Conference 7.286::digital

    I can sympathize with DNC, I think we are still at the mercy of
    Marketeers who have little or no concept of the strategic long term
    direction that our technology can take us in, and as he says, are
    swayed by the current "whizigig" being touted by our competition. This
    has led to this crazy myth that we are spending too much on R&D, and
    generally kept us in a confused state. 
    
    DNC is a little hot-headed. Sadly, his vendetta against DEC is
    mis-directed. Many of those that blockaded Prism, have already gone.
    THose that remain wouldn't realize what he is doing, if you wrote it
    across their foreheads...
    
    A Few years back, when Gordon Bell left, I said to an asssociate,
    "There goes a technical visionary, but it's OK, we still have Cutler",
    then Cutler left, but it was OK, because we still had Heinen, then
    Heinen left...
    
    I don't know all of the players personally, but I have this nervous
    feeling that at a senior level, in terms of technical people that
    understand the direction that we should be going in (rather than that
    proposed by Weather Vaners or "Bottom-line" MBAs) can be counted on the
    fingers of one hand...
    
    sigh
    
    q
    

    
    Hey, I understand it too.  The thing is I don't think the market would
    have ever accepted a portable OS from a hardware company.  Only a 
    Microsoft could pull this off successfully.  Even if Cutler had
    BP's job, the marketplace would have simply called NT "Son of VMS".
    
    Cutler does not understand this, ergo, he slams Digital.  Digital
    needs to eat some humble pie and make this man happy again.  We don't
    need him making customers think he is our enemy.
    
    my $.02
    
    -Ed
    

    .1
    
    >A Few years back, when Gordon Bell left, I said to an asssociate,
    >"There goes a technical visionary, but it's OK, we still have Cutler",
    >then Cutler left, but it was OK, because we still had Heinen, then
    >Heinen left...
    
    dont worry Q,  Iam still here !
    
    
     ______
     | DEC |   <--- my DECeey hat
     \_____/
     (-o o-)
      \ v /
       <0>
        |           <---- a true DECeee dude who will not leave DEC 
    ----+-----            like Cutler and Gorden and Heinen did.
        |
       / \
    
    \nasser

"Weather Vane marketing" indeed. At that time, I thought all the marketing we
did at the decision making level came from KO's gut. At the moment, it's
clearly coming from other peoples guts. I don't yet see customer aligned
marketing being done at all... it's all internal pitch battles.

This is why Palmer and the new Digital are such a breath of fresh air, and
why I want to continue to play a part in this company!
								- Ian W.

I think the comments are a nice dose of reality, that whatever the lineage
of WNT and Dave Cutler, it's still a Microsoft OS by a Microsoft employee.

DEC unfortunately will need to compete in this game regardless.

			Bob Cohen

    Just as I was reading this thread, I was also reading Digital News &
    Review (1/18/93 issue). In the Matco column, Charlie Matco says that he
    heard that AXP stands for "Almost eXactly Prism". Hmmmm
    
    JOe

>In the Matco column, Charlie Matco says that he
>    heard that AXP stands for "Almost eXactly Prism". Hmmmm

	Old joke. No matter what meaningless letters we'd picked someone would
	likely have found something similar to make out of them.


			Alfred

	
	Let's just hope that the world doesn't get to know it as an
	Awfully eXpensive Processor.

    Prism was an advanced development project involving a RISC processor.
    I forget the code name for the hardware (Crystal?) but Prism was the
    code for the software I think. Or the other way around.

    		Alfred

    Other way around.  The uPRISM chip was, as whoever is currently writing
    the Charlie Matco column obviously knows too, designed by the team that
    did the EV3 and later the EV4 chips, which share a lot of the ideas
    from the uPRISM chip.
    
    /Charlotte

Prism wasn't "advanced development".  It was a real live
project to develop DEC's hardware base and operating system
for the 1990s.

    for more info on PRISM also see
    
    MARKETING note 1824.*
    OSF note 477.14+
    
    cheers,
    Robert

Re .9:

>                          -< exactly what was prism? >-

It was a simplified architecture for fast execution.
				/AHM

RE: 2338.11 by CVG::THOMPSON "Radical Centralist"

> Prism was an advanced development project involving a RISC processor.

Crystal was the original hardware.  ECL ~150 VUP.  

Prism was next.

uPrism was a scaled down and cheap version of the Prism.  uPrism was to run 
on a platform called Rock and on Pebble (my baby).  Killed.  Dave left the
company.  I held in my hand,  at that time,   the most powerful microprocessor 
in the world.   Someone from Maynard made sure all were collected and (rumored) 
smashed.

"Riscy VAX" was next,  leading to the EV series and Alpha AXP.  Differences
between all these were trivial.

Software was "Ozix"... I'm not sure of spelling.


Phil

    Re .-1
    
    I thought the base software that Cutler was doing was called MICA
    and on top of that was meant to be VMS and UNIX personality modules.
    Didn't OZIX come ang go later?
    
    Dave

    Re "the world's most powerful microprocessor..."  what time-frame are
    we recalling here?  Just curious...  Dan
    

    While we are on the scuttlebutt thing, I had heard that DNC had a
    MicroKernal running virtual machines, so that you could run U*x and VMS
    on the same box at the same time...
    
    q
    

RE: Mica.  You are correct.

RE: "the world's most powerful microprocessor..."  

uPrism pass one,  early Aug 1988.  Project was already canceled.


Phil

    I have been given to understand that Prism was dropped in favor of the
    MIPS R3000 (and successors) because the state of compiler development
    for Prism would have delayed its introduction unacceptably -- i.e., it
    might have missed its market window, or at least kept Digital out of
    the RISC UNIX market for too long.  At the time, MIPS had better
    compilers, although the Prism chip outperformed the MIPS chip by a
    healthy margin.
    
    Mac

An excerpt from an article entitled:  'How DEC Developed Alpha'. 


