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

[Clem Cole]

Hmm since this has deteriorated into stories and history of Dave and what
he did.  I'll add one of mine and what I know.  Apologies to this group
ahead of time if you do not, but I think many of you might find it amusing
if not interesting.

I was under the impression Culter built something similar to RSX for the
PDP-10 pre-DEC (for DuPont).  At least that is what guys like Fossil, Clark
D'Elia who had worked with Dave on RSX, Paul Cantrell who had worked on
VMS's file systems and Tom Kent on the terminal system had always said to
me. I'm pretty sure it was the DEC sales guys that introduced him to the
engineering teams and eventually he went to work for Roger in the "VAX SW"
team.     I've never been completely sure of the path, I think Dave came
late to RSX proper, although I thought he had a heavy hand in the "11M"
implementation.

I can say, in the early 1980s, I first met him at a bar in Littleton Ma
(the old "Maui ??something??" - which is now the site of the YankeeZee
River Restaurant) in Littleton, MA.    Clark knew I had programmed on VAX
Serial #1 under VMS and done the TCP/IP work so was pretty familiar with
the systems and even Dave's C compiler, but prefered UNIX and "Ritchie C."
  Dave and I knew of each other and had actually exchanged emails
previously but have never met in person before that night.   Clark wanted
us to meet, so he arrange for some of the VMS guys to getgether and dragged
me along when Cutler who was at the time at DEC west working on what would
later become Mica and had come east at that point for some mtg in Maynard
WRT uVax IIRC.   Dave Cane (Mr. VAX 750), heard the meeting was going to
happen and walked into Roger's office, who was later reported by I think it
was Janet Egan as having to have replied:  "Oh sh*t one of them is going to
tear a new a*shole into the other."


Anyway, we all ended up at the bar and Clark tried to trying to start a
food fight by turning to Dave and introduced me with the words:  "Dave meet
Clem.  He's one of the old UNIX guys and he thinks all the SW DEC built in
the last few years sucks."  But Fossil then turned to Dave and said "When I
hired you I had a fiery red beard [he turned grey in the mid-70s], and then
turned to me and said and after you I went bald."  Truth is we got along
fine that night and would each buy the other a beer or two.  In fact, Dave
and I would work together a few years later on NT-OS/2 uKernel when he was
at MSFT and I was at NCR.

But that evening, I would not grant him two design issues with VMS - using
assembler instead of BLISS [DC hates BLISS] and the file naming conventions
[which he defended as being required to be compatible with RSX and I
replied but he wasn't]; and he would not give into the fact the UNIX had a
command system that was in his words "random" and "unclean" in the handling
of things like errors [I understand but accept it as a cost of that's what
happens when you have a lot of different developers as opposed to small
controlled team and in return you get a lot of useful work from a lot of
people].

The truth is we both respected the work the other had done and understand
why both systems were successful and useful and I think Clark was
disappointed it did not become a shouting match.

As for NT, Dave definitely lead Mica, which begat NT-OS/2 @ MSFT.   Windows
was spliced into what would become NT-Windows by the time it became a
product.   But Dave's team was responsible for uKernel portion and he will
tell you he was influenced by CMU's Mach and what had made UNIX
successful.  When it was still Mica, the idea was to have two user mode
API's, one being VMS and one being UNIX with the new ukernel being coming
between them.

Clem

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> On 2015-03-04 20:18, Bill Cunningham wrote:
>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: <lists at openmailbox.org>
>> To: "SIMH" <Simh at trailing-edge.com>
>> Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 7:45 AM
>> Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth
>>
>>
>>  Incredible post! This list is worth following for the scope of
>>> information
>>> alone, even if you never run SIMH...
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, 3 Mar 2015 17:28:25 -0800
>>> Sergey Oboguev <oboguev at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>  Since the topic of "Cutler the Demiurg of VMS" comes up once in a while
>>>> here and there...
>>>>
>>>
>>> [fantastic post deleted for brevity]
>>>
>>
>>     This sounds to me that Cutler and maye RSX was about the same time
>> that Ritchie and Thompson also got Unix together. And I guess it was 5
>> years later that Kildall put CP/M together. And the 8" diskette came
>> together.
>>
>
> Actually, Ritchie and Thompson did Unix before Cutler did RSX. But Cutler
> didn't design RSX, he just reimplemented it. The early versions of RSX are
> contemporary with Unix, yes.
>
>         Johnny
>
>
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