Comment by TheOtherHobbes

Supposedly, DEC started to lose its way when Olsen no longer had Doriot around to mentor him.

Olsen was an old-school MIT guy - an engineer making "affordable" tools for other engineers and scientists. It was a personal crusade for him, and his biggest competitor was always the ghost of the IBM System 360.

He literally couldn't imagine the economies of scale that VLSI made possible, or how to pivot from DEC's traditional customer base into commodity computing at one extreme and the more open Sun/SGI workstation market at the other.

There's a parallel universe where DEC invented the commodity PC and made the Internet run on it. It's likely quite an interesting place.

DEC always had top-tier engineering talent and had the Alta Vista search engine well before they understood how valuable it could be.

DEC's management and vision were also top-tier, until suddenly they weren't.