Dave Cutler

Dave Cutler (born March 13, 1942) is a noted software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including the RSX-11, VMS and VAXELN systems of Digital Equipment Corporation and Windows NT from Microsoft.

VMS

In April, 1975, DIGITAL began a hardware project, code named Star, to design on a 32-bit virtual address extension to its PDP-11. In June, 1975, Dave together with Dick Hustvedt, and Peter Lipman were appointed the technical project leaders for the software project, code named Starlet, to develop a totally new operating system for the Star family of processors. These two projects were tightly integrated from the beginning. The three technical leaders of the Starlet project together with three technical leaders of the Star project formed the "Blue Ribbon Committee" at DIGITAL who produced the fifth design evolution for the programs. The design featured simplifications to the memory management and process scheduling schemes of the earlier proposals and the architecture was accepted. The Star and Starlet projects culminated in the development of the VAX 11/780 computer and the VAX/VMS operating system.

Related Topics:
1975 - PDP-11 - Dick Hustvedt - VAX - VMS

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At DEC he is widely credited for terminating the 1979-80 Desktop RSTS project and scrapping the manufacturing prototype. Compared to the subsequently announced IBM-PC, RSTS had 40,000 running applications, ANSI languages and DMBS.

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