Cynics are advised to recall what Kenneth Olsen, founder of minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corp.
The minicomputer people barely saw Sun, Dell, Microsoft et al. coming, and when they did they didn't believe it.
And minicomputer vendors like Digital in turn dismissed the personal computer revolution spearheaded by Dell, Compaq and Hewlett Packard.
The 1990-91 recession killed off the minicomputer industry and nearly did in IBM.
It happened to mainframe vendors like Unisys, which totally missed the minicomputer marketplace.
Consider Ken Olsen, the giant who pioneered the minicomputer sector as a co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957.
As late as 1987 the old guard--IBM and the minicomputer stalwarts such as Wang and Digital--was still laughing at chip PCs.
Workstation computers took out the once-mighty minicomputer industry rather swiftly during a five-year period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.
The 1990 recession unmasked the problems of IBM and the minicomputer industry.
Founded in 1983 to market a minicomputer data cartridge backup drive, Advanced Digital has emerged as a world leader in open systems storage for PCs.
It happened to mainframe vendors like Unisys (nyse: UIS - news - people ), which totally missed the minicomputer marketplace.
"We got a few theses out of it, " Williams say, noting that the trick saved him the cost of buying a new minicomputer.
Boston's Route 128 was home not just to the minicomputer revolution but to early developments in word processing, spreadsheets, networks and computer-aided design.
It's like the scruffy PC versus the minicomputer all over again.
This contrasted with the batch processing or time-sharing models which allowed larger, more expensive minicomputer and mainframe systems to be used by many people, usually at the same time.
The centerpiece of the system is an ultra-small Mac minicomputer safely housed under the rear shelf in an electrically deployed drawer whose design mirrors the design of the computer itself.
Only ten years later, by the early 1990s, the exponential gains had evolved to the point at which microprocessors were running fast enough in PCs and workstations to topple an entire industry--in this case, all the minicomputer companies along Boston's fabled Route 128.
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