Many of the team members left the company over the next year, notably Dave Cutler who moved to Microsoft and led the development of Windows NT.

As the company explored the future of the VAX they concluded that a PRISM-like processor with a few additional changes could address all of these markets.

Introduced in 1977, the VAX was a runaway success for DEC, cementing its place as the world's #2 computer vendor behind IBM.

By the early 1980s, VAX systems had become "the computing hub of many technology-driven companies, sending spokes of RS-232 cables out to a rim of VT-100 terminals that kept the science and engineering departments rolling.

"[4] This happy situation was upset by the relentless improvement of semiconductor manufacturing as encoded by Moore's Law; by the early 1980s there were a number of capable 32-bit single-chip microprocessors with performance similar to early VAX machines yet able to fit into a desktop pizza box form factor.

Companies like Sun Microsystems introduced Motorola 68000 series-based Unix workstations that could replace a huge multi-user VAX machine with one that provided even more performance but was inexpensive enough to be purchased for every user that required one.

While DEC's own microprocessor teams were introducing a series of VAX implementations at lower price-points, the price-performance ratio of their systems continued to be eroded.

[5] Around the same time, in 1979, Dave Patterson was sent on a sabbatical from University of California, Berkeley to help DEC's west-coast team improve the VAX microcode.

Titan from DEC's Western Research Laboratory (WRL) in Palo Alto, California was a high-performance ECL based design that started in 1982, intended to run Unix.

[8] Eventually, Cutler was asked to define a single RISC project in 1985, selecting Rich Witek as the chief architect.

Through this early period, there were constant changes in the design as debates within the company argued over whether it should be 32- or 64-bit, aimed at a commercial or technical workload, and so forth.

As newer RISC-based workstations were introduced, the performance benefit of the VAX was constantly eroded, and the price/performance ratio completely undermined.

[8] Frustrated with the growing number of losses to cheaper faster competitive machines, independently, a small skunkworks group in Palo Alto, outside of Central Engineering, focused on workstations and UNIX/Ultrix, entertained the idea of using an off-the-shelf RISC processor to build a new family of workstations.

Full production of a DEC version could begin as early as January 1989, whereas it would be at least another year before a PRISM based machine would be ready.

But PRISM's performance was similar to that of the latest VAX machines and the RISC concept had considerable room for growth.

[12] The group next considered systems that combined both an existing VAX single-chip solution as well as a RISC chip for performance needs.

There appeared to be no compelling reason why VMS could not be ported to a RISC chip as long as these small bits of the model were preserved.

Two questions were raised: could the resulting RISC design also be a performance leader in the Unix market, and should the machine be an open standard?

[13] When PRISM and MICA were cancelled, Dave Cutler left Digital for Microsoft, where he was put in charge of the development of what became known as Windows NT.