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> Microsoft hired the main architect of VMS, Dave Cutler, away from DEC to design Windows NT. Not sure why you mice words. Cutler developed NT at Digital. That
by Maursault 4y ago
> Microsoft hired the main architect of VMS, Dave Cutler, away from DEC to design Windows NT.
Not sure why you mice words. Cutler developed NT at Digital. That's better.
In 1988, Cutler took his work (the literal data, the MICA OS code from DEC's cancelled Prism RISC project) and his engineering team at DEC with him to Microsoft. I believe it was much less like poaching and much more like defecting. DEC ultimately forced Microsoft into an alliance under threat of lawsuit for the IP theft to migrate the VMS user base to NT, with Microsoft paying quite a lot, $180M, to avoid lawsuit, for, get this... training DEC engineers to use NT. In 1995, someone at MIT found large chunks of DEC MICA code unaltered, including comments, in Windows NT.