alt Hacker NewsDEC had a moment between 1990-92 when they did pretty good in PC market.
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.
Yes I know. But this person came to sun after doing the Rainbow 100. DEC did better once they went away from that approach and went towards actual PC compatible. Neither DEC Rainbow nor Sun i386 were PC compatible. For DEC this is understandable as PC wasn't really a standard (their problem was that they pushed 3 different incompatible products into virtually the same market). For Sun to do this didn't make much sense.