DEC's entire corporate structure was based on a particular business model that demanded their products sell for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands per sale.
They tried many times to break out of this box, but failed every time. There was simply too much of the company invested in selling into a particular size of customer, and its weight meant that they could not survive, for instance, selling individual small computers to end users.
You can see this right to the end: even when they came out with Alpha it was targeted 100% to what was then the high-end of the new server-based market. Sure they made workstations, but only grudgingly, and with the hope that it would be part of a network containing at least one of their higher-end servers.
>DEC's entire corporate structure was based on a particular business model that demanded their products sell for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands per sale.
Is this why the VT180 never got anywhere? (Didn't DEC only sell it to employees, or something like that?)
In retrospect it's mindboggling to think that DEC never marketed the upgrade kit to the massive existing VT100 installed base as an easy way to move into personal computers for less money. DEC had name recognition in corporate America in a way that Apple and Commodore did not, let alone the likes of North Star, Morrow, or Cromemco.
Nah, this was the book on how to write programs in the dominant end-user language of the day. Few of the games are all that memorable, really; the coolness lay in making the computer do things, in building something that was interactive. The book appeared in a brief shining moment when literally anyone could write meaningful programs without requiring vast amounts of training—-and then, like me and so many others, could grow and learn as the industry grew.
DEC could have ruled the world.