Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
On 2015-03-04 20:18, Bill Cunningham wrote: - Original Message - From: li...@openmailbox.org To: SIMH Simh@trailing-edge.com Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 7:45 AM Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth Incredible post! This list is worth following for the scope of information alone, even if you never run SIMH... On Tue, 3 Mar 2015 17:28:25 -0800 Sergey Oboguev obog...@yahoo.com wrote: Since the topic of Cutler the Demiurg of VMS comes up once in a while here and there... [fantastic post deleted for brevity] This sounds to me that Cutler and maye RSX was about the same time that Ritchie and Thompson also got Unix together. And I guess it was 5 years later that Kildall put CP/M together. And the 8 diskette came together. Actually, Ritchie and Thompson did Unix before Cutler did RSX. But Cutler didn't design RSX, he just reimplemented it. The early versions of RSX are contemporary with Unix, yes. Johnny ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
- Original Message - From: li...@openmailbox.org To: SIMH Simh@trailing-edge.com Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 7:45 AM Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth Incredible post! This list is worth following for the scope of information alone, even if you never run SIMH... On Tue, 3 Mar 2015 17:28:25 -0800 Sergey Oboguev obog...@yahoo.com wrote: Since the topic of Cutler the Demiurg of VMS comes up once in a while here and there... [fantastic post deleted for brevity] This sounds to me that Cutler and maye RSX was about the same time that Ritchie and Thompson also got Unix together. And I guess it was 5 years later that Kildall put CP/M together. And the 8 diskette came together. Bill ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
From: Bill Cunningham bill...@suddenlink.net I've always heard Dave Cutler given full credit for RSX. I know he designed NTFS. If you imply NT file system, then the history of NTFS development is described at some length in the Showstopper. According to this description NTFS was one of the aspects of NT Cutler did not partake in. NTFS had other developers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Developers ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
Remember when VAX SW is being put together in the early/mid-70s, many commercial OS guys (particularly @ DEC) did not (yet) believe it was possible to right a commercial OS in anything but assembler - until UNIX (although UNIX was hardly the first - Boroughs used an Algol, and of course GE/Honeywell and Pr1me used PL/1 and to be fair UNIX v1 was written in PDP-7 assembler). Poduska bully-wheedled his operating system engineers into using a compiled language in the beginning, but it was FORTRAN at first. PL/P didn't come along until '78 or so. De ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 3:38 PM, Bill Cunningham bill...@suddenlink.net wrote: That is indeed a wonderful story. So Cutler didn't hate Unix like I have alawys heard then? Well, I think its like saying I hate(d) VMS or RSX. I respect(ed) both systems, but would prefer not use them when I had other systems that made me more productive. My employer today (Intel) is heavily Windows oriented. Windows drives me nuts. I'm typing this on a Mac and would probably used Linux if I did not have the Mac. But I will use Windows when I have too and understand why it's there. Most of the time I can avoid it. But bless MSFT and Windows, it sells lots of Intel chips which helps to keep me employed. Same thing about Fortran. I'm at HPC type, and in reality Fortran pays my salary; but I don't want to have to program using it. IMO: While I think it bug Dave and others that people did not like his favorite system, I think Dave understood then that UNIX was it was and VMS was not going to replace it and the arguments were not useful (although that did not stop them mind you when pride was on the line). What mattered was many large customers wanted UNIX and prefered it. I suspect Dave would rather use VMS, but if UNIX was selling Vaxen, and people were not going elsewhere, Unix/Ultrix was important. That said looking at all of UNIX, VMS source and later NT-OS/2 source, I might suggest that Mica looked in many ways more UNIX than VMS as a ukernel. Again, IMO why is because it's model was Mach, ney Accent, ney Rig and structurally Dave had learned the ideas that the ukernel offered were very good and useful. Unix has been able to embrace the ideas easily and I do not think that would have been easy with VMS. From what I have understood, at the time, just as the Gem group in the compiler team was doing a full rewrite, Dave too wanted a modern kernel for DEC's future. He needed a modern, scalable and portable VMS implementation too and (I believe) he wanted to see DEC get back to single core OS instead of needing multiple OS teams (that vision would never be found).So learn from what UNIX and family did well, at MSFT this is called embrace and extend. They wrote Mica in C++ (warped a bit to look like PL/1 IMO), but at least it was not assembler anymore. It was made to scale and work on UP, SMP, or NORMA hardware as well as Vax, MIPS and PRISM. UNIX really was that influence, at the time VMS certainly could not do that and was not going too. Remember when VAX SW is being put together in the early/mid-70s, many commercial OS guys (particularly @ DEC) did not (yet) believe it was possible to right a commercial OS in anything but assembler - until UNIX (although UNIX was hardly the first - Boroughs used an Algol, and of course GE/Honeywell and Pr1me used PL/1 and to be fair UNIX v1 was written in PDP-7 assembler). Clem ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
