[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Neil Rieck]

On Nov 7, 5:32 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
> > I didn't know that Cutler was a hardware guy.
>
> OK, I had opened the document in quicklook and couldn'to select text
> from it. (quicklook is apple's implementation of
> dir/show=formatted_content  filename)
>
> Now, I have it on a PDF reader:
>
> ##
> Evolution of the architecture
> For almost a year, the VAX development
> and review teams worked
> back and forth on the VAX architecture.
> After four versions, the
> proposed architecture was found
> to be too complex, too expensive,
> and too complicated to execute.
>
> The company formed a group that
> became known as “The Blue Ribbon
> Committee” that included three
> hardware engineers: Bill Strecker,
> Richie Lary, and Steve Rothman,
> and three software engineers: Dave
> Cutler, Dick Hustvedt, and Peter
> Lipman
> ##
>
> ##
> With the VAX hardware development underway, the software
> development—code named Starlet—began a few months later in June of
> 1975. Roger Gourd led the project and software engineers Dave Cutler, Dick
> Hustvedt, and Peter Lipman were technical project leaders, each responsible
> for a different part of the operating system.
> ##
>
> ##
> After the 750, DIGITAL
> designed the MicroVAX I—one of the first DIGITAL projects to include
> silicon compilers—with the consulting help of Carver Meade, a pioneer in
> integrated circuit design. Building on the experience of the MicroVAX I,
> the company soon followed with the more powerful MicroVAX II.
> While the V-11 was designed as a full VAX implementation, the MicroVAX I
> was designed as a VAX subset. The MicroVAX I system was developed
> in the company’s Seattle facility, headed by Dave Cutler. Because the
> MicroVAX I was a much simpler design than the V-11, and because of the
> use of the silicon compiler tools, it was completed before the V-11.
> ##
>
> ##
> “The sense I always had was that there were four key technical
> visionaries at
> the beginning of MicroVAX: Dave Cutler, with his creation of the MicroVAX
> I system for early software development; Bob Supnik, who headed up
> MicroVAX chip development and also wrote the microcode; Jesse Lipcon
> who headed up MicroVAX II Server Development; and Dick Hustvedt, who
> drove the MicroVMS Software Strategy.”
> —Jay Nichols
> Computer Special Systems, Manager of Engineering
> ##
>
> ##
> Prism: VMS on RISC technology
> DIGITAL began working on RISC technology in 1986 when Jack Smith,
> VP of Operations, tapped Dave Cutler on the shoulder and said, “You will be
> RISC Czar for DIGITAL. Organize a program.” The program, code named
> Prism, was to develop the company’s RISC machine. Its operating system
> would embody the next generation of design principles and have a
> compatibility layer for UNIX and VMS.
> ##
>
> ##
> Alpha was very much the “son of Prism.” The primary changes made to
> produce Alpha were for VMS compatibility. The original Prism design had
> serious compatibility problems with the VAX and VMS in two areas—
> numerical data types and privileged architecture.
> ##
>
> ##
> “When our customers had beta
> copies of Windows NT, they told us
> that it felt like they were revisiting
> an old friend. That’s not surprising
> because the chief architect of both
> operating systems was Dave Cutler.
> So there is a natural affinity from a
> technical perspective between the two
> environments. Wes Melling is often
> quoted calling it the ‘Cutler effect.’”
> —Mary Ellen Fortier
> Director, OpenVMS Marketing
> ##

Here is a quote from DEC Engineer Gordon Bell. (you can find the full
text online here: http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/bell.htm).
According to this, DEC was drifting from project-to-project and really
didn't know what they had under Cutler

Transition from VAX to Prism, MIPS, and Alpha: Losing momentum

Next, I think what really got DEC into the most significant trouble
was the way it dealt with the transition from to RISC and to a 64-bit
address. Dave Cutler had an architecture called Prism that he had
designed at the Seattle lab. That was all done, the manuals were done,
people were working on chips, and the program was going along well.
Meanwhile, MIPS came to DEC and said: “Gee, you’re not there with RISC
or your one chip VAXen, you need a RISC machine for your workstations.
Why don’t you build a workstation on RISC?” And DEC did, introduced
it, and said: “Oh well, we’ll stay with MIPS.” Then they killed the
Prism project and Mr. Cutler left. They killed it, but Ken didn’t know
that it wasn’t dead. It was still alive in the semiconductor group and
it sprung up as Alpha. And so that came back several years later.
Meanwhile other people within the company were looking at building a
fast MIPS architecture machine including a group in Palo Alto which
built something called BIPS – a billion instructions per second
processor. In fact they have one. They had one about three years ago.
So all of those projects never came to market. And that’s why I said
when I left the company that you’ve got to get rid of VAX, you’ve got
to go open. The companies that I then started and worked with were
open systems companies. They were all UNIX. But it was deciding to go
to Alpha or deciding to do Prism, then killing Prism and going to
MIPS, and then coming back to Alpha and killing MIPS again. DEC could
have survived any of those decisions. It could have stayed with Prism,
got it out there a year earlier, and been significant in the
marketplace. It could have switched to MIPS, and I think that would
have probably been the best strategy. But coming in late, having to
build these very fancy FAB facilities to get the performance was
really costly. And today, there is no way I see that DEC can afford to
be a semiconductor supplier or microprocessor supplier when they have
to build their own, use their own, FAB facilities. So that was a
significant error in judgment and decision making. On the other hand,
the world is better off because Dave Cutler went to Microsoft and
built NT for a much larger market.

NSR