Why has Digital Equipment Corp effectively turned its user base over to Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT? As the Wall Street Journal tells it, when DEC engineers drew to president Bob Palmer’s attention the fact that NT appeared to have an awful lot of features in common with VMS – whose architect, Dave Cutler moved to head the NT team at Microsoft Corp – Palmer decided to screw the company down to the best deal he could get by in return for not launching any lawsuits. Thus did Microsoft not only agree to put NT up on the Alpha RISC and keep that version in lock-step with the iAPX-86 one, but also committed to spend $50m to $100m retraining hundreds of DEC engineers in support of NT.
