Unfortunately, by the 1980s they were fighting for a larger slice of a shrinking pie. DEC missed the PC revolution almost entirely, and by the 1990s was a shell of its former self, sustaining billions of dollars in losses and laying of tens of thousands of workers.
DEC expanded its customer support, marketing, and software and service offerings such that by 1980, it offered one of the broadest product lines in the industry and marketed to the whole spectrum of computing customers. By 1970, the minicomputer industry consisted of a dozen medium-sized companies led by DEC, Data General, Prime, Wang, and Tandem.
These machines cost from $125,000 to $250,000 complete with necessary peripherals and software, substantially below largescale computers. DEC marketed most of its early machines to specialized users in science and engineering but soon began marketing more capable, easier to use machines to business users who wanted to perform applications in a decentralized way for greater control, responsiveness, and interactiveness.
In addition, the minicomputer greatly expanded the size of the independent software industry,10 another step toward the PC era in which independent vendors would dominate in software. In another foreshadowing of the PC industry, the first minicomputers were designed by the system vendor and powered by that firm’s central processing unit (CPU) but assembled from parts, components, peripherals, and software [ Read More ]
The new users for the minicomputer were scientists and engineers who had sufficient computer expertise to program, operate, and manage computers on their own for uses such as scientific computation, laboratory data acquisition, industrial process control, or computer research.
While IBM and the other mainframe vendors were mainly building big computers for large corporations, several new companies focused on building new, smaller computers—dubbed minicomputers—beginning in the early 1960s.
WLANs, especially unsecured WLANs, can introduce the possibility of challenges ...