[Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Sergey Oboguev]

> - Original Message -
> From: Christian Gauger-Cosgrove 
> To: Bill Cunningham 
> Cc: SIMH 
> Sent: Tuesday, March 3, 2015 12:12 PM
> Subject: Re: [Simh] Getting rsxs to run on the pdp11 emulator

> Dave Cutler is the "father" of RSX-11/M+, VMS, and Windows NT.

Since the topic of "Cutler the Demiurg of VMS" comes up once in a while here
and there...

In the interests of some historical justice and accuracy, Cutler is "a" father
of VMS, not "the" father.

The myth that Cutler was "the" father of VMS originated in its public
circulations probably from the authors of the "Showstopper" book, who did not
have much interest in the subject of VMS, did not have access to the members of
early VMS design team and could not know what had been happening there, and
also probably (as many if not most book authors) were not against dramatizing
and embellishing their story a little.

I have not read or heard anywhere that Cutler himself was ever claiming the
role in VMS development ascribed to him by this myth.

In reality, from the very start there were three key people on the software
side in development of VAX and subsequently VMS, and if any "the" father of VMS
were to be named at all, it would hands down be Dick Hustvedt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Hustvedt

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.

"VAX Team A" designing VAX architecture included 3 people from the hardware
side and 3 people from the software side. On the software side these were
Dick Hustvedt, Peter Lipman and David Cutler. These three also became later
the principal authors of VMS kernel.

In terms of the magnitude of contribution to VMS among these three
a distinct #1 was certainly Hustvedt.

A look into VMS source code (authorship and change history in source files
headers) in source kits at around VMS late 3.x-4.0 versions timeframe -- about
the time when all three departed VMS development -- makes the picture
exceedingly clear.

Direct code contributions of Cutler to VMS were parts of the kernel, DCL, MCR,
autoconfig, 5 drivers and C run-time library.

As to the specific parts of VMS kernel, the breakdown of its primary authors
is as follows:

Cutler was responsible for IO subsystem (except page locking), forking (like in
fork processes/fork blocks), exception handling, system timer and timer
services, executive pool allocation, bugcheck code, logical names and several
miscellaneous facilities (including mailboxes, console IO routines, CHMx
dispatcher, adjust stack and error logging interface routines in the kernel).
There are no visible Cutler "fingerprints" (change/authorship comments) in any
other kernel modules.

Hustvedt was the primary author responsible for the scheduler, swapper,
synchronization primitives (including event flags and kernel mutexes) and RSE
code (that changes process scheduling state in response to system events), AST
handling (for all CPU modes), process creation/deletion/starting, process
control (suspend/resume/hibernate/wakeup/handling process priorities and
names), process shell and null process, system init, SYSGEN parameters,
image exit and rundown, power failure handling and recovery, VMB, SYSBOOT,
XDELTA and MSCP port driver.

In addition, as a secondary author Hustvedt was responsible for 55 other source
files in the kernel.

Later Hustvedt was also responsible for ASMP (asymmetric multi-processing) and
was the driving force behind the advent of VAXcluster.

Peter Lipman was the primary author responsible for all virtual and physical
memory handling (except swapper). This may sound brief, but these are the most
complex and sophisticated modules in the system with extreme importance.
One should remember that the ability of VMS to run scores of user sessions
in a few megabytes of main memory was a sort of a technical wonder that,
one might surmise, greatly contributed to VMS success. In the course of
VAX MP project, I had a reason to look through some pieces of these algorithms
and implementation code behind them and might say they stay a technical miracle
even today, with hardly any modern operating system replicating their
complexity and sophistication (of course, in days of RAM plenty this is not
much of a pressing issue). In addition, Lipman was responsible as the primary
author for image activator, kernel file IO routines and GETDVI. As a secondary
contributor he was also responsible for 63 other source files in the kernel.

There were also other major VMS components, such as file system, various system
processes, later SCA/SCS etc., developed by other people.

Thus, though contributions of Cutler to VMS were significant, he by no means
was "the demiurge" of VMS as the myth would have it, nor even the architect #1.

One may surmise that dedication of I&DS to Hustvedt (rather than Cutler, who by
the time the book was published also departed VMS development) was not only a
"thank y

Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[lists]

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  wrote:

> Since the topic of "Cutler the Demiurg of VMS" comes up once in a while
> here and there...

