Dave Cutler

In addition to his engineering skills, Cutler is known for his sardonic humor. He generally referred to the RSX fork list as the "fork queue". Sometimes even his error messages turn out to have a double meaning. The acronym WNT was acknowledged by Cutler to be a pun on VMS (obtained by shifting each letter one position in alphabetical order, as HAL is popularly believed to have been derived from IBM in the film ).

He was born in Lansing, Michigan and grew up in Dewitt, Michigan. After graduating from Olivet College in 1965, Cutler went to work for DuPont. One of his tasks was developing and running computer simulations on Digital machines. He developed an interest in operating systems and left DuPont to pursue that interest.

Cutler's software career started at a small company he founded, located in Monument Square, Concord, Massachusetts, marketing software for the LINC and PDP-8 computers. He joined Microsoft in 1988 and was co-leader of the team that developed Windows NT. Later he worked on targeting Windows NT to the 64-bit Alpha computer. That project was scrapped by COMPAQ/DEC (ironic, given the fate of the Emerald and Prism projects to port VMS to IA32!) According to Microsoft's website, Cutler is (as of September 24, 2002) working on the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows.

Cutler holds over 20 patents and is an affiliate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington.

David Cutler usefully summarised his own career in the foreword to Inside Windows NT, quoted on Neil Rieck's web site.

Cutler is featured prominently in the book, "ShowStopper!", which chronicles how the first version of NT was developed at Microsoft. It was written by G. Pascal Zachary.

Quotation

• "VMS and its RSX ancestors all the way back to IAS, I believe, have had a FoRK Queue, the source of at least 3% of Internals humor." Usenet FoRK discussion list.
• "I have many fond memories of how RSX-11M took shape, I had a rubber stamp made that proclaimed 'Size Is the Goal' and proceeded to stamp every last bit of correspondence to make sure that all the programmers and project managers understood" -- David Cutler
• "Little did I know that I would be fortunate enough to develop several operating systems in my lifetime; developing one is a rare opportunity for anyone." -- David Cutler

Referenced By