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

[Phil Mendelsohn]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cheers,
Phil M