[fantastic post deleted for brevity]
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Clem Cole]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2015 at 8:28 PM, Sergey Oboguev  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
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-03-04 20:18, Bill Cunningham wrote:


- Original Message - From: 
To: "SIMH" 
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  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

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Bill Cunningham]

- Original Message - 
From: "Johnny Billquist" 

To: 
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 2:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth



On 2015-03-04 20:18, Bill Cunningham wrote:


- Original Message - From: 
To: "SIMH" 
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  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


   Well you would know. But I've always heard Dave Cutler given full credit 
for RSX. I know he designed NTFS.


Bill

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Bill Cunningham]

- Original Message - 
From: 

To: "SIMH" 
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  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

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Sergey Oboguev]

> From: Bill Cunningham 

> 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
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-03-04 20:23, Bill Cunningham wrote:


- Original Message - From: "Johnny Billquist" 
To: 
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 2:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth



On 2015-03-04 20:18, Bill Cunningham wrote:


- Original Message - From: 
To: "SIMH" 
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  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


Well you would know. But I've always heard Dave Cutler given full
credit for RSX. I know he designed NTFS.


Cutler have most credit for RSX-11M, but RSX-11M was just a 
reimplementation of RSX-11D. Same API, but redesigned internals.
And RSX-11D comes from -11C, and eventually you can trace it all back to 
RSX-15, which was written for the PDP-15...

So many of the ideas and concepts had already been done before Cutler.

One thing Cutler did, which you do not find in the predecessors are ACPs.

Johnny

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Clem Cole]

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

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 2:20 PM, Johnny Billquist  wrote:

> On 2015-03-04 20:18, Bill Cunningham wrote:
>
>>
>> - Original Message - From: 
>> To: "SIMH" 
>> 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  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.
>>
>
> Ac

Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Bill Cunningham]

- Original Message - 
From: "Sergey Oboguev" 

To: "Bill Cunningham" ; 
Sent: Wednesday, March 04, 2015 2:47 PM
Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth






From: Bill Cunningham 



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

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Bill Cunningham]

- Original Message - 
From: "Clem Cole" 

To: "Johnny Billquist" 
Cc: "SIMH" 
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

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Clem Cole]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 3:38 PM, Bill Cunningham 
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
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Dennis Boone]

 > 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
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Clem Cole]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Dennis Boone  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.
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Sergey Oboguev]

> 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).

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.

Some of their choices included

- partially paged system code
- partially paged pool
- extremely sophisticated memory management algorithms

Their choices also included choosing assembler as an implementation language
for key system modules rather than high-level language. The state of the
compiler technology to match or surpass hand-written assembler code just was
not there at the time, and would not be there for about another decade
(after all, the advent of modern efficient compilers owes a historical stage
of their development to the availability VAX as a development platform).

Choice of the assembler and accordingly manual hard labor as "an optimization
engine" allowed to achieve smaller memory footprint of the system and faster
code than present state of compiler technology would allow, which was crucial.

One should just remember that 11/780 computational performance was only about
0.7 MIPS and some of the initial machines shipped with less than 1 MB of 
memory.

As an illustration, the first VAX I personally met even much later (ca. 1984)
was 11/780 with only 2 MB of RAM.

Another place I worked at later ran (in ca. 1984-1988) a cluster of 780's with
initially 4 MB each later upgraded to 8 MB. During daytime, the mix on *each*
of the machines included about 4-6 concurrently executing batch jobs doing
particle physics computations plus about 20 interactive sessions of people
editing, compiling, running and debugging their computational applications --
all in a few MBs of RAM. It was a crawl, but the system was still reasonably
responsive and able to make forward progress with only limited loss to paging
etc., and the fact VMS was able to sustain workloads like these (and thus
meet the needs of technical/engineering and scientific markets) was made
possible by those extreme lengths VMS developers went to and by the
trade-offs they chose -- one of which was the choice of the assembler
as an implementation language.

This trade-off, of course, meant bleaker prospects for VMS longer-term future,
but it enabled its early market success and building of market momentum.