   'But toward the end of the '80s, some realized shared computers would one 
 day give way to powerful, single-user workstations networked to powerful
 resources.  And during that period, the banner of open systems was unfurled
 by Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, Calif.; users were demanding non-
 proprietory designs that would slip into their computer operating environments
 like light bulbs into a socket.  For manufacturers of proprietary mainframes
 and minicomputers, chaos lay ahead.
    Summertime Blues.  IN the late summer of 1988, a number of top-level
 engineers at DEC found themselves idled.  Several of these "consultants" -
 DEC engineers whose accomplishments make them special design resources - had
 been involved for the past three years in the Prism project, whose goal was
 to develop DEC's first commercial reduced-instruction-set computer.  (Titan,
 a research project to construct very high speed RISC with emitter-coupled
 logic, or ECL, began in 1984 at DEC's Western Research Center in Palo Alto,
 Calif., but was never considered commercial.)
     The Prism architecture was to consist of a set of integer and floating-
 point chips.  But, by June 1988, the Prism team did not yet have a lauchable
 32-bit RISC machine; the integer chip design had not been fabricated and the
 floating-point unit was still in the early design stage.  Further, the
 associated compiler, code-named Gem, was also in early development.
     At a stormy meeting that month, DEC's senior executive committee, which
 determines major business directions, decided to adopt RISC architecture 
 from MIPS, rather than go with Prism.  While Prism's design was to prove
 much faster than MIPS's, (in the fall of 1988, it was shown that Prism would
 run at 60-80 Mhz), MIPS was further along and would allow DEC to gain a foot-
 hold in the open systems market within a year.
     Dave Cutler, who headed up the Prism development team, was disappointed
 over the cancelation and left DEC about a year later (for Microsoft Inc.,
 where he is now in charge of developing the Windows NT operating system).
 Others who had worked on the project felt likewise.
      As that fateful June meeting was coming to a close, Robert Supnik
 recalled, a senior officer told him, "You know, this RISC technology stuff
 might pose a real threat to our VMS business sometime in the future.  Why
 don't you look into this and tell us what we ought to do?"  From this 30-
 second exchange, Alpha would be born.'

RE:.16, .21, .22

As originally conceived, PRISM (Prototype RISc Machine) was to be DEC's 
hardware architecture for the '90s, and its operating system, MICA, was to be 
our operating system for the '90s.  The orginal idea was for PRISM to be a 
64-bit RISC architecture, thus in one stroke significantly differentiating it 
from VAX and also providing expansion headroom to take us into the 21st 
century.  MICA was to be a multithreaded, portable, kernel-based, 
object-oriented operating system, with personality modules on it to provide 
both ULTRIX and VMS execution environments.  Windows/NT on Alpha AXP is very 
close to the original vision of MICA on PRISM.

A lot of things went wrong in the process of realizing this idea.  The concept 
of a 32-bit "microPRISM" meant that the GEM compiler group had to throw out 
over a year's work and start over, which sent delays rippling through the 
entire layered product side of the effort.  It also removed the 64-bit vs. 
32-bit differentiation--PRISM was now just another 32-bit RISC machine and 
there were problems with lack of differentiation from VAX.  People also got 
cold feet about whether the VMS personality module would really be enough like 
VMS to be viable, so a separate port-VMS-to-PRISM effort was started.  Ditto 
with ULTRIX.  This more or less left MICA high and dry.

By the time June 1988 rolled around, microPRISM hardware was in good shape (as 
a previous note indicated, first silicon a few months later was to yield the 
fastest microprocessor in the world), but the software side, especially layered 
products, was a real shambles.  If microPRISM were to be released on its 
original schedule, it would have next to nothing in terms of software running 
on it.  This, plus, as stated in a previous note, worries about cannibalization 
of VAX and competition from MIPS, led to the PRISM program's cancellation.  We 
regrouped and got our act together for the next RISC processor effort, which 
was Alpha AXP.

Dave Cutler left after the PRISM cancellation.  If he still feels somewhat 
bitter about it, it's not without reason.  I'm still miffed at the pig's 
breakfast we made out of the whole thing, and I was only peripherally 
involved in the effort.  DEC took a very nice technical idea and bungled it.  
It was, perhaps, too revolutionary a change for a company as large as ours to 
make.

--PSW

    
    There is no way in hell MICA could have seen the success NT will.  
    three reasons:
    
    1) We already have something like it.  It is called OpenVMS.  Only 
       die-hard VMS lovers buy it.  UNIX people thumb their noses at it.
       Yeah it does not have a microkernel, but do users *Really* care?
    
    2) No way in hell we could have put a Windows API on it.  Gates
       would have sicked the entire Yale and Hahvahd law departments
       on us.
    
    3) OSF, Chorus and now Microsoft now have such beasts.  None of these
       companies sell hardware and never worry about people crying 
       "propreitary"
    
    Now, had we spun DECwest off as an independent company, ( i.e. no DEC
    equity position) it might have worked.  Cutler was kidding himself
    if he thought this might take place.  
    
    -Ed
    
    

>    2) No way in hell we could have put a Windows API on it.  Gates
>       would have sicked the entire Yale and Hahvahd law departments
>       on us.

   I believe you can copyright the code, and you can copyright the
documents which detail the specification of the interface, but I'm
fairly certain that Microsoft can't do anything to touch an independently
developed implementation of "windows" which provides the same programming
interface.  I recall recently seeing an advert for a company which was providing
the Windows API on SUN machines.

   Your other two arguments don't make much sense, but I believe this one
is patently incorrect.

					-mjg

re Note 2338.25 by MARX::GRIER:

>                -< They couldn't stop a conformant implemenation >-
> 
> >    2) No way in hell we could have put a Windows API on it.  Gates
> >       would have sicked the entire Yale and Hahvahd law departments
> >       on us.
  
        I remember that one of the original ideas for DECwindows was
        to implement the Windows API on it.

        Bob

RE: .24

>    1) We already have something like it.  It is called OpenVMS.  Only 
>       die-hard VMS lovers buy it.  UNIX people thumb their noses at it.
>       Yeah it does not have a microkernel, but do users *Really* care?

MICA was not a VMS look-alike.  It was a completely new operating system whose 
only relationship to VMS is that it would have a VMS API.  It would also have a 
Unix API, and the potential for others.  It also would have been easily ported 
to other hardware architectures.  And yes, when it comes to marketing an 
operating system, the trade press and users DO care about things like being 
microkernel-based, just like people who buy cars care about things like 
rack-and-pinion steering or fuel injection.

>    2) No way in hell we could have put a Windows API on it.  Gates
>       would have sicked the entire Yale and Hahvahd law departments
>       on us.

