[jdege]

Dave Cutler was the main reason that VMS learned almost nothing from Unix. He hated that so many of DEC’s customers preferred to install BSD on their PDPs and their VAXen.

He was working on the successor to VMS, when DEC pulled the plug. So he and most of his team went to Microsoft to build NT. Where his arguments with Richard Rashid (who’d built Mach, at Carnegie Mellon, before coming to Microsoft) we’re legendary.

Cutler was a lead developer on Azure.

If he were dead, he’d be rolling in his grave. (Though he seems to have been shuffled off to work on the Xbox, which is pretty much the same thing.)

[dayglored]

Dave Cutler's legacy is that Windows NT learned nothing from Unix either. Despite the fact that Microsoft had been a Unix house prior to the IBM-PC MSDOS takeover, and that there was considerable Unix experience within MS engineering (witness how much of the MSDOS filesystem mimicked Unix filesystem structure and usage), all that was forsaken with NT.

Cutler is/was brilliant and capable, no one admits otherwise. But had Microsoft used Unix lessons more during NT development, they would likely now have a much better Windows product. And it would be one that their engineers understand.

Oh well.

[Jonty30]

Why is working on the X-box a death sentence?

It’s a huge success by any measure.