thesis was entitled "An Architecture for Reliable Decentralized Systems". In 1983, Allchin was recruited to Banyan by founder Dave Mahoney, eventually being Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. During his seven years at Banyan, he created the VINES distributed operating system, which included the StreetTalk directory protocol as well as a series of network services based on the Xerox XNS stack. Bill Gates tried to recruit a reluctant Allchin to join Microsoft for a year, yet successfully convinced him to join in 1990. Gates told him that whatever he created would have a wider customer base through Microsoft than anyone else. Allchin is known as a prolific computer programmer/engineer. Allchin is also known for debugging systems remotely by having the person on the phone toggle in hexadecimal via front panel switches of early computers to correct problems. Microsoft Initially, Gates put Allchin in charge of revamping LAN Manager, using his networking expertise. However, Allchin scrapped the project, citing the need to start fresh. Allchin's first high-profile project at Microsoft was the Cairo technology, which was intended to add on to Windows NT to create the next version of the operating system. At the NT Developer Conference in July 1992, Allchin gave a presentation about the future Microsoft operating system. One of the main goals for Cairo was the ability for users to locate files based on their content as opposed to their name. Users would also have access to files stored on other machines on a network as easily as they had access to files on their own hard drives. Cairo was scheduled to ship as a single package in 1994. After several delays, it was finally released in pieces; the technology was shipped in successive operating system releases. The Cairo and Windows NT groups were combined, and Allchin created a new client and server organization focused on business and IT users. Allchin replaced Dave Cutler as the lead developer on Windows NT version 3.5 onwards. This led to conflict with Vice President Brad Silverberg, who was in charge of the development of Windows 95, the operating system which was aimed at the personal computer market as opposed to Windows NT's business computer market. In 1999, Microsoft re-organized its corporate structure. The Consumer Division, which maintained versions of Windows for home users and the Business & Enterprise Division, which maintained Windows NT, were combined into a single operating system