The Death Of Compaq
Many years ago there was an incredible company called Digital Equipment Corporation. This company produced two of the best operating systems ever available: RSTS/E and OpenVMS. Digital also created by far the best piece of computer equipment ever made: the Alpha chip and computer systems.
Even the "best" operating systems and hardware today do not even come close to OpenVMS running on an Alpha computer. Those systems were reliable (ours has remained up-and-running for over a year without a reboot), performed exceptionally well and ran hundreds or even thousands of jobs at a time.
Even the highly touted Windows 2000 machine is a joke compared with OpenVMS. Yeah, Windows 2000 has clustering, but it's a childish, incomplete version when compared with the clustering on OpenVMS. And, by the way, OpenVMS was multi-user, one of the best of it's class, and made the "multi-user" functions in Windows 2000 look like a complete joke from MAD comic books.
Did you know that Digital created a network protocol called DECnet which was far superior to TCP/IP? If the world had implemented DECnet it would not be in the fx it is now, with a critical need to upgrade to IPv6 in the next few years. DECnet already had all of those problems solved long ago.
The operating system was in every way superior to Windows, Linux, Unix and just about every other operating system you can name, excluding those on the big IBM mainframes.
So what happened? The company called Digital Equipment Corporation was arguably the best group of engineers ever assembled in one place. They produced some of the best products of their type ever created. They were intelligent, well versed in their field and highly motivated.
The "other half" of the company, however, was manned by babbling idiots second only to the management and marketing skills of Apple Computer in their extreme stupidity and their ability to totally miss reaching the market. Just like Apple did in the 1990's, DEC simply could not figure out how to get their products to the market. So even though these two companies had outstanding products, they completely and utterly lost to a far inferior set of hardware from Intel and a horrible server product called Windows NT (and now Windows 2000).
Apple managed to survive it's overabundance of stupidity, but Digital Equipment Corporation did not. The company was purchased by Compaq in 1998. Compaq wanted to gain access to DEC's network of worldwide service and support specialists, to become more than just a hardware vendor.
You see, DEC had a reputation as not only having the best mid-size computers (the VAX and Alpha) and the best operating systems (RSTS/E and OpenVMS), but it also had the best service department in the computer industry.
I know from experience how bad the Compaq service department was before they took over Digital. We had over 100 Compaq machines in our company, and we threw them all out because we could not get Compaq to provide adequate service on a consistent basis. We replaced them with IBM laptops, workstations and services, and to date the service has been markedly improved.
Once Digital's service department merged with Compaq, however, this changed dramatically. We still had a few Compaq systems as well as several VAXs, and we found that the service increased tremendously.
In fact, over the few years after the merger of Compaq and DEC, the new company grew tremendously. Compaq soon reached the number 2 spot behind IBM.
And now Compaq and HP will merge into one huge company. What will this lead to? Ah, that's the question. In my opinion, this is a bad move for customers, computer users and even the two companies. Some people will become very rich, but overall quality will fall and the new company will fade and possibly fail. They are already talking about canceling the Alpha line entirely.
The magic that was Digital is almost entirely gone. Soon it will fade forever.