What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2105

Certainly not reading for comprehension. I can accept that Digital *did* attempt to sell at the chip level, but I will continue to buttert: It was not their main business.

Only if you have a secret meaning for the phrase "building block" that nobody else uses.

But that was never the context that DEC-Digital lived in.

The point I was trying to make was: DEC *defined* several of the markets for minicomputers - all of which were supplanted by other technologies, some that Digital fared better in than others.

All that can be certainly stated was: Digital fared poorly in responding to market changes - perhaps unavoidably. It seems entirely acedemic to imagine how Digital might have captured the workstation market.

Digital was nearly psychotic when it came to their relationship with Unix, and as unbearable as Unix interoperability was ( here include everything MRC has ever written ) it was better than ZERO, which is what you had if you went with Digital's home-grown operating systems.

We can *now* say, that without drinking the AT&T Kool-aid, Digital could not have possibly taken a lead in that market. Their reluctance to do that was not *entirely* the NIH atbreastude -- it was a failure to see a decade of software development as a sunk cost in 1987.

No, they couldn't. So, they had to adapt or die. Obviously we know which outcome came to pbutt.

Providing computing hardware for people building other things and helping those customers put that hardware into their things.

I know that I never questioned that IBM would survive and prosper. Their core value has always been: Our success is based on our customers' success. I think part of their rebirth was the collective mind of the IT (nee DP) departments realizing that: Acquisition cost is the tiniest sliver of an insignificant fraction of the cost-benefit equation for their computer systems.

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 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.