Ha! I remember the DEC Rainbow, their attempt at an IBM PC competitor. They didn’t sell the OS with a diskette formatting utility, the idea being you would have to buy pre-formatted diskettes from DEC. Yeah, that attempt at vendor lock-in worked real well for them . . .
Yeah, the Rainbow - the proprietary PC for everyone. The model above that was geared for administrative stuff and the top model, the Pro, was actually advertised on TV. The ad as I remember showed a doctor and the flavor was something like “if you are as smart and wealthy as this doctor, you should have a DEC Pro PC.” Yup, the whole line deserved to bomb. The Pro model was such a bad seller that they were given to all the finance admins just to use Lotus 1-2-3.
My first PC was a DEC desktop model with Windows 3.1. It was a real PC and lasted until I got a Win98 machine. That was after DEC had completely crumbled.