In a similar vein, Gordon Bell tells in one of his interviews how already in
the 1990's Cutler once asked him why they did not design VAX as a RISC from the
start. Bell answered that it would not be possible at the time: RISC
instruction set would  have meant larger code size, and at those-day RAM
costs, this would impede VAX market success.

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Sergey Oboguev]

> From: Clem Cole 


> 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

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Clem Cole]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Sergey Oboguev  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
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Jon Elson]

From: Sergey Oboguev  To: Dennis Boone 
, SIMH  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
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-03-05 00:22, Sergey Oboguev wrote:

From: Clem Cole 




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:


The "New Hacker's Dictionary" is a prime example of history 
falsification. You should read the original. It is quite different. ESR 
did a lot of text substitution and outright changing to fit his view of 
the world when he "took over".



"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."  ;-)


This is just silly. TOPS-20 people are either shaking their heads at the 
level of uninformedness, or spinning in their graves...


Johnny

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Sergey Oboguev]

> From: Andreas Davour 


> what is the "Showstopper"?

A belletristic account of Windows NT development history.

"Showstopper is the dramatic, inside story of the creation of Windows NT, told 
by Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary. Driven by the legendary 
Bruce [sic!] Cutler, a picked band of software engineers sacrifices almost 
everything in their lives to build a new, stable, operating system aimed at 
giving Microsoft a platform for growth through the next decade of development 
in the computing business. Comparable in many ways to the Pulitzer 
Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Showstopper gets 
deep inside the process of software development, the lives and motivations of 
coders and the pressure to succeed coupled with the drive for originality and 
perfection that can pull a diverse team together to create a program consisting 
of many hundreds of thousands of lines of code."

http://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generation-Microsoft/dp/1497638836

In all fairness, in the text of the book they actually got Cutler's name right.

"G. Pascal Zachary is a journalist, author, and teacher. He spent thirteen 
years as a senior writer for the Wall Street Journal (1989 to 2001) [...] 
Zachary concentrates on African affairs. He also writes on globalization, 
America's role in world affairs, immigration, race and identity, and the 
dysfunctionalities and divisions in US society."

Some undoubtedly would argue that Windows must be falling into 
"dysfunctionalities and divisions in US society".
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Sergey Oboguev]

> Johnny Billquist  wrote:

> One thing Cutler did, which you do not find in the predecessors are ACPs.

If so, he may have a claim to inventing (a hint at) a microkernel concept. ;-)

Ironically, while ACPs made a lot of sense in a PDP-11 world due to the 
constraints in address space and kernel memory size, but rolling ACP idea over 
to VMS was much less productive (since these constraints were gone), and 
eventually F11 ACP was replaced with in-process XQP.

I am wondering though if FUSE developers ever heard of ACPs or reinvented the 
concept from scratch.
At least http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace
claims that "The idea of a filesystem driver living in userspace was originally 
developed in 1995".

It is also curious that ACPs (whether in traditional form or XQP form) allowed 
to do one thing that Unix/Linux interface still does not -- opening files as an 
asynchronous operation -- but ironically the chief utility of this capability 
is mainly for web servers which were not invented back then yet.

P.S. To come think of it, my very first project as a salaried software 
developer (more akin to commercial enterprise of Tom Sawyer in fence painting 
business) at ca. 1984 involved writing an ACP-like structure... not for a file 
system, but for a graphics card, on RSX.
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Clem Cole]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Sergey Oboguev  wrote:

> If so, he may have a claim to inventing (a hint at) a microkernel concept.
> ;-)


​Dykstra invented the ukernel -- its the THE kernel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system

The paper itself is
http://uosis.mif.vu.lt/~liutauras/books/Dijkstra%20-%20The%20structure%20of%20the%20THE%20multiprogramming%20system.pdf

And all kernel hacker should read it some time.  It where the idea of
semaphores are defined and the idea of "up" and "down" - (aka P/V).

Clem​
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-03-08 21:39, Clem Cole wrote:


On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Sergey Oboguev mailto:obog...@yahoo.com>> wrote:

If so, he may have a claim to inventing (a hint at) a microkernel
concept. ;-)


​Dykstra invented the ukernel -- its the THE kernel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system

The paper itself is
http://uosis.mif.vu.lt/~liutauras/books/Dijkstra%20-%20The%20structure%20of%20the%20THE%20multiprogramming%20system.pdf

And all kernel hacker should read it some time.  It where the idea of
semaphores are defined and the idea of "up" and "down" - (aka P/V).


