Digital Equipment Corp has been talking enthusiastically about how well it has been doing this year with the personal computers it buys OEM from Tandy Corp, Ing C Olivetti & Co SpA and latterly Intel Corp – and according to Electronic News, it now thinks that its business will continue to grow to hit 1m units annually within the next couple of years. In what sounds like very bad news for its OEM suppliers, the company therefore plans to start manufacturing its own MS-DOS machines again for the first time since it discontinued the Rainbow in the mid-1980s. The company plans to continue its OEM relationships, but to supplement the bought-in machines by stuffing its own motherboards and doing final assembly and test. The company plans to do the work both in the US and overseas, but would not say at which plants or give a starting date. DEC already ships its own disk drives, monitors, mem ory boards and SCSI adaptors to its OEM suppliers for building into the machines that they make for it.
