Dave Cutler

Dave Cutler, Sr. (born March 13, 1942 in Lansing, Michigan, grew up in Dewitt, Michigan), noted software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including the RSX-11 and VMS systems of Digital Equipment Corporation and Windows NT from Microsoft.

In addition to his engineering skills, Cutler is known for his sardonic humor. He generally referred to the RSX fork list as the "fork queue". Sometimes even his error messages turn out to have a double meaning. The acronym WNT was acknowledged by Cutler to be a pun on VMS (obtained by shifting each letter one position in alphabetical order, as HAL is popularly believed to have been derived from IBM in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey).

After graduating from Olivet College in 1965, Cutler went to work for DuPont. One of his tasks was developing and running computer simulations on Digital machines. He developed an interest in operating systems and left DuPont to pursue that interest.

Cutler's software career started at a small company he founded called ??, located in Monument Square, Concord, Massachusetts, marketing software for the LINC and PDP-8 computers. He joined Microsoft in 1988 and was co-leader of the team that developed Windows NT. Later he worked on targetting Windows NT to the 64-bit Alpha computer. That project was scrapped by COMPAQ/DEC. According to Microsoft's website, Cutler is (as of September 24, 2002) working on the 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows.

Cutler holds over 20 patents and is affiliate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington.

Quotation

• "VMS and its RSX ancestors all the way back to IAS, I believe, have had a FoRK Queue, the source of at least 3% of Internals humor." Usenet FoRK discussion list.