20 Feb
2018
20 Feb
'18
10:33 p.m.
On 2/20/18, Donald ODona <mutiny.mutiny(a)india.com> wrote:
since '86 he was working on an operating system,
named Mica, which failed.
At 19 Feb 2018 18:13:59 +0000 (+00:00) from Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>om>:
> Dave Cutler was in the VMS group only for VMS version 1. He rarely
> stayed on around for version 2 of anything. Hustvedt's and Lipman's
> contributions for VMS were more extensive and longer-lasting than
> Cutler's.
Cutler had already left the VMS OS group by the time I joined DEC in
February of 1980. After VMS he led the team developing PL/I and C
compilers for VMS. These shared a common back end called the VAX Code
Generator (VCG). The other VMS compilers at the time (Fortran,
Pascal, Cobol) had their own separate optimizers and code generators.
The VAX Ada compiler would also use VCG.
When version 1 of VAX PL/i and VAX C shipped, Cutler worked on
subsetting the VAX architecture so that a single chip implementation
could be done, and led the team that produced the MicroVAX I. The
MicroVAX architecture emulated expensive instructions such as packed
decimal. All of the later, single-chip VAXes used this architecture.
When the MicroVAX I shipped, Cutler devised a microkernel-based
real-time operating system for the VAX called VAXeln.
After VAXeln, Cutler led the team developing a RISC architecture
follow-on to the VAX called PRISM, and an operating system for it
called Mica. Mica had a VAXeln-like microkernel, and the plan was to
layer personality modules on top of that to implement VMS and
Unix-style ABIs and system calls.
Alpha was chosen instead of PRISM as the VAX successor, and that is
when Cutler left DEC for Microsoft. Windows NT has a lot of design
concepts and details previously seen in PRISM and VMS.
-Paul W.
21 Feb
21 Feb
7:20 a.m.
New subject: Dave Cutler (was Re: Re: Happy birthday, Dick Hustvedt!)
I used the VMS PL/1 to write an ISO transport layer as a gigantic
finite state machine in the computed GOTO via a jump table. First job
from graduating. Not my finest moment, but the compiler was awesome.
Fast, rigid. I think I had to get somebody to write some bliss32 or
even ASM to do a trick in the stack for some debug, cool moment for
me. The box of fiches of the OS code was there in the machineroom, It
was a revalation to me you could do that: go "read" the code, and see
what it did.
I don't know if we used VMS C from Dec. I have a feeling if you ran
Eunice, you used pcc or a derivative of pcc. Cross library calling was
pretty straightforward (ok, so passing function addresses and dynamic
structures into FORTRAN not such) and VMS had a well defined 'postbox'
mechanism for async I/O which was wierd if you were used to UNIX but
then .. the entire FS in VMS was wierd if you were used to UNIX.
Wierd, but also comforting: you told the filesystem you wanted fast
record indexing into a file as a binary construct and it said "sure:
I'll do that" and as long as you opened the file with the right
semantics, thats what you got.
I still have my thin-form PL/1 cheetsheet booklet. Its fat. Most of
these were 3-fold cards, its got staples. Not a big language mind you.
So basically, his compiler got me my first paper.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/spe.4380150503/full
On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 2:33 AM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 2/20/18, Donald ODona
<mutiny.mutiny(a)india.com> wrote:
since '86 he was working on an operating
system, named Mica, which failed.
At 19 Feb 2018 18:13:59 +0000 (+00:00) from Paul Winalski
<paul.winalski(a)gmail.com>om>:
> Dave Cutler was in the VMS group only for VMS version 1. He rarely
> stayed on around for version 2 of anything. Hustvedt's and Lipman's
> contributions for VMS were more extensive and longer-lasting than
> Cutler's.
Cutler had already left the VMS OS group by the time I joined DEC in
February of 1980. After VMS he led the team developing PL/I and C
compilers for VMS. These shared a common back end called the VAX Code
Generator (VCG). The other VMS compilers at the time (Fortran,
Pascal, Cobol) had their own separate optimizers and code generators.
The VAX Ada compiler would also use VCG.
When version 1 of VAX PL/i and VAX C shipped, Cutler worked on
subsetting the VAX architecture so that a single chip implementation
could be done, and led the team that produced the MicroVAX I. The
MicroVAX architecture emulated expensive instructions such as packed
decimal. All of the later, single-chip VAXes used this architecture.
When the MicroVAX I shipped, Cutler devised a microkernel-based
real-time operating system for the VAX called VAXeln.
After VAXeln, Cutler led the team developing a RISC architecture
follow-on to the VAX called PRISM, and an operating system for it
called Mica. Mica had a VAXeln-like microkernel, and the plan was to
layer personality modules on top of that to implement VMS and
Unix-style ABIs and system calls.
