Microsoft, others sketch the OS future. (distributed OS strategies) (Industry Trend or Event)

Although the hot topics at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in San Diego last week were Windows NT 5.0 and the Distributed InterNet Applications, the software giant's research team is laying the foundation for a futuristic operating system that can span more than one machine.

Having decided that the future of computing lies in distributed operating systems, Microsoft is counting on advances in hardware and networking technologies to help bring about a computing environment, referred to as Millennium, that its researchers believe will "raise the level of abstraction for developers and users."

Admittedly a "radical experimentation," Millennium calls …