[Info-vax] BOINC for VMS

[Paul Sture]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:51:16 -0700, Johnny Billquist wrote:

> DEC was constantly at war with itself. There are/were several arcade
> games which used the PDP-11 as the CPU. They could definitely have
> competed way more there, except they often refused to sell, kicked the
> price up to make it unviable, or cut off supplies, afraid that selling
> CPUs would hurt their sales of larger systems, and big money on that
> end.
> 
> DEC was was too scared of losing its existing business to be able to
> get into new areas from the mid 70s and onwards.

DEC also mucked around in its policy of how they treated OEMs, at least 
in the UK.  Traditionally, DEC's UK salesmen were not on commission and 
were basically order takers rather than salesmen, visiting large 
corporations and saying "How many systems do you want next year?".  They 
refused to talk to us because we had  a smaller turnover than 100 
million, pointing us to OEMs instead.

A few years later, DEC UK wanted that OEM business themselves, and there 
were accusations that they played dirty to get it.

And then a few years after that, we were told to go through OEMs again.

It really was unsettling from a customer's point of view.

Incidentally, those OEMs were the ones who first put PDPs to commercial 
use doing "boring stuff" like accounting packages, and opened up a brand 
new market.

-- 
Paul Sture