DEC made a big impact on me when I was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, and even through the mid 2000s; from learning C on eagle.wesleyan.edu (VAX/VMS)

DEC made a big impact on me when I was growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, and even through the mid 2000s; from learning C on eagle.wesleyan.edu (VAX/VMS) to writing my undergrad thesis C++ on zoltar.ucsc.edu (alpha running dec UNIX) to socrates.cgl.ucsf.edu (alpha cluster running TruCluster) and later geneland.gene.com (alpha cluster running trucluster). The DECs were uniformly excellent, with great CPU and memory performance, along with good compilers and OS (IMHO TruCluster is the last of the great UNICES). I never bought one myself, too expensive. Since then I've gone back and learned a lot of history about DEC, specifically how the series of PDPs were made. They had a huge impact on scientific analysis, making high speed experimental data collection and complex realtime logic relatively easy to implement.