Wow, you sure tripped my nostalgia trigger. I remember studying DEC PDP-5
hardware when in US Navy data systems technician school, although we were
using Univac digital trainers for hands on work. Later I serviced some PDP-8
and of course, lots of PDP-11 based systems, some painted navy grey so the
taxpayers could be charged more. Seems to me DEC was just down the road
from another giant in its time, Wang..
Doug K7ABX

"Wayne.B" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 02 Nov 2004 16:27:12 GMT, Geoff Schultz
wrote:

I worked for Digital Equipment Corp of 14 years and I can remember
marketing turning out beautiful looking brochures with technical
mistakes.
Back then I would I sworn to DEC's staying power, but now 20+ years later
we had DEC-Compaq-HP...

===============================

DEC did turn out some nice looking brochures, no question. Most of
the hardware worked reasonably well also, but the middleware software,
that was a disaster. My company spent about a kazillion $$$s trying
to make a product work that was ironically called the "Reliable
Transaction Router" (RTR). In the end I think Digital was squeezed
off from below by increasingly powerful and inexpensive PCs. When
they tried to take the high end with the 64 bit Alpha, they were over
their heads and up against well entrenched competition.