[Damogran6]

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.

[rasz]

and resulted in project failure. Grant Saviers was responsible for PC division in early nineties.

Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU

Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201... Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

>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.

[panick21_]

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?

[rasz]

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.

Part 1 doesnt exist in video form :(

[panick21_]

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.

> Part 1 doesnt exist in video form :(

Guess I have to go old school and read it :)

[Damogran6]

Awww. Boss had a Digital HiNote that seemed like a pretty nifty laptop compared to the competition at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_HiNote#/media/File:DEC...

[nxobject]

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.