Olson didn’t kill DEC, palmer did. everytime they made money, he’d whack them with more restructuring costs. he fired his best SW engineer, who went to microsoft and wrote WNT as a followup from VMS. when he decided to design WNT on the intel platform rather than the faster, cooler Alpha that DEC had, that was the death knell.
I can’t speak for the marketing side of things. But I think there were some technical issues that DEC failed to address quickly.
As microprocessors continued to improve in the 1980s, it soon became clear that the next generation would offer performance and features equal to the best of DECs low-end minicomputer lineup.
For instance, Berkeley’s RISC and Stanford MIPS designs were aiming to introduce 32-bit designs that would outperform the fastest members of the VAX family, DEC’s cash cow.
Constrained by the huge success of their VAX/VMS products, which followed the proprietary model, the company was very late to respond to these threats. In the early 1990s, DEC found its sales faltering and its first layoffs followed. The company that created the minicomputer, a dominant networking technology, and arguably the first computers for personal use, had abandoned the “low end” market, whose dominance with the PDP-8 had built the company in a previous generation. Decisions about what to do about this threat led to infighting within the company that seriously delayed their responses.
Eventually, in 1992, DEC launched the DECchip 21064 processor, the first implementation of their Alpha instruction set architecture, initially named Alpha AXP (the “AXP” was a “non-acronym” and was later dropped).
This was a 64-bit RISC architecture (as opposed to the 32-bit CISC architecture used in the VAX) and one of the first “pure” (not an extension of an earlier 32-bit architecture) 64-bit microprocessor architectures and implementations.
The Alpha offered class-leading performance at its launch, and subsequent variants continued to do so into the 2000s. An AlphaServer SC45 supercomputer was still ranked #6 in the world in November 2004.
Alpha-based computers (the DEC AXP series, later the AlphaStation and AlphaServer series) superseded both the VAX and MIPS architecture in DEC’s product lines, and could run OpenVMS, DEC OSF/1 AXP (later, Digital Unix or Tru64 UNIX) and Microsoft’s then-new operating system, Windows NT.
In 1998, following the takeover by Compaq Computers, a decision was made that Microsoft would no longer support and develop Windows NT for the Alpha series computers, a decision that was seen as the beginning of the end for the Alpha series computers.
DEC tried to compete in the Unix market by adding POSIX-compatibility features to the VAX/VMS operating system (becoming “OpenVMS”) and by selling its own version of Unix (Ultrix on PDP-11, VAX and MIPS architectures; OSF/1 on Alpha), and began to advertise more aggressively.
However, IMHO, DEC was simply not prepared to sell into a crowded Unix market however, and the low end PC-servers running NT (based on Intel processors) took market share from Alpha-based computers. DEC’s workstation and server line never gained much popularity beyond former DEC customers.
After Compaq merged with Hewlett Packard, they announced the port of OpenVMS to the Intel Itanium architecture.
This port was accomplished using source code maintained in common within the OpenVMS Alpha source code library, with conditional and additional modules where changes specific to Itanium were required. The OpenVMS Alpha pool was chosen as the basis of the port as it was significantly more portable than the original OpenVMS VAX source code, and because the Alpha source code pool was already fully 64-bit capable.
THAT WAS THE LAST I LEARNED OF DEC’s latest and greatest product — OpenVMS. I don’t think any significant organization is buying into this initiative any longer.