From The Boston Globe
Digital effects: Computer maker’s rise, fall still echo in Mass.
By Hiawatha Bray
Today, the giant mill complex in the town of Maynard is home to a host of businesses. The online job-search firm Monster.com is there; so are musical instrument maker Powell Flutes Inc., a Gold’s Gym, and lots of small offices.
But two decades ago, the mill housed only a single business — the largest and most influential company in Massachusetts: Digital Equipment Corp., which was for a time the world’s second-largest computer maker, after IBM Corp.
In those days, Massachusetts rivaled California’s Silicon Valley as a world center of the computer industry. Digital’s soaring success helped spawn an entire minicomputer industry in Massachusetts, with companies like Prime Computer Inc., Apollo Computer Inc., Wang Laboratories, and Data General Corp. Today, they’re all gone, victims of a technological transformation that overwhelmed even Ken Olsen, the brilliant cofounder of Digital, who died last week.
Remnants of Massachusetts’ once-mighty computer industry still remain. You can find one in Hudson, where Intel Corp. makes microchips at a factory where Digital once produced its own high-powered processors. There’s another at EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, whose Clariion line of data storage systems derives from technology pioneered by Data General....
Yet Digital also developed a reputation as an insular company that rejected innovative ideas from beyond its borders. AnnaLee Saxenian, dean of the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley and author of a book on the Massachusetts high-tech sector, said that attitude would lead to disaster, and not just for Digital. According to Saxenian, Digital “developed a culture of secrecy and self-sufficiency’’ that was emulated by the state’s other computer firms....