What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2101

And what everyone else is saying is: So what. DEC was not in the business of selling microproccesors. Neither did they sell gin, automobiles nor shoes.

CAT phototypesetters. Dover laser printers. Siemens Century. San Francisco BART.

I do not imply that, I state it outright. A larger *system* does not mean *computer*.

During their salad days, DEC made their money selling small computers that were used to control larger things.

I think that is the point BAH has been making all along: Through powerfully bad decisions, the entire business that was DEC's raison d'etre was thrown out the window.

By the time the Alpha came out DEC had long abandoned their core customers leaving nothing but Palmer's (cover your eyes, Barbara) Digital

To the credit of Digital's R&D team, Alpha was the leader of the pack in terms of raw compute power. Sysadmins wanted the I-O performance of Sun with the integer performance of Alpha, the floating point of Power, the chrome and shiny bits from SGI and the price from Wintel.

deletia

Well, Digital became insignificant before they started making wintel hardware, and it strongly suspect they were never a major player in that arena. It was so far afield from what their bread-and-butter had been for forty years, that maybe the *would* have been better off going into gin or real-estate.

Well, there you have it: If you want to play in some new sandbox - whether it's LEO-based telephones or desktop commodity hardware, it is a stupid idea to abandon your core business.

Well, that's the part that is hard to define. In many ways, DEC (not Digital) was an engineering support company - they didn't make the nuclear power plant, they made the nuclear power plant safer.

The DEC of 1970 understood that to sell your 'stuff' you had to help your potential customers put your stuff into *their* stuff; In many ways, it was the explosion of computers-qua-computers that was their undoing.

That may be -- but shifting your focus from systems to chips is a major change, and the organization that made DEC great (and kept Digital holding on for over a decade) may not have adapted to that different market any better than they adapted to the wintel market.

It took the management several tries to dissolution via the "bet the entire company on unproven thing 'x'" gambit. Who can say with certainty that leaving systems for silicon would turn out any better or worse?

Maybe DEC should have abandoned the LSG in 1977 and gone into microcontrollers. Maybe, maybe, maybe -- we can not know what would have saved them, or if there was even anything there worth saving.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Computer software consists of only two components: ones and zeros, in roughly equal proportions. All that is required is to sort them into the correct order.