- Original Message - From: Sergey Oboguev obog...@yahoo.com To: Bill Cunningham bill...@suddenlink.net; simh@trailing-edge.com Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 2:47 PM Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth From: Bill Cunningham bill...@suddenlink.net I've always heard Dave Cutler given full credit for RSX. I know he designed NTFS. If you imply NT file system, then the history of NTFS development is described at some length in the Showstopper. According to this description NTFS was one of the aspects of NT Cutler did not partake in. NTFS had other developers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#Developers I apologize. It seems I have been told all kinds of wrong things. Bill ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
- Original Message - From: Clem Cole cl...@ccc.com To: Johnny Billquist b...@softjar.se Cc: SIMH simh@trailing-edge.com Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 3:16 PM Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth Hmm since this has deteriorated into stories and history of Dave and what he did. I'll add one of mine and what I know. Apologies to this group ahead of time if you do not, but I think many of you might find it amusing if not interesting. I was under the impression Culter built something similar to RSX for the PDP-10 pre-DEC (for DuPont). At least that is what guys like Fossil, Clark D'Elia who had worked with Dave on RSX, Paul Cantrell who had worked on VMS's file systems and Tom Kent on the terminal system had always said to me. I'm pretty sure it was the DEC sales guys that introduced him to the engineering teams and eventually he went to work for Roger in the VAX SW team. I've never been completely sure of the path, I think Dave came late to RSX proper, although I thought he had a heavy hand in the 11M implementation. I can say, in the early 1980s, I first met him at a bar in Littleton Ma (the old Maui ??something?? - which is now the site of the YankeeZee River Restaurant) in Littleton, MA.Clark knew I had programmed on VAX Serial #1 under VMS and done the TCP/IP work so was pretty familiar with the systems and even Dave's C compiler, but prefered UNIX and Ritchie C. Dave and I knew of each other and had actually exchanged emails previously but have never met in person before that night. Clark wanted us to meet, so he arrange for some of the VMS guys to getgether and dragged me along when Cutler who was at the time at DEC west working on what would later become Mica and had come east at that point for some mtg in Maynard WRT uVax IIRC. Dave Cane (Mr. VAX 750), heard the meeting was going to happen and walked into Roger's office, who was later reported by I think it was Janet Egan as having to have replied: Oh sh*t one of them is going to tear a new a*shole into the other. Anyway, we all ended up at the bar and Clark tried to trying to start a food fight by turning to Dave and introduced me with the words: Dave meet Clem. He's one of the old UNIX guys and he thinks all the SW DEC built in the last few years sucks. But Fossil then turned to Dave and said When I hired you I had a fiery red beard [he turned grey in the mid-70s], and then turned to me and said and after you I went bald. Truth is we got along fine that night and would each buy the other a beer or two. In fact, Dave and I would work together a few years later on NT-OS/2 uKernel when he was at MSFT and I was at NCR. But that evening, I would not grant him two design issues with VMS - using assembler instead of BLISS [DC hates BLISS] and the file naming conventions [which he defended as being required to be compatible with RSX and I replied but he wasn't]; and he would not give into the fact the UNIX had a command system that was in his words random and unclean in the handling of things like errors [I understand but accept it as a cost of that's what happens when you have a lot of different developers as opposed to small controlled team and in return you get a lot of useful work from a lot of people]. The truth is we both respected the work the other had done and understand why both systems were successful and useful and I think Clark was disappointed it did not become a shouting match. As for NT, Dave definitely lead Mica, which begat NT-OS/2 @ MSFT. Windows was spliced into what would become NT-Windows by the time it became a product. But Dave's team was responsible for uKernel portion and he will tell you he was influenced by CMU's Mach and what had made UNIX successful. When it was still Mica, the idea was to have two user mode API's, one being VMS and one being UNIX with the new ukernel being coming between them. Clem That is indeed a wonderful story. So Cutler didn't hate Unix like I have alawys heard then? Bill ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Dennis Boone d...@msu.edu wrote: Poduska bully-wheedled his operating system engineers into using a compiled language in the beginning, but it was FORTRAN at first. PL/P didn't come along until '78 or so Interesting. With Apollo they went back to Fortran (Ratfor actually). Bill was always good at seeing the direction of future (one of the best people I have known at doing that), but he did not always get the actual technology that won in the end. ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Cutler Unix
On 2015-03-04 23:57, Dave Osborne wrote: Don't forget that DEC did not adopt Unix because of Ken Olsen snake oil. The IT world could have been a totally different place When was Unix put up to adoption? ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
[Simh] Fw: Fw: Cutler Unix
