The first in DEC's series of miniaturised PDP-8 computers based on the Intersil 6120 microprocessor and dedicated to wordprocessing. The DECmate was DEC's original competition for the IBM PC.

The DECmate I was introduced in 1980 as the successor to the WT78. The processor ran at 10 MHz, and was housed in a VT100 CRT terminal. It was a very limted model, no EAE option was available, memory was 32 Kwords. It used the RX02 8" dual floppy drive. Options were the DP278-A and -B communication ports and RL278: 1 to 4 RL02 cartridge disk drives.

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