SAQ wrote:
I think he was generally only "semi-official" and early to mid '90s birthdate, so the age and the fact that the full weight of the marketing department wasn't behind him explains a bit of the FOSS logo look.
having been in the middle of it up until '96, my observation at the time was it was going downhill, the economy was cutting into DEC quite hard, and we were divided by 36 bit, and 32 bit loyalties. making the jump from one family to the other was difficult for everyone. toward the end the trajectory of development was pretty obvious; crank out a VAX on a chip for cost, and build a super-VAX to compete IBM"s 3080 and 3090 Mainframes. i jumped ship to work on 3rd party plug compatibles for both companies as well as HP, Apollo, Prime, and Wang to name a few. from that perspective the love of DEC, TOPS-20, and VMS was just that; love. there really was nothing intrinsically awesome about any of them from the inside. once you reverse engineered their products it was really all the same stuff inside. the only thing that stuck out was that DEC products were easier to reverse engineer. whether that was because i was most familiar with DEC, or that the engineering principles were much more obvious than other companies *shrug*. i love them none the less now, but from the perspective that it's just my personal bias at work. which certainly must apply to everyone one else as well judging from 30+ year of experience in R&D.
the best logo is the simple one. this thing isn't a logo, it's a mess a beginner would come up with.
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(single-CM)
(Maradona)
