DEC cancelled Cutler's pet projects Mica and Prism, a 64-bit RISC chip and a portable multi-personality next-gen OS to run on it.

He was upset. Ripe for head-hunting. MS did so, but he insisted on bringing his core team.

MS did not know what to do with him and put the team to work on some corner of LAN Manager.

Then Windows 3.0 was a hit, which led to IBM and Microsoft divorcing. IBM kept OS/2 1.x (16-bit, for the '286) and OS/2 2.x (32-bit, for the '386).

Microsoft got OS/2 3.x, a planned CPU-independent portable OS.

It was working on it on Intel's RISC chip, the i860, codenamed N-Ten. The OS was named after it: OS/2 NT.

Then, with Windows now suddenly a big deal, getting a next-gen Windows working was suddenly a big urgent issue.

Cutler got the job: finish OS/2 NT and make it work.

OS/2 NT was renamed Windows NT, and as it was barely a skeleton of an OS, Cutler took a lot of the design of Mica -- the cancelled next-gen VMS -- and built NT around that.

DEC found out and sued, and DEC got very sweet deals on NT and Exchange and things as a result. (Compaq totally blew this and died as a result. It deserved worse.)

DEC also salvaged the Prism project and it was launched as DEC Alpha, the first 64-bit RISC chip.

Alpha was the first 64-bit platform NT ran on, and it was also the first non-x86 platform Linux ran on.