Editing Minicomputer (section)

===Mid-1980s and 1990s decline===
Minicomputer companies historically competed on the price and speed of their computers, instead of marketing and advertising.<ref name="pollack19840328">{{Cite news |last=Pollack |first=Andrew |date=1984-03-28 |title=A.T.&.T. OFFERS ITS COMPUTERS |language=en-US |pages=D1 |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/28/business/at-t-offers-its-computers.html |access-date=2023-02-14 |issn=0362-4331}}</ref> By the early 1980s, the 16-bit minicomputer market had all but disappeared as newer 32-bit microprocessors began to improve in performance. Those customers who required more performance than these offered had generally already moved to 32-bit systems by this time. But it was not long before this market also began to come under threat; the [[Motorola 68000]] offered a significant percentage of the performance of a typical mini in a desktop platform. True 32-bit processors such as the [[National Semiconductor NS32016]], [[Motorola 68020]] and [[Intel 80386]] soon followed. By the mid-1980s, high-end microcomputers offered CPU performance equal to low-end and mid-range minis, and the new [[reduced instruction set computer|RISC]] approach promised performance levels well beyond the fastest minis, and even high-end mainframes.

All that really separated micros from the mini market was storage and memory capacity. Both of these began to be addressed through the later 1980s; 1 MB of RAM became typical by around 1987, desktop [[hard drive]]s rapidly pushed past the 100 MB range by 1990, and the introduction of inexpensive and easily deployable [[local area network]] (LAN) systems provided solutions for those looking for multi-user systems. The introduction of [[workstation]]s opened new markets for graphics-based systems that the terminal-oriented minis could not even address. Minis remained a force for those using existing software products or those who required high-performance multitasking, but the introduction of newer [[operating system]]s based on [[Unix]] began to yield highly practical replacements for these roles as well. For [[computational science]], [[commodity computing|clusters of commodity PCs]] largely replaced minicomputers.

Mini vendors began to rapidly disappear through this period. [[Data General]] responded to the changing market by focusing entirely on the high-performance [[server (computing)|file server]] market, embracing a role within large LANs that appeared resilient. This did not last; [[Novell NetWare]] rapidly pushed such solutions into niche roles, and later versions of [[Microsoft Windows]] did the same to Novell. [[Digital Equipment Corporation|DEC]] decided to move into the large-computer space instead, introducing the [[VAX 9000]] mainframe in 1989, but it was a flop in the market and disappeared after almost no sales. The company then attempted to enter the workstation and server markets with the [[DEC Alpha]], but was too late to save the company, and they eventually sold their remains to [[Compaq]] in 1998. By the end of the decade all of the classic vendors were gone; [[Data General]], [[Prime Computer|Prime]], [[Computervision]], [[Honeywell]], and [[Wang Laboratories|Wang]], failed, merged, or were bought out.

Today, only a few proprietary minicomputer architectures survive. The [[IBM System/38]] operating system, which introduced many advanced concepts, lives on with IBM's [[AS/400]]. Great efforts were made by IBM to enable programs originally written for the [[IBM System/34]] and System/36 to be moved to the AS/400. After being rebranded multiple times, the AS/400 platform was replaced by [[IBM Power Systems]] running [[IBM i]]. In contrast, competing proprietary computing architectures from the early 1980s, such as DEC's [[VAX]], [[Wang VS]], and Hewlett-Packard's [[HP 3000]] have long been discontinued without a compatible upgrade path. [[OpenVMS]] was ported to HP [[DEC Alpha|Alpha]] and Intel [[IA-64]] ([[Itanium]]) CPU architectures, and now runs on [[x86-64]] processors.

[[Tandem Computers]], which specialized in reliable large-scale computing, was acquired by [[Compaq]] in 1997, and in 2001 the combined entity merged with [[Hewlett-Packard]].<ref>{{Cite web |title=Top-end server group comes home to HP |url=https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/top-end-server-group-comes-home-to-hp/ |access-date=2023-02-28 |website=CNET |language=en}}</ref> The NonStop Kernel-based [[NonStop (server computers)|NonStop]] product line was re-ported from MIPS processors to Itanium-based processors branded as '[[HPE Integrity Servers|HP Integrity]] NonStop Servers'. As in the earlier migration from stack machines to MIPS microprocessors, all customer software was carried forward without source changes. The NSK operating system, now termed [[NonStop OS]], continues as the base software environment for the NonStop Servers, and has been extended to include support for [[Java (software platform)|Java]] and integration with popular development tools such as [[Microsoft Visual Studio|Visual Studio]] and [[Eclipse (software)|Eclipse]]. Later, Hewlett-Packard would split into HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. The NonStop products and the DEC products would then be sold by HPE.