BOSTON, January 28: The high-tech highway -- Route 128 outside Boston -- was once home to giants in the computer industry but has lost another notable milestone with the news that Compaq Computer Corp had bought out Digital Equipment Corp.Route 128 became the technology centre of the computer industry in the 1970s and 1980s with the rise of the minicomputer -- corporate computers that competed with the massive mainframes produced by International Business Machines Corp.
Digital, the king of all minicomputer companies, Wang Laboratories Inc, Prime Computer, Computervision Corp and Thinking Machines all called the corridor around Route 128 home.
Brilliant graduates of prestigious schools such as Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology fed the thriving companies down the road, and Digital was founded by MIT graduates.
"The minicomputer was really a New England phenomenon," said John Gantz, senior vice president with research firm International Data Corp, based in Framingham, Mass."And then the PC came along.
"With the introduction of the personal computer ... the centre of gravity began to shift. Maybe by the mid-1980s, Silicon Valley became the centre of gravity," he said.
Formerly one of the largest computer companies in the world, Digital misjudged the importance of the PC and never recovered.
The crippled giant agreed to be bought by Houston-based Compaq, the world's largest maker of PCs, for more than $9 billion in cash and stock in the largest merger in the history of the computer industry.
Digital fared better than many other computer companies in the area. Wang Laboratories and Thinking Machines both declared bankruptcy. Prime Computer floundered and stopped manufacturing minicomputers after taking over Computervision and ultimately was bought by Parametric Technology Corp.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
