One of my clients has strong ties with the former DEC/Digital in Maynard, Massachusetts.
The recent auctioning of several digital assets of the former company, that was absorbed by Compaq and eventually Hewlett-Packard, adds a sad epitaph to the region’s tech sector.
My client is a corporate veteran that has lived the 70’s and 80’s being part of the technological revolution that led to the dot .com boom of the 90’s. And we all know what happened in 2000.
Upon mentioning to him the sale of DEC.com and Digital.com, two domains that were once the pride and joy of a historic company, he mentioned that the area has not recovered from the loss of Digital, Wang, Data General and other brick and mortar corporations.
The digital assets being auctioned are merely the stardust of an industry that produced tangible hardware and networking technology, and in the end, production is what matters.
Eventually, these aged domain names will be used as beacons to invite the younger generations to research the glorious past; it remains to be seen whether companies involved in manufacturing of tangible technology will make use of them.
Didn’t Compaq pick up AltaVista.com (search engine) as part of the Digital acquisition? I can recall back in the late 90s using Lycos and AOL and receiving an AOL disk in the email probably every two weeks or so 🙂
Leonard – No, Altavista was acquired by Yahoo when they bought Overture, and now they shut it down. The e-commerce era took a toll on the regular hardware manufacturers on the East coast.