal Computer Manufacturers?

This advert is primarily worth including because it has a nice picture of the Grand Canyon in the background. 

It's not for any particular machine, rather it's to advertise DEC as safe, reliable company to buy gear from and to say just how much better DEC/Digital are than anyone else in the whole world.

The machine perched on the edge of the yawning chasm looks like it might be the <a href="/archives/computers/phot_001">DEC Rainbow 100</a> - part VT-220 terminal, part Z80 and part Intel 8088 machine. 

DEC's terminals had been around for a while - its first, the VT100, had come out back in 1978 - and the company's terminal protocols are still around today. Many terminal emulators still come with VT-220 and VT-100 as options.

Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC (which traded as Digital), was primarily a minicomputer company, and had been famous for its range of PDP machines such as the PDP-8. It never quite escaped its history and didn't survive once the performance of microcomputers had caught up to - and then exceeded - its minicomputers. 

DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998, which was in turn merged in to Hewlett-Packard in May 2002[source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation]

