And their one-time competitor Data General! Somewhere in my archives I have a copy of Tracy Kidder's very good book, "The Soul of a New Machine" (1980), about the development of the DG Eclipse! DG went from 1968 to 1999, while DEC, the former company of DG's founders lived from 1957 to 1998. That niche of mini-mainframes and distributed processing just got squeezed into nothingness.
I worked in Data Storage at DEC and we were still building rack mount 9 inch drives when cheaper 5.25” drives were introduced (and later 3.5” drives; the standard now).
This was in the early 90s. DEC survived another 6/7 years but it was clear that management were in denial.
Now for a little over $100 you can buy a drive that is 200x the capacity of the fully loaded rack mount storage cabinet that we were working on.
“The Soul of a New Machine” a very good read!
You may also like “Show Stopper!”: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
G. Pascal Zachary, Author
http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-935671-5