[HECnet] This is probably been asked already but....

[Gregg Levine]

On Mon, Jul 2, 2012 at 9:57 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
On 2012-07-03 03:28, Phil Mendelsohn wrote:

On 12-07-02 03:09 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:

I have no problems calling -11M a redo of -11D. As far as I know, it was
not done by Cutler at DuPont, but something he did after starting at
DEC. But that is just what I gathered from reading various sources over
the years... I could very well be wrong.


-11M was entirely done at DEC.   -11D was brought finished from DuPont,
and was AFAIK written single-handedly by Cutler.   Source may or not
reflect this; in order to stamp 'digital' on it, there may have been a
new coat of paint.


Uh...? As far as I know, Dave Cutler was not involved in -11D. Are you
really sure about this? Also, DuPont writing -11D? RSX started as RSX-15 for
the PDP-15, at DEC. And that was around 1972 as well. How could DuPoint have
become involved and written RSX before then? I'm curious here...


DEC was headhunting around '72 - they picked up Cutler earlier because
of what he'd done at Du Pont on his own.   My dad had done an OS for the
LINC-8 for the Psych dept. at Michigan State which got back to Central
Engineering through the Life Sciences people, so that's how he ended up
working with Cutler.


Cool.


And Cutler seems to have been quite a person to deal with already back
then. :-)


He didn't write -11M single handedly, but he read and signed off each
and every line of code in it.   You probably know the story about how he
had a red ink stamp that said "Size Is Everything."   If he could write
code tighter than what came across his desk, the proposed code was
returned to the sender with the stamp right across it.   That's not
apocryphal.


I know he didn't write it single handedly, but he did write quite a lot of
it. Just read through the sources... His name is at the top in quite a few
places...


What isn't always told is that if you couldn't ever write tighter code
(two or three iterations), Cutler used his own - but didn't necessarily
take other names off it IIRC.

Dad was pretty full of himself when he successfully argued Cutler out of
2 *bits* in a register for the error logging subsystem.   It wasn't
pigheadedness on either side, but you had to formally show something
couldn't be done with n-1 bits.   Even for n=2.   Absolute brutality when
it came to size.

Memory hasn't been such an issue for a long time now, and now I'm off
topic - sorry guys.


We are indeed drifting way off hecnet here. I think I'll continue this
outside of the list.
I apologize for the drift as well...


              Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist                                   || "I'm on a bus
                                                                  ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                         ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                                         ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol



Hello!
Not really Johnny. I'm the one who should have stated that. I actually
find this material interesting. And Steve? During the course of the
month I shall be working to bring up an emulated VAX running VMS.

-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."