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

[Paul Raulerson]

On Nov 7, 2009, at 8:18 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> 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

Not to mention that there is at least as much "borrowed" technology  
from UNIX in NT there is from VMS.
And when you hit Windows XP, there is far more UNIX based technology  
cloned into NT than from VMS.

I have never fully understood this, since in some ways, VMS is clearly  
superior to the contemporary UNIX
implementations of that time.

I suppose it was that DEC was still shuttered tightly with the idea  
that computers would never be ubiquitious,
and therefor they should squeeze every nickle out of a limited market.  
A shame that Olsen never realized
it was an essentially unlimited market. (*sigh*)

HP is faced with that legacy. If they were to release VMS as a free  
OS, it would invade the data center's of the
world like wildfire. Especially if they went ahead and gave in to  
porting it to Intel.

-Paul