[ih] Where's Multics now, was Internet-history Digest

[Bill Nowicki]

 Here is my anecdote on Dave Cutler, with at least some tie-in with Internet history, I hope. The East-Coasters on the list might have more details, but this covers his migration to the West.
By the late 1970s, there was a fairly low-profile project at BBN to write networking code in a better language (besides Honeywell assembler for the IMPs etc.). A small team designed an elegant but efficient "Communication Oriented Language" (COL) that had stronger typing than C, with a syntax that a human could read (as opposed to C++). That came to a grinding halt when the US Defense Department edicted that all code would be written in Ada.  At the time I was an intern at the laser fusion project at Lawrence Livermore Lab. We were also looking for a language in which we could write real-time control code for the huge systems such as the fusion projects. My boss at the time, James R. Greenwood, headed the effort at the labs for the Department of Energy, which at the time was not under the Ada mandate, and need something sooner. By 1982 Jim Greenwood got some start-up funding (this was California after all), and convinced the BBN folks Art Evans and Bob Morgan to join him. They also recruited Dave Cutler from DEC, who had just finished working the Vax PL/I code generator. Many said it was the best PL/I, although the language never took off. The idea was to have Cutler port the COL compiler from PDP-11 to VAX and make it a commercial product under the name "Praxis". Somehow Gordon Bell found out about Cutler's move to the West, and asked what it would take for him to stay. He made a demand he thought they would never match: that he could start his own team on the West coast (fondly called decwet) and do whatever he wanted. The Praxis compilers were used a bit at Livermore then fizzled.
So Cutler started decwet, hired some people who worked on micro-kernels as grad students, and developed MICA and PRISM until his funding ran out, then went to Microsoft and the rest is history. Meanwhile I went back to finish my PhD at Stanford and connected them to the Internet, writing the code in C, alas.
Bill
    On Monday, August 18, 2025 at 09:32:38 AM PDT, Dave McGuire via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:  
 
 On August 18, 2025 10:55:39 AM Clem Cole via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> First remember Johnny knows a lot about RSX-11M sources so final state I
> trust his comment, but he was never a DECie or worked in the Mill or ZKO
> like some us so he never lived it and I suggest you take many of comments
> with a bit of care.

  Hi Clem, it's nice to see your name in my mail spool.  Actually Johnny did work at DEC in the 1980s.  I was under the impression that he had, so I just asked him, and he confirmed it.

                      -Dave

--
Dave McGuire
President/Curator, Large Scale Systems Museum
New Kensington, PA


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