Well, in all fairness, semaphores were used on railways already in the 
19th century...


Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist  || "I'm on a bus
  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive! ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Clem Cole]

Yep

On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 4:48 PM, Johnny Billquist  wrote:

> On 2015-03-08 21:39, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Sergey Oboguev > > wrote:
>>
>> If so, he may have a claim to inventing (a hint at) a microkernel
>> concept. ;-)
>>
>>
>> ​Dykstra invented the ukernel -- its the THE kernel:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system
>>
>> The paper itself is
>> http://uosis.mif.vu.lt/~liutauras/books/Dijkstra%20-%
>> 20The%20structure%20of%20the%20THE%20multiprogramming%20system.pdf
>>
>> And all kernel hacker should read it some time.  It where the idea of
>> semaphores are defined and the idea of "up" and "down" - (aka P/V).
>>
>
> Well, in all fairness, semaphores were used on railways already in the
> 19th century...
>
> Johnny
>
> --
> Johnny Billquist  || "I'm on a bus
>   ||  on a psychedelic trip
> email: b...@softjar.se ||  Reading murder books
> pdp is alive! ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
>
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Ton van Overbeek]

Clem,

Thanks for the reference to the Dijkstra paper.
I had my electrical engineering education at the THE 1968-1974 and our
introduction to programming class
was taught by Dijkstra himself. Of course our exercises had to be programmed
in Algol68 and run on the EL-X8
system described in the paper (entering programs on paper tape with a
flexowriter).
Interesting to read how ‘small’ the machine was in terms of memory and mass
storage.
The actual machine consisted of several cabinets.

Apologies for the off-topic post.

Ton van Overbeek

From:  Clem Cole 
Date:  Sunday 8 March 2015 21:39
To:  Sergey Oboguev 
Cc:  "simh@trailing-edge.com" 
Subject:  Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth


On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Sergey Oboguev  wrote:
> If so, he may have a claim to inventing (a hint at) a microkernel concept. ;-)

​Dykstra invented the ukernel -- its the THE kernel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system

The paper itself is
http://uosis.mif.vu.lt/~liutauras/books/Dijkstra%20-%20The%20structure%20of%
20the%20THE%20multiprogramming%20system.pdf

And all kernel hacker should read it some time.  It where the idea of
semaphores are defined and the idea of "up" and "down" - (aka P/V).

Clem​

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Henk Gooijen]

-Oorspronkelijk bericht- 
From: Johnny Billquist

Sent: Sunday, March 08, 2015 9:48 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

On 2015-03-08 21:39, Clem Cole wrote:


On Sun, Mar 8, 2015 at 8:23 AM, Sergey Oboguev mailto:obog...@yahoo.com>> wrote:

If so, he may have a claim to inventing (a hint at) a microkernel
concept. ;-)


​Dykstra invented the ukernel -- its the THE kernel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THE_multiprogramming_system

The paper itself is
http://uosis.mif.vu.lt/~liutauras/books/Dijkstra%20-%20The%20structure%20of%20the%20THE%20multiprogramming%20system.pdf

And all kernel hacker should read it some time.  It where the idea of
semaphores are defined and the idea of "up" and "down" - (aka P/V).


Well, in all fairness, semaphores were used on railways already in the
19th century...

Johnny


That's true, but Dijkstra used it as a software technique, and that was new.
BTW, "up" and "down" is not the best translation for "P/V" operation.
P stands for the Dutch word "passeer" which roughly translates to "pass".
V stands for the Dutch word "verhoog" and that should be translated to
"increment". And that is exactly what happens: pass and increment (the
semaphore variable).

- Henk 


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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Sergey Oboguev]

> From: Henk Gooijen 
> "up" and "down" is not the best translation for "P/V" operation.
> P stands for the Dutch word "passeer" which roughly translates to "pass".
> V stands for the Dutch word "verhoog" and that should be translated to 
> "increment".

The history of early efforts in synchronization is fascinating.

