The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s. The VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space.
As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially with the introduction of RISC-based workstation machines, the performance niche of the minicomputer was rapidly eroded. After several attempts to enter the workstation and file server market, the DEC Alpha product line began to make successful inroads in the mid-1990s.