We had two (possibly 3) 11/45s for our application so I guess my memory isn't so bad. :) David. - Forwarded Message - From: Clem Cole cl...@ccc.com To: david.d.mil...@att.net Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com simh@trailing-edge.com Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2015 7:54 PM Subject: Re: [Simh] Fw: Cutler Unix below.. On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 9:27 PM, david.d.mil...@att.net wrote: In the mid-70s I was working at Sylvania WDL. We were looking for a real-time OS for a PDP 11/45. Nothing at DEC. We checked with ATT for UNIX and they wanted $40K (I was told). Management said, no way and I was assigned the task. I wrote a separated ID-space (full memory) OS for our application, which incidentally was written in Pascal. But that's another story. David. If it was mid-70's (i.e. 6th or 7th edition) the commercial license was $20K for the first CPU and $7K for the second and $5 for each additional CPU. $100 was the educational license fee and was to defray the cost of writing a tape - but ATT had to make the IP available as part of the consent decree. IIRC: Even the $100 could be waved it you brought a couple of RK05s to MH and Ken or Dennis copies the disk. i.e. that how some of the universities got the bits originally as students brought them back with them. The fees for basic UNIX did not go up to $40k for the first CPU until post System III - it may have been as late as System V. But by then there were all sort of other fees, such as the $150K redistribution license fee which was on top of the first CPU. Looking back on it, one of the few times I was ever in a room with Willy G was during the negotiations @ Ricki's Hyatt in Palo Alto that would cause ATT to create the System III license and the first redistribution license. All the majors firms in the room had no problem with $1.5K per CPU when the cost of a VAX or HP3000 was $250K-$500K or more for IBM. The firms developing what were later be called personal workstations envisioned a $10K-$20K price point and were willing to settle for about $500 a copy. Gates wants to pay $25 for what would be the Xenix license for a PC/AT which then cost about $3.5K-5K retail, but he promised Al Arms that he would sell millions.I remember him turning to the room and saying (whining actually) - You guys don't get it. The only thing that matters in the software business is volume. Sad truth - he was right. Clem ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Cutler Unix
It was never adopted - for $100, your institution got a tape from ATT and they abandoned it on your doorstep. On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 8:34 PM, Jacob Goense d...@xs4all.nl wrote: On 2015-03-04 23:57, Dave Osborne wrote: Don't forget that DEC did not adopt Unix because of Ken Olsen snake oil. The IT world could have been a totally different place When was Unix put up to adoption? ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
[Simh] Fw: Cutler Unix
In the mid-70s I was working at Sylvania WDL. We were looking for a real-time OS for a PDP 11/45. Nothing at DEC. We checked with ATT for UNIX and they wanted $40K (I was told). Management said, no way and I was assigned the task. I wrote a separated ID-space (full memory) OS for our application, which incidentally was written in Pascal. But that's another story. David. - Forwarded Message - From: Jacob Goense d...@xs4all.nl To: dave.osbo...@judgebell.co.uk Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2015 6:34 PM Subject: Re: [Simh] Cutler Unix On 2015-03-04 23:57, Dave Osborne wrote: Don't forget that DEC did not adopt Unix because of Ken Olsen snake oil. The IT world could have been a totally different place When was Unix put up to adoption? ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
From: Clem Cole cl...@ccc.com While I think it bug Dave and others that people did not like his favorite system ... The New Hacker's Dictionary, MIT Press, 3rd edition: Many Unix fans generously concede that VMS would probably be the hacker's favorite commercial OS if Unix didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious. ;-) Unix has been able to embrace the ideas easily and I do not think that would have been easy with VMS It would not, which makes it even more curious that there was a pilot effort at reimplementation of VMS on top of Mach. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=964616 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=692228 http://www.sture.ch/vms/Usenix_VMS-on-Mach.pdf They wrote Mica in C++ (warped a bit to look like PL/1 IMO) Was not it supposed to be in Pillar (kind of Pascal++)? Or was Pillar abandoned or relegated to some other role? http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/dec/prism/mica/Pillar_Language_Specification_Nov88.pdf ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Fw: Cutler Unix
below.. On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 9:27 PM, david.d.mil...@att.net wrote: In the mid-70s I was working at Sylvania WDL. We were looking for a real-time OS for a PDP 11/45. Nothing at DEC. We checked with ATT for UNIX and they wanted $40K (I was told). Management said, no way and I was assigned the task. I wrote a separated ID-space (full memory) OS for our application, which incidentally was written in Pascal. But that's another story. David. If it was mid-70's (i.e. 6th or 7th edition) the commercial license was $20K for the first CPU and $7K for the second and $5 for each additional CPU. $100 was the educational license fee and was to defray the cost of writing a tape - but ATT had to make the IP available as part of the consent decree. IIRC: Even the $100 could be waved it you brought a couple of RK05s to MH and Ken or Dennis copies the disk. i.e. that how some of the universities got the bits originally as students brought them back with them. The fees for basic UNIX did not go up to $40k for the first