Alpha was chosen instead of PRISM as the VAX successor, and that is
when Cutler left DEC for Microsoft. Windows NT has a lot of design
concepts and details previously seen in PRISM and VMS.
-Paul W. 
22 Feb
22 Feb
2:18 a.m.
New subject: Dave Cutler (was Re: Re: Happy birthday, Dick Hustvedt!)
On 20/02/2018, George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote (in part):
I don't know if we used VMS C from Dec. I have a
feeling if you ran
Eunice, you used pcc or a derivative of pcc. Cross library calling was
pretty straightforward (ok, so passing function addresses and dynamic
structures into FORTRAN not such) [...]
Hhmmm... I recall using DEC's C compiler, which we called VAX C.
Calling C stuff from VAX FORTRAN required jiggery-pokery and the other
way was hopeless. I recall (assuming no wetware bit-rot on my part)
that DEC's languages did not pass on the stack but stuffed the
arguments somewhere, passing a pointer to the somewhere.
N.
3:33 a.m.
New subject: Dave Cutler (was Re: Re: Happy birthday, Dick Hustvedt!)
On Wed, 21 Feb 2018, Nemo wrote:
Hhmmm... I recall using DEC's C compiler, which
we called VAX C. Calling
C stuff from VAX FORTRAN required jiggery-pokery and the other way was
hopeless. I recall (assuming no wetware bit-rot on my part) that DEC's
languages did not pass on the stack but stuffed the arguments somewhere,
passing a pointer to the somewhere.
Would that have anything to do with F*RTR*N being call by value-result?
I.e. if you modified a formal parameter, and that corresponding actual
parameter was a constant (and only stored once), then...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
4:16 a.m.
New subject: Dave Cutler (was Re: Re: Happy birthday, Dick Hustvedt!)
On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 1:18 PM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 20/02/2018, George Michaelson
<ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote (in part):
The arguments were on the stack, but the calling convention also had some
metadata about the arguments you needed to worry about when calling
into/out of C, but rarely any time else. %DESCRIPTOR sticks in my head for
some traumatic reason.
Warner
I don't know if we used VMS C from Dec. I
have a feeling if you ran
Eunice, you used pcc or a derivative of pcc. Cross library calling was
pretty straightforward (ok, so passing function addresses and dynamic
structures into FORTRAN not such) [...]
Hhmmm... I recall using DEC's C compiler, which we called VAX C.
Calling C stuff from VAX FORTRAN required jiggery-pokery and the other
way was hopeless. I recall (assuming no wetware bit-rot on my part)
that DEC's languages did not pass on the stack but stuffed the
arguments somewhere, passing a pointer to the somewhere.
4:25 a.m.
New subject: Dave Cutler (was Re: Re: Happy birthday, Dick Hustvedt!)
I'm dredging up from tapestore memory but I think for things we'd
morally call "varargs" you had to have a way of telling the call
binding what the variant elements were. It's one thing to be inside a
language model where the heap and type bindings are known, and another
to break out into another language. NAG library (leeds uni had some
role in this, maybe maintenance contract. I lunched with the people
who worked on it. They were awesome gods of computing including one
feller who had a glass eyeball. Thats hardcore pirate programmers
right there!) its pretty well understood you passed numbers and arrays
of numbers, so the variations on call args were rather limited. Other
things? not such.
There were various warnings about using const and register and other
#pragma too. Compilers mucking around too much.
The only language aside from LISP (sorry. forget I said that) which I
couldn't get to fly on the UNIX systems was Pascal, the Berkeley
compiler made completely different assumptions to the DEC-10 compiler
I'd used at university. Syntactically, the language felt different
even if it really wasn't. I think Berkeley did Pascal to get over some
educational funding barrier, it didn't feel like a real investment
(the p-system aside)
Actually I tell a lie. Snobol defeated me. I had no brain capacity to
understand it. APL had left me behind, on the DECwriter with the
modified alphabet. Keyboard in greek? Ok.. fool me once, more fool
you: fool me twice, Lambda Sigma Phi me.
On Thu, Feb 22, 2018 at 8:16 AM, Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 1:18 PM, Nemo <cym224(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 20/02/2018, George Michaelson <ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote (in part):
The arguments were on the stack, but the calling convention also had some
metadata about the arguments you needed to worry about when calling into/out
of C, but rarely any time else. %DESCRIPTOR sticks in my head for some
traumatic reason.
Warner I don't know if we used VMS C from Dec. I
have a feeling if you ran
Eunice, you used pcc or a derivative of pcc. Cross library calling was
pretty straightforward (ok, so passing function addresses and dynamic
structures into FORTRAN not such) [...]
Hhmmm... I recall using DEC's C compiler, which we called VAX C.
