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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Dave Cutler:Father of VMS, NT, MicroVax .

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G8JCF

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Joined: 15/05/2014
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Posted: 02:17pm 18 Apr 2016

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http://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-senior-technical-fellow-dave-cutler-to-be-made-a-computer-history-museum-fellow/

The only Konstant is Change

bigmik

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Joined: 20/06/2011
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Posted: 07:24pm 18 Apr 2016

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OMG Peter,

I opened that Link and thought I saw Don McKenzie staring back at me..

Here is the real Don.

Actually I knew Dave Cuttler's name but not much about him..

Interesting and a well deserved recognition of his work.

Kind Regards,

MickEdited by bigmik 2016-04-20

Mick's uMite Stuff can be found >>> HERE (Kindly hosted by Dontronics) <<<

paceman
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Posted: 04:04am 19 Apr 2016

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He's certainly got a pretty amazing CV Peter. That story notes he developed VMS with Digital in the late 70's - I reckon it was a bit earlier, more like '76 on. I did some work with RT11 from '79-'81 and VMS was around well before I started that. One thing they didn't mention was the almost universal use of various VAX VMS systems in the university sector. That was in no small part due to Digital's discounted prices to tertiary institutions for marketing leverage but they were still excellent systems.

Greg

bigfix
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Joined: 20/02/2014
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Posted: 06:08am 19 Apr 2016

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I worked for DEC more than 17 Years, fixing PDP11 & VAXes down to Chiplevel

Dave Cutler was one of the very few architects who knew the HW inside out
Very few designers knew more than a small area in a system
A CPU training on a 11/780 was 6 full weeks for me, just to get an overview

When you look at his VMS main scheduling loop, he interleaved processor register and memory access instructions to avoid most wait states

VMS was very powerful due to those various OS optimisations on a rather slow machine
(11/780 was built out of plain 7400 Chips)
We had customers with 60+ Serial lines feeding interactive terminals,
hammering input data all day long
Those lines were handled with interupt driven I/O from a single CPU
The VT Terminals were used interactive and the character echo was supplied by the SW
Any delay of more than 100msec would be visible as lagging input

Dave left his marks all over:
VMS shifted by one letter became W/NT - like HAL is IBM shifted...
DCL is rumored to be not DEC Command Language, but "Dave Cutler Language"

G8JCF

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Posted: 10:18am 19 Apr 2016

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A truly great and unique engineer and architect in all respects.

I'm just surprised it took so long before he was honoured.

The only Konstant is Change

bigmik

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Posted: 11:38am 19 Apr 2016

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Peter, All,

When I started in my current job back in 1985 We used VMS on VAX 780's as our main computer system.. Whilst I personally didn't use them I was familiar with them as I worked on other equipment (Motorola 6800 based) terminals that the 780's served. Whilst I was repairing, as was a part of my job in those days, some of the Motorola boards I remember one of the engineers explaining to me that one of the tricks that DEC used in their boards was to use standard 74xx parts but packaged UPSIDE DOWN and sold at a considerable (10 fold or more) mark up in price... I thought that was a neat way of anti Piracy protection ... Well until the news got out that was..

Regards,

Mick

Mick's uMite Stuff can be found >>> HERE (Kindly hosted by Dontronics) <<<

G8JCF

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Posted: 01:19pm 19 Apr 2016

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Mick

Peter

The only Konstant is Change

JohnS
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Joined: 18/11/2011
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Posted: 11:27pm 21 Apr 2016

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Thanks for posting the link.

Dave certainly deserves awards.

This one may have taken a while as he's a "strong" character. (Very.) [The story of the fist through a wall is presumably on the net.]

Designs and writes great code. His re-write of the kernel of RSX-11 (to create RSX-11M) was terrific. Easily readable code (MACRO-11 of course in those days).

With people like Gordon Bell singing Dave's praises he must be good!

John

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