Both companies missed the opportunity to launch successful micro-computers and by the time the book was published, the IBM PC had already become a de facto standard.

The year 1988 heralded a financial crisis that hit both companies hard, and started a downward slide in sales from which they never recovered.

DEC's community service projects were well known, most specifically his commitment to higher education and his donations of PDP-8 computers to local high schools in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Though the book today serves partially as a historical document of the computing industry, some valuable business lessons can be learned from it.

One of his chief engineers, Edson de Castro, left after failing to get permission to design a 16-bit version of the 8-bit PDP-8 and founded Data General.