[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Arne Vajhøj]

Michael Kraemer wrote:
> Allen, Daniel P. schrieb:
>>> On Behalf Of Michael Kraemer
>>> Neil Rieck <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> writes:
>>> "Dave took his engineers and his new operating system called 'Prism' 
>>> cross town
>>> to the Redmond campus."
>>
>>> How that?
>>> Presumably everything he did at M$ would be IP of DEC,
>>> so he couldn't just "take it with him", unless DEC permitted it.
>>> AFAIK he left as a "disgruntled employee" so DEC would have had
>>> even less reason to give it away.
>>
>> Speaking as an old personal friend of one of his top team members I 
>> think I can say that the description is reasonably accurate.
> 
> So this means he stole DECs IP and got away with it?
> (where are the IP zealots when they're needed?)

Would it have made a big difference?

VMS was not the only multiuser OS.

They could have used ideas from Unix, Multics etc. instead.

No NT user, sysadm or user mode code developer could tell
the difference anyway.

It would have been different from driver writers and
other kernel mode code developers, but even though they may
be the guys that know most about the OS, then I don't think
they have much influence on decisions on what OS to use.

Arne