I shall reveal my age. I was a working AN/FSQ7 programmer in Group 67 at Lincoln Labs when KO took off on his crazy venture to that mill in Maynard. I did not know Ken at the time as he was in Group 64 if my memory serves me correctly. DEC's first products were 'logic boards'. Those were the days of 'wire wrap' breadboarding. Ken's cards built with itty bitty new fangled transistor things slipped securely into a standard wire wrap board. I do not remember any specific cards, but I know they consisted of multiple individual NAND and NOR gates and probably a couple of FLIP FLOPs.
From that came the PDP-1 which I never saw. My memory focuses on the PDP-8 which was popular - so to speak. To put this in perspective the US had just deployed the SAGE air defense computers all around the country to detect and intercept Russian atomic bomb carrying jet airplanes. The SAGE computers used water cooled vacuum tube technology.
I suggest, if you can find a library (remember them?), that is open check out "DEC is Dead, Long LIve DEC" The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation by Edgar Schein. (Is it available on NOOK?). My read of that book was that DEC was fine and healthy so long as it's engineers were producing products the customers did not know they needed, ie DEC was never consumer driven. (This is part of why KO was so beloved.) I was a TCP/IP aware person when I went to work for DEC in 1985. Inside those DEC walls DECnet was not only everything, it was the only thing. Ken Jones