Editing Minicomputer (section)

===Industrial impact and heritage===
A variety of companies emerged that built [[turnkey]] systems around minicomputers with specialized software and, in many cases, custom peripherals that addressed specialized problems such as [[computer-aided design]], [[computer-aided manufacturing]], [[process control]], [[manufacturing resource planning]], and so on. Many if not most minicomputers were sold through these [[original equipment manufacturer]]s and [[value-added reseller]]s.

Several pioneering computer companies first built minicomputers, such as [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]], [[Data General]], and [[Hewlett-Packard|Hewlett-Packard (HP)]] (who now refers to its [[HP3000]] minicomputers as "servers" rather than "minicomputers"). And although today's PCs and servers are clearly microcomputers physically, architecturally their CPUs and operating systems have developed largely by integrating features from minicomputers.{{citation_needed|date=January 2016}}

In the software context, the relatively simple OSs for early microcomputers were usually inspired by minicomputer OSs (such as [[CP/M]]'s similarity to Digital's single user [[OS/8]] and [[RT-11]] and multi-user [[RSTS/E|RSTS]] time-sharing system). Also, the multiuser OSs of today are often either inspired by, or directly descended from, minicomputer OSs.{{citation_needed|date=January 2016}} [[Unix]] was originally a minicomputer OS, while the [[Architecture of Windows NT|Windows NT kernel]], the foundation for all current versions of [[Microsoft Windows]], borrowed design ideas liberally from [[OpenVMS|VMS]]. Many of the first generation of PC programmers were educated on minicomputer systems.<ref>{{cite web
|title=History of Computers in Education
|url=https://www.csulb.edu/~murdock/histofcs.html}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |title=History of Computer Graphics: Dlr Associates Series
|url=https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1456751158  |isbn=978-1456751159
|author=Dan Ryan  |date=2011| publisher=Author House }}</ref>