Or more likely, Apple would have included us in their suit against Microsoft 
over Windows copying from the Mac.  Remember, though, that at this time (1988), 
Windows wasn't very important--it was just starting to take off.

>    3) OSF, Chorus and now Microsoft now have such beasts.  None of these
>       companies sell hardware and never worry about people crying 
>       "propreitary"

This is true.


RE: .25

Or if not patently incorrect, at least copyrightly incorrect.  :-)


RE: .26

Yep, the original idea for DECwindows was to implement the Windows graphical 
look-and-feel and API.  Microsoft wouldn't license us for it.


RE: .27

No question about it--Dave Cutler is something of a prima donna.  But you have 
to admit that taking "his attitude" to Microsoft accomplished something that he 
couldn't get done at Digital--he got the MICA concept out the door and 
shipping.

--PSW

    Re .27
    
    The only thing that could prove you right is if NT bombs in the market
    place. If it is successful Dave Cutler as the technical director
    has to get a LOT of credit for the success.
    
    I judge people on their results not on whether I'd want them as my
    friend.
    
    Dave

    Re .29
    
>    The only thing that could prove you right is if NT bombs in the market
>    place. If it is successful Dave Cutler as the technical director
>    has to get a LOT of credit for the success.

    By the same token, Dave Cutler must also assume a lot of responsibility
    for the demise of PRISM.

    Truth be known, I suspect cancellation of PRISM was the result of his
    inability to deliver in a marketable time.

    Windows NT  - 32 bit, non-multiuser - some future...

	AJ

RE: .30

	Multiuser NT is being done by a company called Citrix in Florida.
	They currently do a multiuser OS/2.  

	RE: your suspecting the PRISM cancellation being DC's fault.

	Ummm, I seriously doubt, from what I've read so far, that one
	could lay the whole blame on Dave Cutler.

							mike

    RE: 1-31

    There's some truths..but most of the last 31 notes is fiction.

    The truths are:
    	- PRISM was ahead of it's time (about 3 years by the original PRISM
    	  schedule still hanging in my office)
    	- the hardware was 64-bit...no 32-bit...no 64-bit..no 32-bit...
    	- DNC was not politically acceptable to Digital's senior management
    	  (brilliant technically - as far as I'm concerned the best that
    	  DEC ever had..or will have)
    	- MICA was the PRISM O/S and would run multiple O/S APIs
    	  simultaneously (VMS, ULTRIX, take_your_pick)
    	- UNIX vendors were eating out lunch (like Sun) and Joe Dinucci
    	  was making a LOT of noise and promoting the use of MIPSco R3000
    	  because they were shipping microprocessors (Joe about a year
    	  later went to MIPSco as a VP and took a number of his people
    	  with him...hmmmmmmmm)
    	- The original hardware was ECL (read: very expensive) with vectors
    	  (remember them) and was a scientific machine with N+1 redundant
    	  power supplies and LOTS of high availability stuff for the 
    	  commercial folks but was originally aimed at the technical market
    	  where we were getting hammered (and still are)
    	- The PRISM microprocessor folks in Hudson were having fab problems

    I could go on and on here but I won't.  PRISM was ABSOLUTELY the
    architecture that Alpha is based on but DEC was not ready for PRISM. 
    Dave left after many frustrations.  It was after the entire program was
    canceled, both hardware and software.  It was a very sad day to see
    Dave leave but I believe it has turned out best for him...not for DEC.

    OZIX was Roger Heinen's brainchild.  Roger took over DECwest when Dave
    resigned.  OZIX died when Roger left the company.  Ironically Dave and
    Roger are now reunited (sort of) at Microsoft...

    Sorry for the rambling but I thought someone should set part of the
    record straight.

I thought Roger went to Apple

    
    Re: .32
    
    There may be two sides to the story.
    
    I know not whether any of this is true, but company legend has it
    that DECwest was created specifically for Dave Cutler who wanted
    to live in Seattle, and that he had a habit of threatening to leave
    when he didn't get things his way.  If this legend is accurate,
    perhaps this time they got fed up and called his bluff.
    
    Steve
    

    re. 33
    
    He just moved to Microsoft as their VP of Databases
    
    re. 34
    
    The legend was that he (and others) wanted to build products (such as
    MicroVAX) away from corporate central and that this (Seattle) area was
    "desirable".
    

    re: 22,23,32
    
    	in 1975-76 time frame we did some work in the mill with some
    CMU students on intern, it was the result of CMU research and seemed
    interesting at the time. I now look back and say what to h*** went
    wrong that we never pursued this and someone else takes it and runs
    with it and beats our brains out.....
    
    	the work we did was on a new kind of processor that was going
    to be faster it was called RISC, guess the non-technical people
    ended up getting involved and we got our clocks cleaned..note this was
    in 1975-76....
    
    
    	wasn't the first time though, in 1967-68 we we're producing
    resistor substrates in a fab room in the mill, whats this put resistors
    in a little flat pack so you can put them on a module....that'll never
    go anywhere...the operation was shut down I was told cause other
    companies could do this better that us and no money in it, TI took it
    and ran with it...DEC has had a lot of great visions from a technical
    standpoint, and someone else ends up making money of it and we lose our
    shirts....
    
    enough rambling, but my point is "the more things change the more
    they stay the same..."

re .15:

>>                          -< exactly what was prism? >-

>It was a simplified architecture for fast execution.

     and a capital idea, at that!

[From UNIXworld, February 1993]

                           The Brain Behind NT
                        Microsoft's David Cutler
                         UNIXWorld February 1993


David Cutler once walked into a high-level meeting at Digital Equipment
Corp. wearing a T-shirt that read, You're Screwing Me!" the company -true
to the shirts word- eventually did.

Today, he's trying to screw DEC and, in passing, the UNIX industry. Here's
why.

Cutler, now Microsoft Corp.'s director of Windows NT Development, will
never forget the October day in 1988 when he brought an edict from DEC's
Maynard, Mass. headquarters -or Mecca as he sarcastically calls it- to the
180 people in DEC West's" Seattle offices announcing the cancellation of
their three year old project It was the worst day of his life.

