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

[FredK]

"JF Mezei" <jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> wrote in message 
news:010541fb$0$23355$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com...
> Neil Rieck wrote:
>> was tantamount to admitting a mistake. "Driving asway Culter was one
>> of the dumbest f*ck*ng things Digital ever did", on person said. "But
>> we can't say we screwed up because some of the idiots responsible for
>> that are still here".
>
>
> My impression is that people are putting way too much importance on
> Cutler, perhaps because they hear about Cutler bragging about himself.
>

I find it amusing to hear the opinions of people who've never met Dave or 
any of the original team that built VMS.

"Driving away Cutler..." was all part of a common problem, the OpenVMS group 
had reached the 800lb Gorilla mark and had veto power over a lot of things. 
It also was the ATM machine.  So there was an unwillingness and inability to 
implement whatever would replace VMS.  Dave leaving was just one of the 
symptoms, a very large example of it.

> Digital went to NT because  at first it wanted Alpha to become widely
> used, and not much later, because it wanted to abandon its own operating
> systems to become a Microsoft reseller.
>

DEC wanted to be able to make money or at least break even building Alpha 
chips.  Period.  Windows was the potential jackpot in terms of volume.

> A Cutler-less team managed to build a most excellent Alpha chip
> architecture. And it made more sense to port VMS than starting yet
> another operating system since VMS has an installed base and still had
> an impressive software portfolio.
>

Gads.  Take this as a lesson: had they been able to produce nVAX on time, 
there wouldn't have been a need for Alpha.  From the blank-slate 
perspective, Alpha is great.  BUT it was a DISASTER for VMS regardless of 
the performance.  It broke binary compatibility, shedding ISV's and products 
that were never ported.  It caused calendar *years* of effort and millions 
and millions of dollars to do.  It was ported to VMS because at the time, 
VMS was still big business - but by then internally VMS was seen as a 
strategic dead end (at the time it was UNIX as the next big thing) and the 
UNIX/RISC weed had rooted.  VMS never recovered from the VAX running out of 
gas, and the port to Alpha.  But it was inevitable that it had to happen, 
and we (DEC) needed to have been planning what came *after* VMS.

>From the parochial viewpoint of the VMS installed base - what they needed 
was faster VAXes.  Not Alpha.

>From a wider perspective, the OS Cutler was working on (not the hardware) at 
DEC would have been the key to getting *beyond* VMS.  An OS with executive 
environments that would allow VMS compatibility (at least at the source and 
command interface level), or with UNIX, or with something brand new.

I can hear it now "but VMS is the greatest!" - at the time I thought RSX was 
the greatest.  Eventually VMS took it's spot.  Who knows how *great* the 
Next Thing after VMS would have been - especially if manu of the people who 
wrote VMS were the ones who helped replace it.

> Considering it took over 10 years before Microsoft had an NT that was
> reliable enough, Cutler shouldn't be bragging so much about it.
>

LOL.  I love guys who know so little and say so much.  Please distinguish 
between the microkernel and "Windows".  It's not like Dave designed 
"Windows".

> What Cutler learned at Digital is that corporate life is much like the
> TV show "Survivor". It isn't enough to learn to get water and food, you
> also need to play the social game to have alliances so that you don't
> get voted out. Bragging publically about his accomplishements and his
> worth  makes him look more valuable and makes it harder for Microsoft to
> lose him. And it also forced Microsoft to listen to his ideas "because
> he is important".

LOL.  I'm not exactly sure why you feel compelled to try to tear down people 
that you don't know, and infer things about situations you have little or no 
direct knowledge of.

As a human being, people love or hate Dave - and that goes for people who 
worked for him or with him.  On the other hand, as an OS architect this guy 
was at the core of RSX, VMS and NT.  That isn't to say it was a one man 
show.  But the guy has made major contributions as an engineer/architect to 
OS's - these are real accomplishments at a level that only a handful of 
people can make claims of being even close.  I remember reading his code 
back in the 1980's when I was a Software Specialist in the field.  There was 
even something approaching a cult of worshipers among the guys who were real 
technical dweebs, and stories bordering on epic myths about how certain 
subsystems had been written fueled by anger and pizza over a weekend.