The Mind Behind Windows: Dave Cutler 

There's truly something to be said about keeping your mind sharp by continuing to work, either through hobbies or otherwise. Just need to keep the stress in check.

Yea it ain't going to be pretty if you just slump on the couch and usually have sausage and beer for lunch you'll be dead or decrepit in a decade. Wouldn't advice working full time to your grave, there aren't many who regret spending fewer hours at the office but suddenly after five decades turn to couch potato is a death sentence.

Keep using your mind or you'll lose it!

Genetics play a significant role in this context. His current intellectual abilities serve as a testament to the remarkable intelligence he possessed during his prime.

I saw a photo, he was working on early days of Azure.

Raymond Chen and Mark Russinovick

BRING BILL@@monad_tcp

Yes same here.... And I would like to hear about Azure history, reddog from the guys that were there!

I nominate the Father of the Zen and Apple A architecture Jim Keller

Soooo much this! These stories of how the foundations of modern computation were developed are incredibly interesting! It's also a real trip to look back and realize how far tech has come since then!

Back then I think that was much more common. You almost had to know what you were doing. It was emerging technology. He started off doing what he was eventually hiring people to do.

​@@bhollingsworth Was more common in all industries, there was a better blend of those that worked there way up and had practical knowledge and those with an academy background with underlying theory.(also the academics had less off-topic fluff) Stuff was really sliding downhill aound the time when the "personnel" depts became HR depts, wich was also associated with increased bureaucracy and middle managment bloat as everyone tries to game the system.

@@mytech6779 I agree.

I don't know if it would have been that good. Because he can critique you more in depth and with him being obsessed with performance and optimization you would be having to put in 110% daily which would burn out. But trade off is a boss you can bounce ideas off of and really know. If my boss was Dave, I would love it. But bosses like that that also micro manage are hell. Dave appears he trusts his employees and if your good enough for him, he would let you do your work.

@@MikeHarris1984 agreed. It sounds miserable. People have said Gates was terrible to work for also for the same reason.

How many Daves are responsible for today’s technology 🧐

Haha just noticed, yes indeed I am in it for the long haul 3 hour cut. So good

Me, for the past 3 days: “That’s a lot of excerpts, is he going to leave anything for the full video?” Me, right now looking at the full video length: “Oh…”

Perfect length for a full interview!

I was wondering what the draw to the fell interview would be after so many clips. Oh.

@@euromicelli5970 same here.

😊😊😊😊😊

😊😊0000000000000⁰000000

His memory is ridiculously good, this guy is sharp.

I'm half his age and feel like a dimwitted sausage after watching this, can barely recall what I did a month ago at work. 🤯

I wish I was that sharp when I was in my 20's.

He is amazing!! 80 years and that eloquence is fantastic

I was thinking the same, its so cool to watch. hahahaha

Really unbelievable how switched on he is. He sounds 40

Just because you said it, I'm ripping and achieving it myself.

I am making dvd with it😅

Word of advice: if you find any valuable video on youtube that is worth rewatching from time to time, archive it yourself. Just remember: in 2023 december, google starts the inactive account purge project. If you know any channel, whose owner deceased (for example during covid), and hasnt logged into its google account in the past 1 year or so, now these videos will be the first candidates of the deletion. Search after it yourself, if you dont believe what I said. Thousands or millions of old videos will be gone forever very soon. Im not exaggerating.

Agree.

This kind of people never retire. Considering it's the work of a lifetime it makes sense, and also it's pretty good to stay healthy, keep the brain working.

@@lppedd Actually it's usually the corporate who pushes people out as they age. But I can understand, a guy with these credentials, they wouldn't wanna lose an employee who is one of the few people who knows a lot about windows and its internals.

You never give up coding.

I’m feeling my own age a bit today as I celebrate a milestone birthday, and hearing Dave Cutler say he’s still coding is so inspirational for me.

He cant. He knows to much lol.

2:52:17 Dave C. eating something. 2:59:50 While talking about X Cloud, Dave C. bumps the microphone and expertly realigns it again.

2:06:55 apparently what are your choices on updating games vms in xbox it's been censored

* any _other..._ (Maybe.)

Ditto.

