In many ways, DEC was the Apple of its time--innovative, iconoclastic, an opposing force to the boring business technologies that Big Blue foisted off onto its conformist customers. But unlike Apple's Steve Jobs, DEC's Olsen was a gentle bear of a man, a leader who walked in front of his troops carrying a slide rule, not behind them wielding a whip (or, more to the point, calling them "stupid").

Unfortunately, no one had the foresight to make Olsen see that the minicomputer's time would soon pass.

Fade forward to DECWorld 1986, the annual show that lighted up Boston Harbor. That year, the company showcased hundreds of VAX computers and thousands of VMS-based software solutions on the Queen Elizabeth 2, docked and decked out to welcome the industry. In retrospect, it was nothing less than a landlubbing voyage of the Titanic, with DEC about to hit the personal-computer iceberg. Indeed, the company was already beginning to take on water in the face of an assault from Intel-based PCs.

Under Olsen's successor, Robert Palmer, the former semiconductor engineer who's most noted for his sartorial splendor (maybe he's related to the rock singer Robert Palmer?), DEC began to list dangerously.

Earlier this week, on October 27th--the same day the stock market plunged 554 points--you could say that DEC's bulkheads finally burst. That's the day Palmer and Intel Corp. president Craig Barrett announced that Intel will purchase DEC's Hudson, Mass., semiconductor-manufacturing facility for $700 million. The deal should be consummated within six months, pending approval from U.S. government antitrust investigators.

Barrett said that Intel plans to install its own 0.25-micron fabrication equipment and will manufacture Alpha microprocessors for DEC. Intel will also make a broad range of integrated circuits--including microproce ssors and core-logic chip sets--for its own use.

Strictly speaking, DEC retains full rights to do its own future Alpha designs and manufacturing. And the microprocessor engineers working on Alpha will remain DEC employees.

But let's not mince words here. DEC insists that it will continue to aggressively market and sell its Alpha-based workstations, and we must believe that. However, Palmer also disclosed plans to develop a full line of systems based on Intel's new IA-64 architecture and its upcoming Merced CPU.

So the reality is that Alpha has become a precarious long-term bet, to say the least. Compounding the confusion about Alpha's future prospects is what Barrett and Palmer didn't say. When Intel takes over the Hudson fab, it will remove most of the DEC equipment currently in place to install its own. But Alpha production has been buzzed out on DEC's fab line--not Intel's. That may make it difficult, at least initially, to continue produc ing the device without some process-related adjustments.

"We'll maintain the copy-exact aspect [of Alpha] as we put our 0.25-micron technology in," Barrett pledged. "And we will be running some of Digital's existing technology and basically copying their technology exactly at the start."

Nevertheless, he admitted that the fab equipment Intel and DEC use "are substantially different. There's some overlap, and where there's overlap we'll make use of that. But we will be putting a healthy, new equipment-set in for our 0.25-micron technology."

In the real world, Digital probably had no other choice but to sell. Still, it's a shame Alpha hasn't gained more adherents. The architecture is a glorious realization of RISC concepts. Indeed, it's likely to remain one of the most impressive microprocessors ever designed, and will probably be one of the last of a breed now that very-long-instruction-word (VLIW) concepts are coming into vogue among chip designers.

Moving forward, the one bright spot for DEC is software. Palmer said that DEC will port its Unix operating-system technology to Intel's IA-64 architecture. Since DEC's software is mature, it could become the leading OS on Merced, outpacing a competing 64-bit version of Windows NT that's due from Microsoft.

That might be small consolation to DEC employees who've seen their minicomputer dreams turn to dust, but it would be heartening to those looking for a stable software platform upon which to base the 64-bit PC future.

Ken Olsen, for one, must be glad that DEC, though diminished, will survive. Yet how strange this denouement must seem to him now, and how bright the future must have looked when he sat at the controls of his PDP-1 in 1960, or strutted about the QE2 little more than a decade ago.

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