Posted on 02/09/2011 7:25:47 AM PST by SeekAndFind
May you always climb the Slope of Englightenment...:)
Vertical isn’t what killed DEC. Olsen’s ego and autocratic direction of DEC killed it. DEC had great products up until the end of their VAX cycle, but they never evolved beyond the VAX. DEC completely missed the boat on PCs, and while DECnet was great in its day, DEC only reluctantly embraced TCP/IP, and when they did, they came out with over-priced and proprietary networking products, and Cisco kicked their ass.
DEC never developed a successor to the VAX, and Sun, SGI, and others kicked their ass. DEC devolved into a dinosaur in every way. The death blow was when DEC hired their legions of technically ignorant sales folks to harass their customers to buy obsolete products, using DEC’s proprietary “VUPS” performance measure for their failing VAX line, because the industry-standard MIPS showed just how pathetic the VAXen were when compared to the new minicomputers developed by SUN, SGI, and the rest.
DEC also completely refused to listen to their customers, presumably because Olsen didn’t want to hear what they had to say. All of their technologically-savy customers told them that RISC, TCP/IP networking, UNIX, and PCs were the technologies of the future and that the ship they were traveling on was soon going to be capsized by the tsunami of new technologies unless they got with the program. But all we heard back from DEC was the sound of chirping crickets.
It was a bit sad when DEC died, because they started out so great. But in the end, DEC died in the bed Olsen made for them, and they deserved it.
My town is the home of DEC...I was chosen to take part as a jet mechanic, and it was my first introduction to a real mainframe computer, a PDP-11. Lots of blinken lights and address switches, but most surreal to me was the paper tape.
I did a bit of consulting work for DEC and have gotten lost in the mill a few times. Once was because I stopped to get a drink at a drinking fountain; when I lifted my head, I had forgetten which way I was going. In addition to be amazing, the place was a maze.
PDP-11 was a mini, not a mainframe. It had nothing on real mainframes. I once dealt with a Burroughs B6800. That machine had lots of blinkenlights. The CPU alone was larger than most PDP-11 systems.
My brush with the A-7 program was writing an RT-11 device driver for mylar tape. Just like paper tape, only made of mylar.
DEC never developed a successor to the VAX...
So "Alpha" doesn't ring a bell?
I really liked KO, very approachable for who he was and down to earth. He was certainly an engineers engineer and never forgot what is was to be one despite all his years in the board room. LOL, I enjoyed those times when he made his top managers go thru the hands-on the field engineers went thru every day. It brought some sense of reality to some of the products.
No, he just wasn't as prescient as he could have been.
I heard the story when I was in school in the late 1970s.
Thanks for the correction...:)
Mylar tape? Now, THAT’S high tech...
Agreed. Apple does quite well in it's own proprietary world.
No, she went out to buy one!
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