DEC made good hardware, and in its day VMS was da bomb. There are still folks out there playing with implementations of OpenVMS. I was sorry to see DEC basically run into the ground when they couldn't keep up with what was happening in the workstation and minicomputer arenas.
They did eventually buy into Unix, but like HP at the time, they appeared to have more loyalty to their own OS, (VMS for DEC, and MPE for HP), and just couldn't keep up with how fast processors were getting on the low end which would make inroads into the higher-power and much higher margin workstations and minis. MPE-V was the first OS that I really became familiar with, and I still like some of the conventions they used that fell by the wayside i.e., jobs could be written almost as if you were sitting right at a terminal running them interactively. Even today some of this functionality is missing in Unix unless you're using Expect-based scripting tools. HP was basically killed by Carly Fiona for many reasons, among which, she didn't understand the benefit to HP of their scientific instruments products or some of the other things the company did that helped them maintain a competitive technological edge. > Years on Fortune 500: 25 > Peak Fortune 500 rank: 27 (1990, 1993) > Peak revenue: $14.6 billion (1996) > Current status: Bought out The fortunes of Digital Equipment Corp., maker of commercial electronics known as minicomputers, began to decline in the 1990s. DEC was successful because its products were priced below mainframes, which were made primarily by International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM). DEC controlled the minicomputer market from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s but failed to enter the workstation and personal computer markets quickly. When DEC finally decided to get into PCs, it tried to use its own operating platform, VMS, without success. Meanwhile, companies such as Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and Sun Microsystems were able to gain market share in workstations by using UNIX operating system, which allowed for many more software applications than VMS. Meanwhile, computers from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, which were based on the Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC) blueprint and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) OS, began to dominate the PC market in the late 1980s. Between 1991 and 1996, DEC lost money every year except for one, including more than $2 billion in 1992 and 1994. After joining the Fortune 500 in 1974, the company peaked in 1993 at 27th. In just six years, it fell to 118th place before Compaq bought it out in 1998.
Not many people know this, but Most of Windows NT’s lead developers, including VMS’s chief architect, Dave Cutler, came from Digital, and their background heavily influenced Windows NT’s development.
It is popularly believed that Dave Cutler intended the initialism “WNT” as a pun on VMS, incrementing each letter by one.
OMG, wish I could edit that post and strip all the accidental copy/paste out of it! lol.