DEC Systems Research Center

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Former location of DEC SRC in Palo Alto, CA.

The Systems Research Center (SRC) was a research laboratory created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1984, in Palo Alto, California.

DEC SRC was founded by a group of computer scientists, led by Robert Taylor, who left the Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) of Xerox PARC after an internal power struggle. SRC survived the takeover of DEC by Compaq in 1998. When Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2002, SRC was merged with other corporate research labs.

After Taylor's retirement, the lab was directed by Roy Levin and then by Lyle Ramshaw.

Some of the important developments made at SRC include the Modula-3 programming language; the snoopy cache, used in the first multiprocessor workstation, the Firefly, built from MicroVAX-2 CMOS chips; the first multi-threaded Unix system, Taos; the first User Interface editor; the first networked Window System, Trestle.