DIGITAL establishes Internet connectivity. Initial e-mail, FTP archive and USENET news hub are established.

DIGITAL launches its first multivendor customer service program, designed to provide customers -- from small businesses to Fortune 500 organizations -- with a full range of service and support for both DIGITAL and non-DIGITAL products.

May:
DIGITAL announces VAXclusters.

VAXclusters tied VAX processors together in a loose processor coupling that allowed VAX computers to operate as a single system, extending the characteristics of VAX to high capacity and high availability applications.

May:
DIGITAL ships the HSC50 controller, its first intelligent disk subsystem.

The HSC50 contained local intelligence capable of managing the physical activity of the drives, optimizing subsystem throughput, detecting and correcting physical errors, and performing local functions such as diagnostic execution without host intervention.

August:
DIGITAL ships the J-11 chip in the LSI-11/73 board.

The J-11 chip was DIGITAL's last 16-bit microprocessor and the first executed in CMOS technology. The LSI-11/73, shown here, brought PDP-11/70 functionality to a microcomputer on the Q-Bus by offering PDP-11/70 memory management, an 8K byte cache and FP11 floating point operations.

October:
DIGITAL starts the industry's first remote delivery of software updates from its Colorado Springs facility.

October:
DECnet Phase IV is announced.

DECnet Phase IV significantly increased the number of nodes possible in a network from hundreds to many thousands. Phase IV began the migration from old point-to-point networks to the new multi-point Ethernet. Concepts developed in DECnet architecture were incorporated in international standards.

December:
DECtalk, a text-to-speech system that allows computers to talk, is announced.

DECtalk was a new type of output device, it accepted ASCII text from an RS232C terminal port and spoke the text rather than printing it. It was the first such device offered by any major computer manufacturer. Entertainer Stevie Wonder introduced DECtalk at the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston.