My uncle worked on the Alpha team at DEC in Maynard, MA. After retiring he found a nice opportunity consulting for Compaq and later HP. He referred to it as being Compaqted and I think he was always saddened that the company he devoted his career to came to such an end.

DEC made excellent equipment and excellent software to go with it. Their FORTRAN compiler was the gold standard. But IBM and Sun were too much competition in the transition to personal workstations and UNIX. It just didn’t fit their business model of enterprise computing via mainframes and accessories.

I still believe that VMS was the superior operating system. And their support was outstanding.

>I still believe that VMS was the superior operating system.

It would have been interesting if someone had built an open-source VMS-like OS instead of Linux.