CPU until post System III - it may have been as late as System V. But by then there were all sort of other fees, such as the $150K redistribution license fee which was on top of the first CPU. Looking back on it, one of the few times I was ever in a room with Willy G was during the negotiations @ Ricki's Hyatt in Palo Alto that would cause ATT to create the System III license and the first redistribution license. All the majors firms in the room had no problem with $1.5K per CPU when the cost of a VAX or HP3000 was $250K-$500K or more for IBM. The firms developing what were later be called personal workstations envisioned a $10K-$20K price point and were willing to settle for about $500 a copy. Gates wants to pay $25 for what would be the Xenix license for a PC/AT which then cost about $3.5K-5K retail, but he promised Al Arms that he would sell millions.I remember him turning to the room and saying (whining actually) - You guys don't get it. The only thing that matters in the software business is volume. Sad truth - he was right. Clem ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
From: Sergey Oboguev obog...@yahoo.com To: Dennis Boone d...@msu.edu, SIMH simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth Message-ID: 1425509240.5193.yahoomail...@web184302.mail.ne1.yahoo.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii VMS team had to make design choices within the constraints of the state of compiler technology, hardware technology/costs, and the requirements of market competitiveness. Looking back, it is very clear that VMS designers went to extreme lengths to ensure a system runnable very efficiently on a resource-constrained hardware. Yes, we had a /780 with only 256 KB of memory. One Friday afternoon after the service window would have been closed by the time somebody could get out to our location, a memory board died. I diagnosed the problem, and pulled one of the memory boards. Wrong one, pulled the other one, and the machine came back up. One of our users had a BIG batch job to run over the weekend, a huge finite element simulation. Well, amazingly it ran on 128 KB of memory! Jon ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Sergey Oboguev obog...@yahoo.com wrote: Unix has been able to embrace the ideas easily and I do not think that would have been easy with VMS It would not, which makes it even more curious that there was a pilot effort at reimplementation of VMS on top of Mach. Sorry, my wording was not as crisp as it should have been. Indeed, re-implementing VMS on top of uKernel is possible and was proposed/attempt/done at least twice - in fact I was part of one of them (I.e. I know of 2 projects that actually started and a 3rd that proposed it, there may have been more). But in all three cases, they took or planned to use a uKernel, with a more standard supervisor/user mode scheme and then implemented the VMS APIs and services on top of it; then reimplement a number of the VMS commands [since parts of the command system was somewhat intertwined with the protection/memory scheme that VAX/VMS had]. What I meant by my comment is that, CMU took BSD 4.1, ripped out the memory system and much of I/O system, and part of the process management system, and then inserted Mach inside of it (aka Mach 2.5).The UNIX API and command system was left intact, and most of the basic UNIX kernel was left alone. They added a few new commands to and added some system services for the mach-ness but as far as a user was concerned it was just BSD4.1 or later BSD 4.2. What I was saying im my previous email was that I believe that trying to pulling VAX/VMS apart in the same way as the CMU guys did to BSD, and inserting a uKernel of almost any flavor into it under the covers would have been much more difficult. Knowing a little about how both systems were put together, I really believe that Unix was just much easier to modify in that way and VMS was. Clem ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Regarding Cutler THE father of VMS myth
On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Sergey Oboguev obog...@yahoo.com wrote: Cutler was a technical team manager during the development of initial versions of VMS, however he was not the top #1 architect and technical contributor. Excellent post. Small but I think important correction. DC was not the manager. He was one of the technical leads and incredibly important the success. But Fossil aka - Roger S Gourd (rsg), was the manager of VAX Software. I note that most of the best engineering managers I have ever known and worked with in the industry all worked for Roger at some time in their career.[After the Vax shipped in the mid 1970s, Roger moved to florida and helped to develop the Gould machine]. Roger could get the most and best out of his people. He was not a perfect manager by any stretch and many found his methods difficult. But he made it work and people that worked for him in the 70s and early 80s all swear by that experience. It has been said by others that VMS and much of the software that was what made it popular, would not have succeeded if Roger had not managed it. DC, Hustvedt and Lipman owe a lot to his running interference and making sure the right things happened so they could do the technical work. In the 90s and early 2000's they used to come to Boston in the summers, and I would try to catch up with him and some of the others from the day, but that has not happened for health reasons for a while. I believe that he is still growing orchids in retirement, but his wife Sally told me a while back his dementia has gotten to the point that he remembers little now. Pain in the ass that fossil could be on a day to day basis, I miss his council. Clem ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
