Digital Equipment Corporation

A former great computer company that "marketed the equivalent of sushi as dead fish."

I thought that we would have marketed sushi as "cold, raw, dead fish". --RonLusk (20-year veteran of DigitalEquipmentCorporation)

You would have marketed it that way, but just try ordering it!

Rice - Product id: 1-TVM0-VSM1456
Cold - ... 1-TVM1-VSM15602
Vinegar...

--MichaelChean - Former DiBol Programmer

See http://www.foldoc.org/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?DEC and http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DEC.html

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A sad but true [StrangeCustomerService] story:

Many winters ago, my colleague and I call from a customer site where we are trying to install DecMessageQueue, and we can't get it off the ground. Some inane configuration issue.

So we call the support number listed on the box.

The support guy asks for the serial number on our DEC server.

We try to explain, many, many times, that we have software, not hardware, compiled for OS/2, running on generic hardware; and it has a perfectly legitimate serial number on it. The support guy refused to listen to this real DEC serial number.

What a sick joke! Asking for a hardware serial number when we need support for our software. I'm certain that dweeb, every time he bounced someone like that, felt a warm glow thinking he was saving his company from theft of tech support. And he did this to us right in front of our customers. What a bunch of [exemplarily incompetent business practices]! --PCP

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Ken Olsen, co-founder of DigitalEquipmentCorporation, died 6th February 2011. http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/02/07/ken-olson-founder-digital-equipment-corp-passes-away/

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CategoryCompany