The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation
by Edgar H. Schein
Proof-backed recommendation
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DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC reads like a chronological company chronicle that pairs engineering milestones with corporate drama. It’s most useful as a granular record of how a pioneering firm built technical innovations and how organizational choices contributed to its decline. The early sections are lively with invention stories; the middle can feel episodic and heavy on product and boardroom detail. Limitations: affectionate tone and repetition make the lessons less crisp, and the book lacks hands-on exercises or a modern how-to roadmap.
This summary and audience guidance are AI-generated from the book's description and its recommendation history, last updated June 2026. Recommendations, quotes and sources elsewhere on this page come from published material and are not generated.
DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC tells the 40year story of the creation, demise, and enduring legacy of one of the pioneering companies of the computer age. Digital Equipment Corporation created the minicomputer, networking, the concept of distributed computing, speech recognition, and other major innovations. It was the number two computer maker behind...
Difficulty:hard
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View available editions on AmazonWhy recommended
Recommended by 2 sources and appears in Business and Nonfiction.
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
David Kadavy
“Love this book. DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equiment Corporation”
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Consider Accidental Presidents by Jared Cohen. Recommended by 10 sources.
“Accidental Presidents offers eight narrative portraits of men who succeeded to the U.S. presidency without election, using anecdote-rich scenes and readable context to show how personality and circumstance interact with office power. It’s strongest as a set of self-contained stories that make succession stakes concrete for non-specialist readers; it does not prioritize dense archival argument or exhaustive methodology, so expect some interpretive generalizations and repeated themes across cases. Use it for fast historical orientation rather than scholarly deep-dives.”
Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.
