Alternatively, DEC was built on a 1950s business model where customers (not necessarily final users) were skilled and educated scientists, developers, academics, engineers, and bizops people - basically hands-on hackers of one kind or another.<p>Its R&amp;D and marketing machine was created to match this market. As long as most of the computer buyers in the world shared that culture, DEC did very well.<p>DEC had no experience designing and selling commodity&#x2F;appliance computers to the general public, and not much interest in same. This may have been Olsen&#x27;s fault. I suspect he just couldn&#x27;t imagine his wonderful computer engineering machine selling crappy microcomputers direct to ordinary Joes through retail and mail order.<p>At the high end there was always an interest in taking on and beating IBM, who had a monopoly on the very high end of business and scientific computing, but for whom the PC was just a flukey minor side project. (IBM didn&#x27;t understand commodity computing either, which is why it was pushed out the market by the clone makers.) DEC made some headway but never quite understood that the business high end is not the same market.<p>So the reason there was no DEC PC and we&#x27;re not all using DEC clones is cultural. Gordon Bell was - as usual - ten years ahead of everyone else, and worrying about this at the start of the 1980s when VAX was well on its way to making DEC a giant. There are DEC memos about this period at bitsavers.org, and they provide some insights into how DEC failed.<p>DEC engineering, especially in VLSI, was easily the best in the world. Alpha was a thing of beauty, and an affordable Alpha PC would have killed Intel, MS, and maybe even Apple, and advanced the PC market and perhaps the Internet by five to ten years, and created a completely different culture around commodity computing.