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

[Neil Rieck]

Question: Is is possible that PRISM was killed but Alpha was still
alive and Ken Olsen didn't know it?
Answer: Yes

Excerpt from Page 216 of DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC
I organized Alpha as a program with me as program manager. This had
never worked before in Digital; it had been tried many times, never
worked. You may remember the old saying that Digital ran by the golden
rule, which was, "he that has the gold makes the rules." Yet the Alpha
Program was a team of maybe a half dozen people with never more than a
million and a half bucks to speak of. But the time was right to get
people aligned around a common effort at engineering.

( so the group was small enough to hide, but there is more... )

Excerpt from Page 217 of DEC is Dead, Long Live DEC
And we really did run Alpha as a program. It never resided centrally
in any organization, it was never really owned by any VP. It evolved
from this core of 6 or eight people to spanning about 105 to 110
projects coordinated by the project team. It outlasted Ken and a bunch
of organizational changes and all kinds of chaos in the first layoffs.
When we shipped Alpha, we shipped a new architecture, a new chip, four
systems, three operating systems, 30 products with field training and
the whole works, the the end of '92. It was kind of a defining
experience for me (Bob Supnik, interview by Edgar Schein, 2001)

Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/dave_cutler-prism-mica-emerald-etc.html