Calling C stuff from VAX FORTRAN required jiggery-pokery and the other
way was hopeless. I recall (assuming no wetware bit-rot on my part)
that DEC's languages did not pass on the stack but stuffed the
arguments somewhere, passing a pointer to the somewhere.
8:38 a.m.
New subject: Dave Cutler (was Re: Re: Happy birthday, Dick Hustvedt!)
On Thu, 22 Feb 2018, George Michaelson wrote:
Actually I tell a lie. Snobol defeated me. I had no
brain capacity to
understand it. APL had left me behind, on the DECwriter with the
modified alphabet. Keyboard in greek? Ok.. fool me once, more fool you:
fool me twice, Lambda Sigma Phi me.
In final year Comp Sci we had to write a compiler, so I told my lecturer
(Ken Robinson) that I was going to do it in SNOBOL. He threatened to fail
me if I did... I ended up using ALGOLW instead, and IMHO it was an
amazing piece of work, being able to correct syntax errors so that it
could continue compiling etc, and proved it by writing a program with
every possible error being auto-corrected and producing the correct output
when run. That listing and deck of cards are long gone, alas.
As for APL, I see you've never used APL\360 on the Kleinschmidt
(pronounced "Kline-shit") terminal. A matrix printer, it regularly
punched holes right through the paper; one joker put a page on the Comp
Sci noticed board with a reddish IBM JCL card showing through, with the
inscription "Who said APL programs weren't transparent?". No, it
wasn't
me; I was responsible for certain other shenanigans instead, but I'm
unsure of the Statute of Limitations...
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
8:44 a.m.
On Tue, 20 Feb 2018, Paul Winalski wrote:
When the MicroVAX I shipped, Cutler devised a
microkernel-based
real-time operating system for the VAX called VAXeln.
Damn; I'm trying to remember a little ditty around that time, something
like:
I love my little MicroVax
I like it when it fails
etc. Does it stir anyone's memories?
--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will
suffer."
9:25 a.m.
New subject: in defense of SNOBOL, APL (and Icon) (was Re: Dave Cutler (was Re: Re: Happy birthday, Dick Hustvedt!)
[I’ll bring this back to AIX so as to not be straying too far from Unix.]
I learned SNOBOL in an undergraduate programming languages course at UT-Austin.
When I went to Yorktown in 1975, I brought with me a queueing network simulation program,
APLOMB, that I wrote in Fortran. I thought of APLOMB as almost incidental to my
dissertation (chapter VI at
http://technologists.com/sauer/CONFIGURATION%20OF%20COMPUTING%20SYSTEMS%20-…
<http://technologists.com/sauer/CONFIGURATION%20OF%20COMPUTING%20SYSTEMS%20-%20AN%20APPROACH%20USING%20QUEUEING%20NETWORK%20MODELS.pdf>).
The group I joined in Yorktown was very interested in APLOMB. I was encouraged to enhance
it considerably, which I did, continuing with Fortran, in spite of wishing I was using a
language with support for structured data types, pointers, etc.
One of my colleagues, the late Martin Reiser, had developed a numerical package, QNET4,
for solving a subset of the queueing networks considered by APLOMB. Martin was adept with
APL and designed QNET4 in APL, but subsequently maintained a PL/I version in parallel with
the APL original. I never did much more than play with APL, though I think I had a
Selectric ball for APL and may have had a 3277 with APL (IIRC, APL was an optional
extra).
It soon came to pass that we wanted to put APLOMB and QNET4 under one roof and the
combination became RESQ
(http://web.archive.org/web/20130627040507/http://www.research.ibm.com/comps…
<http://web.archive.org/web/20130627040507/http://www.research.ibm.com/compsci/performance/history.html>),
based on extending QNET4 and cobbling it with the Fortran APLOMB.
RESQ was very well received. Our management bemoaned the kludgey implementation, wishing
APLOMB was in PL/I, convinced that getting APLOMB into PL/I would be an enormous effort.
Remembering my pleasant course experiences with SNOBOL, I used SNOBOL to create a Fortran
to PL/I translator of sorts. I think it took me less than two weeks to write the
translator, use it with APLOMB and begin working with the all-PL/I version of RESQ.
Management, Martin, Ed MacNair (other primary RESQ developer), and I were all thrilled.
One of SNOBOL’s creators, Ralph Griswold, created a somewhat analogous but less
syntactically intimidating successor, Icon (https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/
<https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/>). When we in AIX development bemoaned all the
code that still existed as PL.8, I remembered the SNOBOL experience and prototyped a PL.8
to C translator in Icon. Dave Farber of ISC (not the CMU Prof. Farber) enhanced it and it
was used to assist in getting the PL.8 code to C in AIX.
Charlie
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8 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
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Charles H. Sauer -
Dave Horsfall -
George Michaelson -
Nemo -
Paul Winalski -
Warner Losh