> DEC was bought by Intel No, it wasn't. Compaq (an x86 shop which did little in the OS space) bought DEC. It kept making the non-x86 DEC hardware and softwar

> DEC was bought by Intel No, it wasn't. Compaq (an x86 shop which did little in the OS space) bought DEC. It kept making the non-x86 DEC hardware and software. Then HP bought Compaq. HP had its own processor & OS families, and had persuaded Intel to work with it on the successor to HP's PA-RISC architecture: Itanium. Part of that deal is that HP passed over some DEC IP it had acquired to Intel. Effectively this killed off a significant rival to Intel, and in theory, opened a path to market for Itanium. So Intel got DEC's Alpha, the first 64-bit RISC and the fastest RISC on the market. It killed it. It also sold off its Arm division to Marvell. The other big thing HP got was DEC's minicomputer OS, VMS. It killed it, as I wrote at the time: https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/06/10/openvms_death_notice/ But it changed its mind and spun it off instead. https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/31/openvms_spared/ https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/31/openvms_spared/