On Saturday 08 August 2009, Robert Lewko wrote: > Yeah, OK a talented programmer. Yeah he was working on Basic. Whoopee!!! > > Then how is it that when this "talented programmer" gets into the position > of chief architect that he hires David cutler, who was fired from DEC for > incompetence, to architect NT? Then because the performance of NT 3.51
This is simply not the case at all. Cutler left DEC because Prism was cancelled in 1988 and he was fed up with the bungling within DEC management. His impatience for fools is well documented. You don't receive high praise from the likes of Gordon Bell and become a recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the White House if you're deemed incompetent by your peers. Cutler was the architect of VMS (aka OpenVMS) in the 70's, well known for its rock solid stability, scalability, and clustering, technologies which other vendors are still grasping at. When uptime is measured in years (cluster uptime now in decades for some customers), when lives are at risk, when a few seconds on a delayed transaction can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, VMS is what is running the show. Think banks, stock exchanges, healthcare, 911. Think Deutsche Borse for example. The baggage handling system in Frankfurt, the busiest airport in Germany and a major international hub, is running on VMS. Commerzbank during 9/11 survived when it's datacenter was destroyed in the twin towers because it was running a multisite VMS cluster with the other fully participating nodes in New Jersey. This was not standby/failover that some vendors tout as "clustering" but rather the VMS single system image clustering technology. A cluster transition of a few seconds occured when the link was lost and all transactions resumed processing on the surviving cluster members - absolutely zero data loss. There are many many other examples of the quality, stability, scalability, and reliability of VMS. So, it would be easy to argue that it was in fact DEC that was incompetent, certainly not technically, but from a marketing and managerial standpoint. Cutler reimplemented numerous VMS technologies in NT, however, the major problem as many have already noted elsewhere over the years, is the backward compatability baggage. If he had started from scratch and not bothered with backward compatability, it's conceivable that NT could have morphed into something with greater stability and security, something similar to what VMS has always been and still is today. An Edsel with a new paint job is still an Edsel. NT was thus crippled from the starting gate. I can remember firing up NT 3.51 on a 64bit AlphaServer in 1997 - fastest BSOD on the planet. "Fired for incompetence" speaks not to Cutlers' skills, but to the inability of the bureaucracy within DEC to realize the engineering talent within its organization during the emergence of the RISC projects at the time. Unfortunately, many of those managers retained their lucrative positions while the brains headed for the exits. The same could be said for numerous other talented engineers... Richie Larry comes to mind for example. Curtis _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