Cutler, the head of the development team for the successful VMS operating
system, was working on an advanced operating system for DEC's Prism line of
computers. The new operating system was intended to replace both VMS and
Ultrix, DEC's version of UNIX but DEC canceled the Prism line because it
could obsolete the company's proprietary products. "Three years of
dedicated work went down the drain," he says ruefully. And he's still mad.

The cancellation of Prism -about which DEC spokespeople refuse to speak-
clearly hurt Cutler's pride. He had spent -wasted- three years of his life
working on the project. So Cutler, who is known for his ordinarily Marine
drill instructor approach to management, told the staff the bad news and
then gave them a furlough -a one month paid vacation- without getting
approval from higher-ups.

He spent the month weighing his options. Cutler had thought about quitting
DEC before. In 1978, he interviewed with Intel Corp. because he wanted to
move to the west coast A year later, he resigned from DEC to start a
compiler company, but a group of senior-level executives convinced him to
reconsider. He stayed under the condition that he would be able to form
his own engineering facility outside of New England: DEC West. But although
he enjoyed the autonomy of being away from the "bullshit" in Maynard, DEC's
cancellation of Prism was too much for him.

After Prism was killed, some venture capitalists wanted to give Cutler
money for his own company. He considered the offers, but he didn't want to
run a company, he wanted to develop operating systems. News leaked to
Microsoft executives that Cutler wanted out of DEC.

DEC's Loss, Microsoft's Gain The timing couldn't have been better for
Microsoft, which was struggling through its advanced operating system
strategy. Its own next-generation operating system -OS/2 l.0 had started
shipping in December 1987, but it was a flop. Why did it fail? For one
thing, the product was co-developed by IBM Corp. and Microsoft and the two
companies fought through the entire project.

Microsoft needed a plan for the future. Be problem was that as processors
became faster, users wanted to run more advanced applications and many
power users were turning to UNIX for multitasking solutions. DOS, which was
Microsoft's nearly 20 year old technology, couldn't handle robust
multitasking applications.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked with Cutler. He had been courting him
to build a new portable operating system since August 1988. Cutler decided
to join Microsoft because the company's wide distribution meant that any
operating system he helped design was likely to afford him far more
recognition than would a DEC-only operating system. This was Cutler's
chance to fulfill his goal of writing the Next Great Operating System.

And to get back at DEC.

He moved the 10 blocks to Microsoft. A group of 16 disgruntled DEC
consulting engineers joined him. Consulting engineers are considered DEC's
most talented software engineers. Eventually, about 40 more DEC programmers
signed on with the software giant

If there's one thing I want to do it's to beat DEC," says Cutler "I think
the greatest way to do that is for them to have to buy and sell an
operating system that they could have gotten for free if they had not
driven me out."

Cutler says he still feels a sense of betrayal, and with betrayal comes
mistrust-especially of what he calls the "weather vane" marketers at DEC
who blocked his vision for developing great operating systems. People who
have worked with Cutler say he wants -needs- NT to be successful so he can
get back at the doubters. Is he confident? "Windows NT could very easily
sell more copies in its first year of existence than the sum total of all
UNIX systems ever sold," says Cutler. He adds that he doesn't have a gripe
with UNIX itself, but with the people who adamantly support it. He
disdainfully call them "religious bigots."

UNIX isn't going to die, he predicts, but NT will "seriously cut into UNIX
sales." He explains that his confidence stems from knowing that NT is not a
half-baked operating system. NT is not just two or three years old, he
believes, but actually the product of many years of DEC-funded research.

He's No Nerd (He Says)

Unlike Rich Kid Gates, Cutler's father was a janitor and his mother worked
in various civil service jobs. Cutler says they didn't have much money. As
a high-school student the broad shouldered Cutler was an avid athlete who
earned 15 letters. His athletic prowess helped him get a scholarship to
attend Michigan's Olivet College, where he was quarterback of the football
team and point guard of the basketball team. He graduated with a major in
mathematics and a minor in physics.

After college he worked for E.I. Du Pont deNemours and Co. in Wilmington,
Del., maintaining a Univac 1108. In August 1971, Cutler decided he wanted
to work for a computer company not be a computer administrator

He says he went to work for DEC because at the time it was "very
freewheeling," and that "people worked night and day at DEC to implement
their own ideas."

At DEC he was the principal designer and implementer of RSX-llM, a popular
real-time system that ran on DEC's PDP-11 series. then he was the key
designer for VAXELN, an embedded system toolkit for Microvax processors.
"It was far too far ahead of its time for Digital to fathom," says Cutler
unable to resist a jab at his prior employer. "It was never sold
aggressively for fear of cannibalizing VMS sales."

Although Cutler has worked on many operating systems, he claims he's no
"intellectual nerd." Responding to a direct question, he says he can beat
Gates in a wrestling match (which probably isn't saying a lot). He's known
as an avid skier who enjoys heli-skiing. Is he married? "No," he says,
"that is a mistake you only make twice."

the 50-year-old prefers work to recreation. He worked 12 hours a day, seven
days a week, for 18 months on the RSX-l1M project. "There is code in
RSX-llM that is authored by me dated Christmas Day, " he says.

"The guy is very intense," says a former DEC West engineer, "and he runs a
very tight ship."

And he can be emotional. Just before the second prerelease of NT, a
Microsoft engineer broke a kernel debugger. Cutler wanted to know what had
been done wrong. Someone replied that a technical flaw in the code had been
"corrected." Cutler's reaction? He put his fist through the wall. About two
months later at his 50th birthday party, the NT team presented him with the
"hole" in a picture frame.

"Once I accept an assignment I finish it. Nothing gets in the way save for
total cancellation of the project" he says. What kind of a boss is he?
"People that don't do their job get run over," he explains.

Should the UNIX world be scared of this guy? Yes.

UNIX? Blab!
Cutler believes NT will easily outsell UNIX partly, he claims, because NT
is written from scratch by programmers who understand complex operating
systems.

Says Michael Goulde, editor of the Open Information Systems newsletter,
"One condition Cutler had placed on coming to Microsoft was that he could
build a real operating system, not a run-time environment like DOS, and
not, in his words, "an 80's operating system built with 70s technology like
OS/2," he says. "The way momentum builds among developers is interesting.
They are so frustrated with what they have to work with today, that
anything Microsoft gives them to improve their lots is a gift from heaven.
No questions asked."

