"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home"
"Unix is snake oil"
—Ken Olsen (DEC Founder, president, and chairman)
It seems, no, DEC did not miss the PC boat due to one person's nearsighted view.
Microvax was 1985 and yes it would have been interesting if they had a low-end personal product based on VAX at that time. They did have the Professional [0] around 1982 based on PDP-11 which I used at school to learn Macro-11 assembly, C and Pascal. It was blazing fast and ran RSX/11 which was years ahead of DOS. They also had the Rainbow [1] around 1982 (maybe marketed to officework) with a z80 and 8088. And then there was the VAXMate in 86 which we don't talk about :). So it seems these were all aiming at the new "PC" market in a scattergun manner but nobody really knew what that was at the time.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Professional_(computer)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27527140
And also "The VAX":
https://yarchive.net/comp/vax.html
I don't really understand all of this, but the high level gist is that the VAX ISA was almost out of runway; it wasn't entirely that DEC made bad choices but also that they couldn't take VAX where it would need to go to remain competitive anyway.
Now Alpha was a bit late but the same strategy could have been adopted earlier.
IBM has the same costumers and has virtual layer onto of virtual layer to support technology from the 60s.
You then also port the OS to some RISC system and x86 and attempt to get new costumers using VMS on those system architectures.
The fab was also in-house.
"It is DEC's first single-chip microprocessor implementation of the VAX ISA and DEC's first self-fabricated microprocessor...
"The MicroVAX 78032 contains 125,000 transistors on an 8.7 by 8.6 mm (74.82 mm2) die that was fabricated in DEC's ZMOS process, a 3.0 µm NMOS logic process with two layers of aluminum interconnect."
Interesting to compare them both with the ARM1 which was 32 bit (no MMU) but only used 25k transistors on a 3 µm process - and which was more powerful than VAX 11/780. So both powerful and cheap to make.
It includes the 78034, the floating point unit, and up to 8K of L1 cache in a single CPU package. The "up to 8K" was because they'd keep CPUs if 5K or more of L1 worked.
It's my little piece of this interesting history.
It was a rush to go from sharing one with 40 other students to my first job where I had a microvax all to myself!
