The early days of DirecTV were actually a partnership between Hughes Electronics, USSB, Thompson Consumer Electronics (RCA), and DIGITAL. Hughes provided the s

The early days of DirecTV were actually a partnership between Hughes Electronics, USSB, Thompson Consumer Electronics (RCA), and DIGITAL. Hughes provided the satellite tech and some FCC licenses, USSB some FCC licenses, Thompson built the set top boxes, and DIGITAL ran all of the technology. Until DirecTV started to in-source their own IT operations in the mid-2000s, all of the systems to run the business were in DIGITAL facilities (the same campus where StorageWorks R&D and early manufacturing was done) in Colorado Springs. To this day, all those Colorado Springs hosted systems running Billing, Account Management and CRM are in the dec.com domain. HP-UX has replaced most of the OSF/1 stuff by the time I joined in 2011, but OpenVMS was just being upgraded from Alpha to Itanium boxes. I doubt it will survive to make the transition to x86, but it it still the backend for most billing and account management via STMS. Some of the billing was migrated to AT&T systems, but we halted that project because it substantially increased customer churn just migrating them from STMS to Enabler and changing the bill format, even if amounts didn't change. I guess it reminded folks that AT&T was in charge now.