Cutler is known as an anti- UNIX bigot, a reputation he's trying
unsuccessfully to shake.

"I don't hate UNIX. I do, however think the quality of UNIX is poor." He
says UNIX has improved in reliability, but it has an inherently weak
command interface. Because UNIX is used in universities, people fall in
love with it because they don't know anything else."

"In general, [UNIX] has been hacked on by a plethora of graduate students
for many years," he explains. `When done this way, things don't tend to be
reliable or well-implemented. I'm sure the designers of UNIX would like to
have a clean slate and start over."

The Final Irony

Yes, David Cutler is serious. He's still smarting from DEC's cancellation
of Prism. "I don't believe I will ever get over it," he says. And he's
rectifying his bitterness by trying to make a great operating system. A
better operating system than UNIX. "There are lots of ways to build
operating systems," he says. UNIX is just one of those ways. People have
built lots of other systems that were just as good, if not better "

"UNIX is akin to a religion to some," he says. "If things aren't done like
they are in UNIX, then they must be bad. Sorry, I don't believe in this
religion."

But in some ways, Cutler does have religious convictions. He's a guy with
strong beliefs about operating systems. He wants to write the most
advanced, cleanest system ever. He also wants it to rule the world.



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% Subject: NT - the real reality deep inside (for those who care about history)
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    Re: .38
     Definitivly a "driven man". 
    
     Marc H. 

    and the beat goes on ...
    
    Scuttlebutt has it that some of the CAIRO features are based on OZIX..
    
    (If they write a book called "INSIDE CAIRO", I'll check it against
     my OZIX history file!)
    

	I really wonder whether a workstation with a proprietary operating
	system would have been any kind of success in the PRISM time frame.
	It seems to me that Cutler assumes that the technical competence
	alone would have sold in a world that wanted unix. That's exactly
	the attitude that got us in trouble - not listening to the
	customers...

	Roy

    
    Re: .41
    
    Truer words have never been spoken.
    
    -Ed
    

re: the article in .38

It's interesting to observe how well the article points up the fact that
Cutler has an ego the size of Manhattan. Nothing's changed in that respect,
I guess.

But I must admit I agree with him on his opinion of U*ix.

:^)
-Jack

    Re: .43
    

    
    Well I finally read .38 and, IMO, we're better off without him.
    If the article is accurate, Dave Cutler is interested in what's
    important to Dave Cutler.  Digital simply can't afford to depend
    on anyone who sees the company he works for as his personal support
    system for his own agenda.  Good riddance.
    
    Steve
    

Re: .45

The same could be said of Ken Olsen when he founded DEC, no?

Lee

    
    Re: .46
    
    Lee, Having a vision is one thing, and expecting everyone around you
    to bow to that vision without regard to any other consideration is
    quite another.  Ken certainly wasn't perfect, but I don't think he 
    can be compared to a revenge-driven egomaniac who isn't mature enough
    to understand that the world doesn't revolve around him.
    
    Steve
    

    Is there any truth to the rumor that the differences between PRISM and
    ALPHA are 2 instructions?

Alpha used many of the ideas developed for Prism, but it is not THAT similar.
The major difference is that Alpha was designed from the start to be fast
AND flexible, making that important bridge to the past, so that it would be
of more than passing interest to our installed base, yet able to do what would
be needed for the next 25 years.  PRISM was a "let's do it my way this time"
design and might have benchmarked well but would have been a failure as
a product, in my opinion.

As for Dave Cutler, he was indeed a visionary.  But he was very fond of
short cuts and making products "demo well"; when people actually started using
his products and the fragility appeared, Dave became bored and moved on to
something else, letting others pick up the pieces.  During the development of
VAXELN, a DEC internal publication had an interview with him, in which a
prominently displayed quote was "We design the quality in, we don't test for
it later".  At the time I was struggling to make a VAXELN-based product work
and I found myself muttering "He doesn't bother to design it in, either."

I hope, for Microsoft's sake as well as our own, that he has developed 
engineering skills since leaving Digital if, as the "Inside Windows NT" book
claims, he has worked on much of the NT system code.

				Steve

I agree with Steve. Cutler's entire career is a study in running home with
his toys when he doesn't like the way the game is being played or the way
that the rules are being interpreted. The only time the man is a "team player"
is when his "team" is being indulged and pandered to.

Sour grapes? I think not - it's no skin off my nose one way or the other . . . 

-Jack

    Now that Cutler is gone, who is generally considered to be our
    technical visionary/genius??  In other words, to whom was the baton
    passed??

    Probably Bill Strecker, overall.
    
    I would probably also include Supnick and a few others there also.
    

Re: .51

I don't accept the premise of the question that Cutler was our only
"visionary" or that he was even a significant leader in the company's
vision.

I would absolutely agree with the choice of Dick Hustvedt as the one person
who not only had the visions but made sure that they happened, in the area
of software.  Dick was a software architect in the truest sense (a term
Cutler hated); he established the direction of VMS that made us successful in
the 80s, including VAXclusters to name just one significant effort.

Nowadays, we have a number of people of vision.  Strecker is certainly one,
as is Bob Supnik.  We have a lot of other people in software whose names
may not be as well known as some, but they have been instrumental in
steering Digital's course into the future.

We don't need cowboys anymore.  We need leaders who can see the future
and get others to buy into their vision.

				Steve

    Speaking of visionary, I would probably say Dick Hustvedt was as much
    or more of a visionary than DC.  It is just a pitty that he was in an
    auto accident that left him unable to continue to contrubute as a result
    of massive brain damage.
    
    If he had been around, perhaps DC's ideas would have been more
    productive as, from what I heard, he provides a good foil and director
    for DCs efforts.
    

    

  It's amazing how opinions of Cutler run hot and cold. Some people say he has
vision, others say he has blinders. Some say he is driven, other say he's a
cowboy. 

  My 1st hand knowledge of him is limited. I saw him once in a meeting when he
was working on PL/1 and no doubt he was opinionated. Still, if you look at his
track record it's not half bad:

  RSX-11M - During the 70's, the PDP-11 was probably the 2nd most popular
            architecture in the world and RSX was probably it's most popular
            operating system (Duck, here come tomatoes from old RSTS hands)

  VMS - What can you say, the system that took us to #2. Probably the operating
        system of the 80's.