Another fascinating piece along the same lines is a comment at Lamport's web 
page to one of his articles relating that when Alpha was being designed, the 
designers came to Lamport and asked if he can optimize his synchronization 
algorithm so that Alpha can get by with having no interlocked instructions (low 
contention was considered to be the primary use case)... and Lamport did, but 
even the optimized version of the algorithm was still deemed expensive, so 
Alpha team designed LL/SC into the processor.

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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Rhialto]

On Sun 22 Mar 2015 at 21:28:36 +0100, Henk Gooijen wrote:
> That's true, but Dijkstra used it as a software technique, and that was new.
> BTW, "up" and "down" is not the best translation for "P/V" operation.
> P stands for the Dutch word "passeer" which roughly translates to "pass".
> V stands for the Dutch word "verhoog" and that should be translated to
> "increment". And that is exactly what happens: pass and increment (the
> semaphore variable).

Actually, they taught me that P stands for "Passeren" (to pass) and V
stands for "Vrijgeven", i.e. "to release".

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert  -- The Doctor: No, 'eureka' is Greek for
\X/ rhialto/at/xs4all.nl-- 'this bath is too hot.'


pgph_B5ObKYc1.pgp
Description: PGP signature
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Re: [Simh] Regarding "Cutler THE father of VMS" myth

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

There is more on the history of Dijkstra's P and V notation
for semaphores here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_%28programming%29

The article says:

>> ...
>> The canonical names V and P come from the initials of Dutch words. V
>> is generally explained as verhogen (`increase'). Several explanations
>> have been offered for P, including proberen for `to test' or `to try,'
>> passeren for `pass,' and pakken for `grab.' Dijkstra's earliest paper
>> on the subject gives passering (passing) as the meaning for P, and
>> vrijgave (release) as the meaning for V. It also mentions that the
>> terminology is taken from that used in railroad signals. Dijkstra
>> subsequently wrote that he intended P to stand for the portmanteau
>> prolaag, short for probeer te verlagen, literally `try to reduce,' or
>> to parallel the terms used in the other case, `try to decrease.' This
>> confusion stems from the fact that the words for increase and decrease
>> both begin with the letter V in Dutch, and the words spelled out in
>> full would be impossibly confusing for those not familiar with the
>> Dutch language.
>>
>> In ALGOL 68, the Linux kernel, and in some English textbooks, the V
>> and P operations are called, respectively, up and down. In software
>> engineering practice, they are often called signal and wait, release
>> and acquire (which the standard Java library uses), or post and
>> pend. Some texts call them vacate and procure to match the original
>> Dutch initials.
>> ...

I recently released a bibliography of Dijstra's works, and works about
him, here:

http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/d/dijkstra-edsger-w.bib
http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/authors/d/dijkstra-edsger-w.html

The two files look identical in a browser, except that the HTML form
has live hyperlinks.  The top-level index

http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibnet/

provides more information about the bibliographic coverage of the
BibNet Project, and also how to mirror the collection, or subsets
thereof.

It may have been Dijstra's 1968 Communications of the ACM article
(entry Dijkstra:2002:SMSb)

The Structure of the "THE"-Multiprogramming
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/363095.363143

that first made the P/V notation known to the English-reading world,
in the appendix, where he writes

>> ...
>> A process, "Q" say, that performs the operation "P (sem)" decreases
>> the value of the semaphore called "sem" by 1. If the resulting value
>> of the semaphore concerned is nonnegative, process Q can continue with
>> the execution of its next statement; if, however, the resulting value
>> is negative, process Q is stopped and booked on a waiting list
>> associated with the semaphore concerned.  ...
>>
>> A process, "R" say, that performs the operation "V (sem)" increases
>> the value of the semaphore called "sem" by 1. If the resulting value
>> of the semaphore concerned is positive, the V-operation in question
>> has no further effect; if, however, the resulting value of the
>> semaphore concerned is nonpositive, one of the processes booked on its
>> waiting list is removed from this waiting list, i.e.  its dynamic
>> progress is again logically permissible and in due time a processor
>> will be allocated to it...
>> ...

---
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- University of UtahFAX: +1 801 581 4148  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCBInternet e-mail: be...@math.utah.edu  -
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