[aparsons]

You’re very welcome. Always nice to walk down memory lane to an exciting era for the industry.

Fun office rumour from the time: MSFT offices were in Seattle, while most competitors were in California. Yet Bill and co always seemed to know what every new company - stealth mode or not - was up to.

Rumour was that Msft had bribed a lot of SV reporters to gather intel. Often in the cafes and computer clubs where people loved to talk.

When Clinton was elected, there was some government agency shakeup and lot of ex-FBI agents were available to contract. Quite a few VIPs’ security affairs (including Michael Jordan who was the biggest star in the world) were handled by these contractors. Story went that we’d hired a number of them into the competitor intel work. We’d known about Sun working on a user space VM since 1992.

No idea if these were true or just fair tales.