"A couple years later, the entire market segment died, because their crappy products couldn't compete with personal computers". This is wrong in several ways:

"A couple years later, the entire market segment died, because their crappy products couldn't compete with personal computers". This is wrong in several ways: A few years later, Convergent was bought by Unisys for $350 million (in 1988 dollars). http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/11/business/company-news-unisys-says-it-will-buy-convergent.html http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/11/business/company-news-unis... The MegaFrame wasn't competing with personal computers, it was competing with engineering workstations (Sun, Apollo, etc.) and departmental minicomputers (HP, DG, others I don't recall at the moment). Convergent's personal computer products were arguably less crappy than IBM's (they often were a generation ahead in CPUs (80186 vs 8088, then 386 vs 286, etc.), they ran a multitasking message-passing OS instead of DOS, etc.). For a while, they sold quite well in some markets (e.g. every U-Haul office in the country had a B-25 on every desk at one point in the early 90s). They lost anyway, because cheap crappy PC clones were so ubiquitous, and the resulting software and hardware ecosystem could out-evolve any specialized product from a single company.