DEC MICA (original) (raw)

MICA was the codename of the operating system developed for the DEC PRISM architecture. MICA was designed by a team at Digital Equipment Corporation led by Dave Cutler. MICA's design was driven by Digital's need to provide a migration path to PRISM for Digital's VAX/VMS customers, as well as allowing PRISM systems to compete in the increasingly important Unix market. MICA attempted to address these requirements by implementing VMS and ULTRIX user interfaces on top of a common kernel that could support the system calls (or "system services" in VMS parlance), libraries and utilities needed for both environments.