[Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Clem Cole]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Sergey Oboguev <oboguev at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Cutler was a technical team manager during the development of initial
> versions
> of VMS, however he was not the top #1 architect and technical contributor.
>

​Excellent post.   Small but I think important correction.  DC was not the
manager. He was one of the technical leads and incredibly important the
success.  But "Fossil" aka - Roger S Gourd (rsg), was the manager of "VAX
Software".  I note that most of the best engineering managers I have ever
known and worked with in the industry all worked for Roger at some time in
their career.    [After the Vax shipped in the mid 1970s, Roger moved to
florida and helped to develop the Gould machine].

Roger could get the most and best out of his people.  He was not a perfect
manager by any stretch and many found his methods difficult.  But he made
it work and people that worked for him in the 70s and early 80s all swear
by that experience.   It has been said by others that VMS and much of the
software that was what made it popular, would not have succeeded if Roger
had not managed it.  DC, Hustvedt and Lipman owe a lot to his
running interference and making sure the right things happened so
they could do the technical work.

In the 90s and early 2000's they used to come to Boston in the summers, and
I would try to catch up with him and some of the others from the day, but
that has not happened for health reasons for a while.  I believe that he is
still growing orchids in retirement, but his wife Sally told me a while
back his dementia has gotten to the point that he remembers little now.

Pain in the ass that fossil could be on a day to day basis, I miss his
council.

Clem
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