How Big Is VMS?

David Cutler is one of my heroes. I think he only worked on the first version of VMS, but his expertise of OS design and implementation is probably second to few.

Does anyone know whether he is still working in Microsoft? What does it feel to work with him?

He's a high level technical fellow as far as I know but he's also 83. I suspect his involvement these days, if any, is purely advisory to a limited group of core NT kernel and RDOS engineers.

His series on YouTube, Dave's Garage, has really helped me to conceptualize Operating Systems in the past that I used, but didn't really fully understand. I started with Atari DOS, but moved to the 286 roughly around the time it started to become popular, along with MS-DOS. I'm 45 now, so didn't think about things as deeply back then, as far as constraints and why things may have been built the way they were. I think his series really does a great job at looking into both technology and company politics (especially his time at Microsoft).

https://youtu.be/xi1Lq79mLeE?feature=shared

That's Dave PLUMMER's channel. Dave CUTLER is the guest in that video.

Thanks, I think he did an interview of David Cutler which is pretty interesting.

Yeah, I agree, it's probably high level or retirement.

You are correct, thank you. Dave Cutler has apparently done many guest spots on Dave's Garage, so many that I confused their names! Appreciate the correction, so I can perform some better searches of Dave Cutler, having only looked into the videos on YouTube.

Yes, lmz <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lmz> pointed out that I had mixed up Dave Plummer and Dave Cutler. There are actually multiple videos that Dave Plummer has done with Dave Cutler, which I found very interesting.

Reminds me of Coders At Work, by Peter Seibel, which I read right around the time that I decided to get deeper into software. Being able to read or hear about the process that went on in someone's head while developing something so major was and is still impressive, and motivating.

The last article I read about him implied that he’s intent on working and that working with him was… intense. But that was a few years ago.

I like to imagine there’s an inner sanctum in a secure sub-basement of Microsoft where a couple dozen cracked kernel developers work quietly… except when Dave Cutler asks them to come into his personal lab through the three foot thick blast doors and man-trap so he can yell at them about a bug he found.

At the end of his interview some folks linked to, he points out still being at Microsoft working on a project related to AI looking into using Linux on XBox racks.

He brought down the empire by committing the ultimate offense: walking across the street and taking the additional money. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their careers, millions more disrupted because of his selfish act. In the 9th Circle will be at least your hero, RMS of GNU and Vint of PPP and Carly of "That Face."

Can you please elaborate? I get that he brought maybe a couple of dozens of people from Prism to Microsoft, but I can't see why that brought down DEC, especially it was DEC who paused Prism.

I also know that some Prism code was used in NT but again I hardly see why that brought down DEC.

That could be the cause, if DEC had some competitive hardware or software projects, but none that I know so far. Please share your knowledge with us.

DEC failed because Corporate America perceived that the Chief Architect of VMS had created a futuristic version for Microsoft that ran on commodity hardware.

He should have convinced Ken Olsen to let him port VMS to commodity hardware and gone back to DECWRL to try again later if Ken refused, but instead he built it for Billy and Balmy who were guaranteed to (and, in fact, did) use it to destroy the lives of every DEC employee and every industry worker that had specialized in DEC's proprietary (but incredible) systems, also setting back the progress of mankind a couple of decades because NT turned out really terrible compared to VMS, giving rise to Linus' science project born out of the pages of a book on operating system theory written by an academic with no real world experience compared to the Chief Architect of VMS, RSX11, RT11, etc. (If there is no Hell, he's home free. If we make hell on Earth, then for him, it must be knowing that WSL exists.)