  VAX/ELN - A solid realtime host/target system which is very robust and easy
            to use. Made embedded systems and ISR routines something that
            any application programmer could write.

  NT - Some say it will replace UNIX. Of course it won't, but in a world where
       there is only room for 2 or 3 operating systems, it will be one of the
       big players.

  What a resume. If that's the result of being a cowboy, maybe we should start
issuing 6 shooters and 10 gallon hats.

  George

Re:  <<< Note 2338.53 by STAR::PARKE "True Engineers Combat Obfuscation" >>>

>    Speaking of visionary, I would probably say Dick Hustvedt was as much
>    or more of a visionary than DC.  

I had the pleasure of knowing Dick for only a short while before his accident.  
I have to agree with you.

-  David

    Re: .55
    
    I can only comment on two of the projects you list:
    
>  VMS - What can you say, the system that took us to #2. Probably the operating
>        system of the 80's.
>
    The success of VMS was, in my opinion, much more a result of Dick
    Hustvedt than Dave Cutler.  Cutler was responsible for many of the
    design constraints (such as 16-bit lengths in descriptors and
    elsewhere) which have plagued us for over a decade.  And Cutler cut
    out after V1.0 was released, deciding to do something "fun" (which 
    ended up being VAX PL/I).  Indeed, I'm not sure Cutler has stayed 
    around for a V2 of anything...
    
>  VAX/ELN - A solid realtime host/target system which is very robust and easy
>            to use. Made embedded systems and ISR routines something that
>            any application programmer could write.

    VAXELN may be robust today, but that is only due to the hard work of
    a team of engineers who took at least three years after he abandoned
    it to turn it into something one could call "production quality" without 
    laughing.  VAXELN still doesn't have full multiprocessing, something
    Cutler said he had designed in from the beginning.
    
    There's also VAX PL/I and VAX C to contend with - two of the buggiest
    and fragile products I've ever seen.  Again, after Cutler got bored and
    left others to clean up his mess, it took many years of effort to
    solve the problems in these products.  PL/I used to break almost every
    time a new VMS release came out because of the shortcuts Cutler took.
    VAX C's RTL is, well, let's just say that users' opinion of it is on
    the low side, given the hundreds if not thousands of SPRs it has
    generated.  We've finally thrown it out and replaced it with
    a rewritten RTL for DEC C.
    
    However, I don't think it's really worthwhile to put Cutler on trial.
    It does irritate me to see him put up on a pedestal when I think
    Digital had and has many much more worthy of such a position.  And
    of course all the self-promotion bugs me as well.  I'd prefer that we
    look for other role models.  Dick Hustvedt has filled that spot for
    me for more than a dozen years.
    
    					Steve

 >   VMS - What can you say, the system that took us to #2. Probably the operating
 >         system of the 80's.

    As one who knew Dave slightly and Dick pretty well, I've got to agree
    with Steve here. Dave drove the initial formation of VMS, and that was
    no mean feat. VMS as you know it today, and as it evolved through most
    of the 80s, is what happened to that base system under the guidance of
    Dick Hustvedt - especially VAXclusters, which probably epitomize what it
    is about VMS that's been so successful. No one person can take credit
    for clusters, but they were developed while Dick was the technical
    leader of VMS - Cutler was gone by then (he'd already left the group by
    the time I joined it in late 1981).

    I don't want to diminish Dave's talents or his contributions to the
    initial design and release of VMS. But it's not particularly accurate to
    look at the VMS you've known since, say, 1984, and say "Dave did that".
    He led the team that did the foundation and framing - a whole lot of
    finishing and furnishing has happened since then.

    Raising anybody to cult status is ultimately to fog over what really
    happened. 

>    Raising anybody to cult status is ultimately to fog over what really
>    happened. 

	Except in the case of Elvis.. Which it seems where DC is headed
	for the computer heads.

	It will be interesting to see what DC is doing 1 year from now.
	I suspect that NT will be a very good V1 product. (For Microsoft)
	But I think it will be an even better V2 or V3 product.
	Personally, from what I've seen/heard, I think DC is a very 
	intelligent person. But he's a 70% solution engineer. In the right
	place, that's good. But the comments at the lunch table about
	"Cutler Code" make you wonder about the supportability.

	Time will tell..
						mike

    
    Since the UNIXworld article doesn't seem to be posted in this string I
    thought I'd post it here. Mainly to discuss the next reply.
    
    Dave
    
                <<< PEAR::DUA1:[NOTES$LIBRARY]SOAPBOX.NOTE;1 >>>
                   -< SOAPBOX: Around as long as Digital is >-
================================================================================
Note 1502.26                Our "friend" Dave Cutler                    26 of 37
BROKE::PARTS "Hot stuff"                            189 lines   3-FEB-1993 09:19
                             -< UNIXworld article >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


                           The Brain Behind NT
                        Microsoft's David Cutler
                         UNIXWorld February 1993


David Cutler once walked into a high-level meeting at Digital Equipment
Corp. wearing a T-shirt that read, You're Screwing Me!" the company -true
to the shirts word- eventually did.

Today, he's trying to screw DEC and, in passing, the UNIX industry. Here's
why.

Cutler, now Microsoft Corp.'s director of Windows NT Development, will
never forget the October day in 1988 when he brought an edict from DEC's
Maynard, Mass. headquarters -or Mecca as he sarcastically calls it- to the
180 people in DEC West's" Seattle offices announcing the cancellation of
their three year old project It was the worst day of his life.

Cutler, the head of the development team for the successful VMS operating
system, was working on an advanced operating system for DEC's Prism line of
computers. The new operating system was intended to replace both VMS and
Ultrix, DEC's version of UNIX but DEC canceled the Prism line because it
could obsolete the company's proprietary products. "Three years of
dedicated work went down the drain," he says ruefully. And he's still mad.

The cancellation of Prism -about which DEC spokespeople refuse to speak-
clearly hurt Cutler's pride. He had spent -wasted- three years of his life
working on the project. So Cutler, who is known for his ordinarily Marine
drill instructor approach to management, told the staff the bad news and
then gave them a furlough -a one month paid vacation- without getting
approval from higher-ups.

