They had a lot of software licensing issues. They believed software cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and should be self funded (edited rather t

They had a lot of software licensing issues. They believed software cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and should be self funded (edited rather than a gateway drug to sell lots of new hardware). Also they believed in industrial era depreciation, so the cost of, say, OS-8, should be more or less constant for 20 years. So although someone might be able to obtain obsolete / obsolescent hardware, if you wanted legal DEC (non-transferable) licenses it was always like $5000 for OS-8 and everything no matter how small had a price. Not a big deal for a corporation buying a $500K CNC milling machine, but it did quite adequately kill the small resale and reuse market. They didn't understand software as it relates to the small market. If my Dad could have legally run an old -8 or an old -11 at home or at work for clandestine-ish jobs, then in his official day job inevitably the office would fill with VAXes. But no, they wanted to nickel and dime everyone, so we ended up with with the inferior junk we are still recovering from. A world of VAXes and VMS would be a wonder. Home computers capable of running BSD on a -11 in the early 80s instead of rom msbasic. Could have been a different world. About 20 years after DECs fatal decision to nickel and dime software, around '93 I was installing linux on commodity PC hardware using SLS floppy disk sets I downloaded for free, legally, from BBSes. So much for that bright financial idea.