OK, that was kind of harsh. (Trying to send email too fast...) DEC had a lot of really brilliant people, and they produced some awesome machines. But when it comes to desktops, I think there is a certain amount of bottom-line truth in that assessment: there was a huge market there (obviously), and DEC should have been in a pretty good place to capture it, but it completely failed to do so. Why not? I put it down to corporate cultural intertia - ironically, the same thing that allowed DEC to eat so much of IBM's lunch. Just as IBM took way too long to understand that there was a very large ecological niche for smaller machines _with customers who didn't want or need the whole IBM hand-holding routine_, DEC never (or, at least, until way too late to catch the wave) could change their mentality from producing really, really well built computers for people who were all technical, to commodity computers which needed to be made as absolutely cheaply as possible, and for people who were non-technical. The company as a whole just couldn't change its mindset that radically, that quickly. (And a lot of the blame for that has to go to Ken Olsen, of course. He just didn't grok how the world was changing.) The best one on this topis, probably, is "Ultimate Entrepreneur", by Glenn Rifkin and George Harrar, which gives a lot of detail on DEC's attempts to build personal computers; also good is "DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC", by Edgar Schein. Noel