New subject: DEC Sold to Compaq! | Possibly off topic |

26 Jan 1998

classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu
Subj:	Re: DEC Sold to Compaq!

Richard A. Cini wrote:

...
 Well, you could see it coming. Poor financial
performance (and hence, weak
stock price) over the last few years. Weak products. Then, DEC sells-out the
Crown Jewels (its Alpha procesor) to Intel.

    After listening to an interview with Eckhard Pfeiffer of Compaq, they
paid $9.6 billion for DEC's customer list, not its products. He mentions
nothing about DEC's products. 
According to the scoop on DEC web pages and in comp.os.vms and various VMS 
mailing list he said:

 We are committed to...investing in Digital's strategic assets, particularly 
 its worldwide service organization, as well as its 64-bit leadership with Alpha 
 microprocessors, OpenVMS, Digital UNIX and Windows NT enterprise systems, 
 open storage, and software products," Eckhard Pfeiffer, president and chief 
 executive officer of Compaq, said in a statement.

And all the VMS geeks are tickled pink that he mentioned VMS first on the list 
of OSes and point out that DEC CEO Bob Palmer hasn't been known to do that.

...
     It's a shame...but it seems to me that DEC
should have seen it coming.
Death comes to the last of the old-line computer companies. 
Well IBM is still alive and kicking (rumour is that the whole OS/2 shop has 
been fired/re-assigned/real-estate liqidated but AS/400 minis and mainframes 
are making a strong comeback).  I Don't know much about Unisys though...

Peter Prymmer