The single best x86 computer I've ever used was a Dec Pentium 90...updated eventually to a Pentium II-300. Dec hardware was stupendous. Other systems were (obviously) faster and smaller and probably cooler and more power efficient, but their daughter card implimention of a CPU/RAM upgrade came from their obvious expertise in the Server/Scientific Workstation market with non x-86 architectures.
>As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.
@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.
Killed by Ken Olson? That doesn't really make sense? They still had the PC division in like 1994 long after Ken was gone? Or am I getting the timeline wrong? Maybe just slowed it.
I haven't yet listened to those Oral histories, but thanks for pointing out another that's focused on DEC.
Love those oral histories. I wish sometimes they were longer and asked some more in detail question about certain things. But I guess you can't keep people for 10h straight.
Edit: Where the hell is the video for Part 1? Doesn't exist?
From what I understand Ken killed the idea of using cheap commodity parts and moved PC division hardware design inhouse thus turning profit making venture into huge money sink.
The document I linked in my top-level post suggest that PC division was doing Ok by 1994 but that document is written by an insider who was not directly working on the PC stuff.
What a pity... it seemed like "what should DEC doing in the 90s, and how is it related to DEC's historical identity?" was the question when looking back at their 90's strategy – and it seemed like thoughtfully engineered hardware, even if on a commodity architecture, is one of them.
Even if it wasn't the full stack integration from semiconductor fabrication, to OS and networking, that they were used to.
