quantities, though the itself only attained sales figures in the tens of thousands and went out of production within two years. During the 1980s and 1990s Olivetti continued to release PC compatible machines, facing mounting competition from other brands. It turned to laptops, introducing in 1991 the D33, a laptop in a carry case, and continuing with the M111, M211, S20, D33, Philos and Echos series. A very interesting subnotebook was the Quaderno, about the same size as an A5 paper – it was the grandfather of the netbooks introduced 20 years later. Olivetti did attempt to recover its position by introducing the Envision in 1995, a full multimedia PC, to be used in the living room; this project was a failure. Packard Bell managed to successfully introduce a similar product in the U.S. but only some years later. The company continued to develop personal computers until it sold its PC business in 1997. End of Olivetti as a separate company In the 1990s, Olivetti's computer businesses were in great difficulty, reportedly because of the competition from US vendors and new cheap manufacturers for PC components in Taiwan like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and so on from which local system builders profited much to offer cheaper PCs than Olivetti did with their own designs. It was on the brink of collapse and had needed government support to stay afloat. In 1992, Digital Equipment Corporation announced its intention to invest in Olivetti, approximating to a 10% stake valued at around , amidst a wave of investment in European companies by their US counterparts. Digital were already reselling Olivetti personal computer models in Europe, and the investment presented an opportunity for the adoption of Digital's Alpha processor in Olivetti's workstation products. The investment programme was to be conducted in two steps over an 18 month period, augmented by additional share purchases. The partnership between the companies, regarded as a way of supporting Olivetti whilst cementing a development relationship around Digital's Alpha platform, developed in the following two years, although the balance of revenue from selling products to each other was reported as being strongly in Olivetti's favour, it having generated lire from Digital in 1993, but with Digital only selling products worth lire to Olivetti. Digital remained a significant purchaser of laser printers and laptops from Olivetti, but had begun to manufacture its own personal computers and planned to produce its own laptop