DEC was based in Maynard, MA not CA. We had a couple excellent teams in the Bay area that were acquired from Xerox as I recall. The Systems Research Center in Palo Alto and WRL.

AltaVista was not the only business that DEC failed to capitalize on. We had an $800M networking business when Cisco was just starting. DEC defunded that business to invest more in other projects. We had a storage server business that we sold to a little company call EMC too. It's quite sad...