[rescue] NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 09:03:04PM -0400, Carl R. Friend wrote:
>    DEC -- you deserved so much better than what happened to you.

There was a point in time when DEC could have and should have simply
hired as much of the UCB [1] Unix team as possible, abandoned VMS entirely,
and committed to owning the nascent Unix market.

They didn't.  Instead we saw an explosion of Unix vendors:
Masscomp, Plexus, Onyx, Zilog, Wicat, Fortune, Altos, Charles River,
Pacific, Spectrix, and I'm omitting/forgetting a zillion of them
(and probably getting some of these wrong).  Most of those didn't
survive, but a few upstarts (e.g., Sun, SGI) did.  I'm not sure that
would have happened had DEC put 100% of its effort into Unix instead
of flushing so much of it down the toilet on VMS and NT.

But in their arrogance and pride, they refused to admit that some "hippies
from Berkeley" had crafted a vastly better OS for their hardware than
they did.  Thus endeth the lesson.

---rsk

[1] Along with people from Purdue, Stanford, MIT, GaTech, et.al.