Technology giants: How the mighty have fallen
by ZDNet Author | February 10, 2011 7:35am PST | Image 1 of 10
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Digital Equipment Corporation
The recent death of Digital Equipment Corporation's founder Ken Olsen is a reminder that getting to the top of the tech world isn't easy but staying there is even harder. ZDNet UK's David Meyer takes a look back at 10 firms that were once leaders in the field but let technology pass them by.
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
DEC's PDP-8 may not look so small now, but its relatively compact size made it a bestseller in the mid-1960s — the company sold 50,000 of its 'minicomputer', which was a record-breaker at the time. DEC became the largest private employer in the state of Massachusetts.
In the late 1970s, the company's VAX-11 32-bit minicomputer served as a rival to IBM's mainframes. However, a decade later saw the rise of the 32-bit microcomputer, and Digital's products lost their cachet. Its 1998 merger with Compaq was the biggest in the history of the IT industry. Four years later, Compaq itself merged with HP, leaving the DEC/Digital brand as little more than a memory.
Just In
AOL
Yahoo
CopmpuServ
ask.com
I know for a fact that AOl and Yahoo are still here, though these are shells of what they once were, in no way on top. I haven't heard anything about Ask.com for a couple of years back when they were trying to be in direct competition with Google. Web of Trust lists ask.com as an untrusted site, but I don't know how realistic that is, considering WoT is opinion based, (and in IE9 lists igoogle as untrustworthy).
Most of these were mentioned above, but just wanted to re-list them together and try and get a handle on whether or not the blog lists dead companies or once greats
Kaypro
CPM
VisiCalc
WordStar
I still use WordStar for DOS or a work-alike Z.EXE that came with XTree on my tri-core AMD computer every day.
The Tandy name is still alive and well, in Australia where it is the name used for RadioShack stores.
But in reality, Tandy were taken-over by Dick Smith Electronics some years ago and Dick Smith is really the major name. However, in their early days, Tandy were very important to the development of home computing in Australia.
Case in point..., as Sun Microsystems combined its real estate holdings with Oracle, they left Menlo Park, CA, just recently acquired by Facebook. The same was true of many of Digital's campuses in the greater Boston area. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ontheblock/detail?entry_id=39801
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