A series of announcements last year saw Digital Equipment Corp and Microsoft Corp deepening their relationship, with DEC announcing its intention of migrating its VMS operating system user base over to Windows NT, and Microsoft handing over large sums of money to cover the cost of training more DEC engineers on NT (CI Nos 2,660, 2,720). At the time there were those who alleged there was more to the deal than met the eye, and that Microsoft had been forced into the relationship to avoid getting sued by DEC for poaching its intellectual property. After all, Dave Cutler, chief architect of Windows NT, was also responsible for the VAX/VMS operating system while he was at DEC, and the similarities between the two environments have often been noted. Well, according to an informed source who spoke to our sister publication ClieNT Server News last week, when Cutler left DEC for Microsoft in October 1988, he not only took engineers with him, but also took the Mica operating system code he had been working on for DEC’s brutally aborted Prism RISC project, which was abandoned when DEC decided to use the MIPS RISC chip instead (CI No 970). DEC, of course, eventually did end up with a home- grown RISC, dumping MIPS for its Alpha chip only a few years later. Last year, somone from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently found whole chunks of Mica comment for comment, note for note still there in Windows NT. And G Pascal Zachary, in Show-Stopper, his 1994 book on NT, says that Cutler saw Mica as the rough equivalent of NT. The source described Microsoft as having been dragged kicking and screaming into the alliance, despite the fact that DEC was allegedly prepared to lodge a suit claiming damages of upwards of $500m to $600m. The alliance gave Microsoft a way to pay DEC off without appearing to. The settlement came to about $105m including the $75m Microsoft kicked in to bolster DEC’s NT service and support operation.
