Dave Cutler

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).

He was born in Lansing, Michigan and grew up in Dewitt, Michigan[?]. 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.