He spent the month weighing his options. Cutler had thought about quitting
DEC before. In 1978, he interviewed with Intel Corp. because he wanted to
move to the west coast A year later, he resigned from DEC to start a
compiler company, but a group of senior-level executives convinced him to
reconsider. He stayed under the condition that he would be able to form
his own engineering facility outside of New England: DEC West. But although
he enjoyed the autonomy of being away from the "bullshit" in Maynard, DEC's
cancellation of Prism was too much for him.

After Prism was killed, some venture capitalists wanted to give Cutler
money for his own company. He considered the offers, but he didn't want to
run a company, he wanted to develop operating systems. News leaked to
Microsoft executives that Cutler wanted out of DEC.

DEC's Loss, Microsoft's Gain The timing couldn't have been better for
Microsoft, which was struggling through its advanced operating system
strategy. Its own next-generation operating system -OS/2 l.0 had started
shipping in December 1987, but it was a flop. Why did it fail? For one
thing, the product was co-developed by IBM Corp. and Microsoft and the two
companies fought through the entire project.

Microsoft needed a plan for the future. Be problem was that as processors
became faster, users wanted to run more advanced applications and many
power users were turning to UNIX for multitasking solutions. DOS, which was
Microsoft's nearly 20 year old technology, couldn't handle robust
multitasking applications.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates talked with Cutler. He had been courting him
to build a new portable operating system since August 1988. Cutler decided
to join Microsoft because the company's wide distribution meant that any
operating system he helped design was likely to afford him far more
recognition than would a DEC-only operating system. This was Cutler's
chance to fulfill his goal of writing the Next Great Operating System.

And to get back at DEC.

He moved the 10 blocks to Microsoft. A group of 16 disgruntled DEC
consulting engineers joined him. Consulting engineers are considered DEC's
most talented software engineers. Eventually, about 40 more DEC programmers
signed on with the software giant

If there's one thing I want to do it's to beat DEC," says Cutler "I think
the greatest way to do that is for them to have to buy and sell an
operating system that they could have gotten for free if they had not
driven me out."

Cutler says he still feels a sense of betrayal, and with betrayal comes
mistrust-especially of what he calls the "weather vane" marketers at DEC
who blocked his vision for developing great operating systems. People who
have worked with Cutler say he wants -needs- NT to be successful so he can
get back at the doubters. Is he confident? "Windows NT could very easily
sell more copies in its first year of existence than the sum total of all
UNIX systems ever sold," says Cutler. He adds that he doesn't have a gripe
with UNIX itself, but with the people who adamantly support it. He
disdainfully call them "religious bigots."

UNIX isn't going to die, he predicts, but NT will "seriously cut into UNIX
sales." He explains that his confidence stems from knowing that NT is not a
half-baked operating system. NT is not just two or three years old, he
believes, but actually the product of many years of DEC-funded research.

He's No Nerd (He Says)

Unlike Rich Kid Gates, Cutler's father was a janitor and his mother worked
in various civil service jobs. Cutler says they didn't have much money. As
a high-school student the broad shouldered Cutler was an avid athlete who
earned 15 letters. His athletic prowess helped him get a scholarship to
attend Michigan's Olivet College, where he was quarterback of the football
team and point guard of the basketball team. He graduated with a major in
mathematics and a minor in physics.

After college he worked for E.I. Du Pont deNemours and Co. in Wilmington,
Del., maintaining a Univac 1108. In August 1971, Cutler decided he wanted
to work for a computer company not be a computer administrator

He says he went to work for DEC because at the time it was "very
freewheeling," and that "people worked night and day at DEC to implement
their own ideas."

At DEC he was the principal designer and implementer of RSX-llM, a popular
real-time system that ran on DEC's PDP-11 series. then he was the key
designer for VAXELN, an embedded system toolkit for Microvax processors.
"It was far too far ahead of its time for Digital to fathom," says Cutler
unable to resist a jab at his prior employer. "It was never sold
aggressively for fear of cannibalizing VMS sales."

Although Cutler has worked on many operating systems, he claims he's no
"intellectual nerd." Responding to a direct question, he says he can beat
Gates in a wrestling match (which probably isn't saying a lot). He's known
as an avid skier who enjoys heli-skiing. Is he married? "No," he says,
"that is a mistake you only make twice."

the 50-year-old prefers work to recreation. He worked 12 hours a day, seven
days a week, for 18 months on the RSX-l1M project. "There is code in
RSX-llM that is authored by me dated Christmas Day, " he says.

"The guy is very intense," says a former DEC West engineer, "and he runs a
very tight ship."

And he can be emotional. Just before the second prerelease of NT, a
Microsoft engineer broke a kernel debugger. Cutler wanted to know what had
been done wrong. Someone replied that a technical flaw in the code had been
"corrected." Cutler's reaction? He put his fist through the wall. About two
months later at his 50th birthday party, the NT team presented him with the
"hole" in a picture frame.

"Once I accept an assignment I finish it. Nothing gets in the way save for
total cancellation of the project" he says. What kind of a boss is he?
"People that don't do their job get run over," he explains.

Should the UNIX world be scared of this guy? Yes.

UNIX? Blab!
Cutler believes NT will easily outsell UNIX partly, he claims, because NT
is written from scratch by programmers who understand complex operating
systems.

Says Michael Goulde, editor of the Open Information Systems newsletter,
"One condition Cutler had placed on coming to Microsoft was that he could
build a real operating system, not a run-time environment like DOS, and
not, in his words, "an 80's operating system built with 70s technology like
OS/2," he says. "The way momentum builds among developers is interesting.
They are so frustrated with what they have to work with today, that
anything Microsoft gives them to improve their lots is a gift from heaven.
No questions asked."

Cutler is known as an anti- UNIX bigot, a reputation he's trying
unsuccessfully to shake.

"I don't hate UNIX. I do, however think the quality of UNIX is poor." He
says UNIX has improved in reliability, but it has an inherently weak
command interface. Because UNIX is used in universities, people fall in
love with it because they don't know anything else."

"In general, [UNIX] has been hacked on by a plethora of graduate students
for many years," he explains. `When done this way, things don't tend to be
reliable or well-implemented. I'm sure the designers of UNIX would like to
have a clean slate and start over."

