Digital Equipment Corporation bankruptcy

Strategic-management coda to the VAX 9000 case. Ken Olsen's dismissal of RISC ("RISC is a fad") combined with the failed VAX 9000 mainframe play against IBM's $40B business. Hewlett Packard, which adopted RISC, captured the printer market and grew accordingly. MIT divested its 7% Digital stake "well before they could have made a few hundred million."

Digital Equipment decided they were going to go after this $40 billion business instead of minicomputers — they were going after the mainframe computer business. They invested several billion dollars. They never really got the VAX 9000 to work very well; they didn't sell very many. They gave one to MIT. They essentially killed Digital Equipment — they went bankrupt by the mid-90s, because of that VAX 9000 project primarily, and a few other poor choices, like they didn't believe in RISC. Ken Olsen, who had founded Digital Equipment.