The Final Irony

Yes, David Cutler is serious. He's still smarting from DEC's cancellation
of Prism. "I don't believe I will ever get over it," he says. And he's
rectifying his bitterness by trying to make a great operating system. A
better operating system than UNIX. "There are lots of ways to build
operating systems," he says. UNIX is just one of those ways. People have
built lots of other systems that were just as good, if not better "

"UNIX is akin to a religion to some," he says. "If things aren't done like
they are in UNIX, then they must be bad. Sorry, I don't believe in this
religion."

But in some ways, Cutler does have religious convictions. He's a guy with
strong beliefs about operating systems. He wants to write the most
advanced, cleanest system ever. He also wants it to rule the world.

    
    I found the attached very interesting. This is conjecture but I've
    often wondered if the reason that Microsoft is sucking up to / putting
    up with DEC and Alpha is because DEC has told them that if they didn't
    they'd dig out all the things in NT that were lifted from MICA. In the
    article in UNIXworld Cutler essentially says that NT was just a
    continuation of MICA (O/S Cutler's team was developing for PRISM).
    
    Dave
    
                <<< PEAR::DUA1:[NOTES$LIBRARY]SOAPBOX.NOTE;1 >>>
                   -< SOAPBOX: Around as long as Digital is >-
================================================================================
Note 1502.32                Our "friend" Dave Cutler                    32 of 37
SOJU::SLATER "Synchronicity - It's Everywhere!"      38 lines   3-FEB-1993 13:46
                  -< A Related Story To The Cutler Interview >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    
    
    
    
    
                    Story Related to the Cutler Interview
    
    
    A high level Digital exec told us at a software conference two weeks
    ago that a copy the Cutler Interview article from UNIX World magazine 
    made it into his and other Digital executives' hands a short time before 
    their meeting with Bill Gates in Maynard in January '93.
    
    While they met with Gates, it became apparent to them that he (Gates) was
    unaware of the Cutler interview article. 
    
    A short while later after their meeting, Gates had a private meeting with
    Bob Palmer.  While Gates was in that meeting, they discreetly gave a
    copy of the Cutler interview article to the Microsoft-Digital
    relationship manager who was waiting for Gates, outside Palmer's
    office.
    
    After Gates finished his meeting with Bob Palmer, his Microsoft-Digital
    relationship manager called him into a private huddle to discuss the
    Cutler interview article.  Gates emerged red-faced and embarrassed,
    then apologized profusely to these Digital executives, saying that he 
    (Gates) DID NOT AUTHORIZE Cutler to say these things, and that he would 
    personally have a talk with Cutler about the article when he returned to 
    Redmond, Washington.  He also assured these executives that Cutler's 
    sentiments toward Digital were not the same as his own, and that he still
    wants to work closely with Digital on all the pre-agreed arrangements.
    
    The exec who shared this unusual story with us, remarked that he would
    have given anything to be "a fly on the wall" when Gates had his
    meeting with Cutler.
    
    
    Wild Bill

     Once again, a pointer to Figs::Cutler$Brickbats$and$Kudos, for those who
want to follow this rathole to its own burrow.

As others have mentioned, this topic is being discussed in the cutler conference
and in soapbox.  KP7 or Select will add soapbox to your notebook.  See note .63
for a pointer to the cutler conference.

Bob - Co-moderator DIGITAL

Several people have requested that this topic be re-opened.  It is with the
following warnings...If you want to fight the good-guy/bad-guy war concerning
Dave Cutler, or share amusing ancedotes about the man, please do it in the
cutler conference whose pointer is in .63.

Please keep the discussion here related to how we work at Digital.

Thanks,

Bob - Co-moderator DIGITAL

Re:<<< Note 2338.61 by SMAUG::GARROD "From VMS -> NT; Unix a mere page from history" >>>
    
>    Since the UNIXworld article doesn't seem to be posted in this string I
>    thought I'd post it here. 
    
See reply .38 in this string...  :-)

-  David

              <<< FIGS::DISK$ITS:[NOTES$LIBRARY]HUSTVEDT.NOTE;1 >>>
                   -< The Real Hero (or just a dark horse)? >-
================================================================================
Note 1.0                               1.0                            No replies
FIGS::PRAETORIUS "mwlwwlw&twwlt"                      4 lines  12-FEB-1993 15:09
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     Since the volume in the Cutler and Gordon Bell notesfiles has been pretty
low, I think my system can tolerate the introduction yet another praise-
singing/character-assassination notesfile for a prominent exDECcie.  What the
heck.

CLIMBING THE PEAK: AGONY AND ECSTASY OF 200 CODE WRITERS BEGET WINDOWS NT ---
BADGERED BY A DRIVEN GURU, THEY FIGHT FATIGUE, FEAR TO BUILD GRAND SYNTHESIS
--- DREAD OF AN UNFIXABLE BUG ---- BY G. PASCAL ZACHARY STAFF REPORTER OF THE
WALL STREET JOURNAL

             REDMOND, Wash. -- David Cutler, wearing white Reeboks, white
          trousers and a T-shirt with the legend "Over the Line," blasts
          through the door leading to Microsoft Corp.'s Build Lab. Mr. Cutler,
          a stocky, balding man who shares some character traits with Captains
          Ahab and Bligh, is checking on the progress of the biggest, most
          complex and possibly most important program ever designed for a
          desktop computer. He is not happy.
             It is 10:20 Monday morning, May 3, and the daily "build" of the
          program, called Windows NT, isn't finished yet. As leader of the NT
          team, Mr. Cutler insists that a new build, or test version, of NT be
          stitched together electronically each morning so that his
          programmers can, as he puts it, "eat their own dog food." Mr. Cutler
          is angry about the delay, angry about a botched test the day before,
          angry at the world. After glaring at a computer screen he storms out
          of the lab, leaving a distinct chill. Two builders, Kyle Shannon and
          Arden White, dip into a king-size jar of Rolaids, popping one each.
          The day has soured early.

    Re .68 You need to check the date inside the mail message that
    contained that story. It's from 1993.... The folks that send out the
    daily updates accidentally sent the 93 news out this morning instead of
    todays news. They sent the corrected version soon after.
    
    Harry
    

>             It is 10:20 Monday morning, May 3, and the daily "build" of the

$ JJ = f$cvtime("03-May-1993",,"weekday")
$ sho sym JJ
  JJ = "Monday"
$