Management sucks for an engineer. Spent 12 years doing it - mostly that was a massive waste of time. Never actually accepted the rules of management - guessing instead of understanding the problem, blaming others for problems instead of just finding the root and fixing them, pretending to be infallible, so not willing to risk whatsoever, and thus not being able to create anything worthy. That's screwed up so badly. There are a few percent of population who are inherently good managers, there rest shouldn't even try. On the other hand, while I was attending bullshit meetings and writing bullshit reports, something bad happened to the technical expertise in the programming world. It's really difficult to hire a senior developer these days. The education mostly became oriented to learning patterns instead of thinking (and those patterns mostly concert integrating someone else's code, not writing your own, for some unimportant applications). So few years ago I switched to writing code as well. So long management nightmare.

@@InconspicuousChap Thank you for this comment. You really hit the nail on the head. Management is a massive waste of time for engineers. Many companies/IT departments these days are run by people, who don’t understand technology and got zero interest/passion for it. Sadly, too many developers are tempted by money/illusionary sense of power and join them. My 8 year management journey left me burnt out, disillusioned and cynical. I went back to programming and it took me awhile to recover. I never looked back.

I also say thanks to the men at bell labs who invented unix , without said unix they wouldn't have been able to create Linux

Agreed. It was refreshing to have the guest do nearly all the talking. So many other tubers do at least half if not more of the talking than the guest. Great questions, too.

I was also going to leave this comment. I’m so sick of interviewers who can’t avoid filling the interview with the sound of their own voice. The way to do it is what Dave did here: frame the story and then get out of the way and let the guy your interviewing tell it his way, and don’t feel like every pause is an opportunity to remind your viewers why you’re important. A couple seconds of dead air is OK, if it leads to another great story from the person you went through all this trouble to get on your show. DP knows his audience, and I suspect knows this great interview style from having to live it on a pretty much daily basis with his autism. I don’t know if I’m on the spectrum, but I am introverted, so I know all about verbally lining up the shot, and then stepping back so the other guy can take it and play the rest of the game.

It was posted 30 mins ago?

He sounds like he was the antithesis of Allchin... but i'm just guessing.

He has to diss PowerPC because he is a "Wintel" guy. With all due respect (which really is due for Cutler) saying an architecture is bad because IBM cannot produce a decent compiler is - well, what do you expect. Microsoft was always married to Intel with AMD allowed to play along. PowerPC was a neat RISC architecture beating Intel/AMD to 64 bit (which was much cleaner on PowerPC than the 64 bit hacks of AMD) and had a vector unit (Altivec/VMX) before Intel even thought about it (i did some Altivec stuff and would choose it over the horrible SSE any time). They could just have used GCC or the Freescale compiler (PowerPC was a collaboraton of IBM and Freescale and is used in embedded devices until today). It wasn't that IBM did not want to "cannibalize" anything, it was that any flavor of Windows shouid commercially run on Intel and Intel only. It's all politics with M$.

@@therealmccoy7221 well, as indicated in my original comment, I was at the receiving end of IBM protecting their AIX revenue at almost all cost (knowing the margin on those systems, that clearly is a sensible short term measure). I cannot say what they did with PowerPC, but I can certainly see them run much the same course there.

@@pjakobs well they ironically delivered the PowerPC CPU's (Xeon) for M$ Xbox 360 later on.

@@therealmccoy7221 sure, and the market overlap for an xbox and a power AIX system is exactly 0% - which is not true for the overlap between AIX systems and Windows server (or in my case, Linux servers). What I described and what I believe is similar to what Dave C described, is the power the AIX team held over the power hardware. I made no statement about the quality of the architecture.

I had a copy of Visual Studio 6 standard when I was a teen, lol. Also had VB4. :p Why was the C++ dialog editor so awful? Lol

Did you use to use Pathworks like we did to get the PCs talking to the VMS machines?

@@JonathanMcCormack omg, had forgotten about pathworks, installed on clients from floppies. was a bit kludgy but did the job and it seemed magical.

@@JonathanMcCormackNot OP, but I did!

​@@JonathanMcCormackyes we did use pathworks but with DOS and Windows 3.11. A mainframe arrived later on and SNA server on NT 4 replaced the VAX and pathworks setup

From a technical standpoint my time with Digital, the VMS operating system and all the networking around that was the best time of my career. I just never learned so much so fast. When things expanded to Pathworks on the PC's, Alisa Systems on the Mac's (remember the Mac originally only had Appletalk), SNA connectivity with JNET on the VAX, Ultrix, DEC X.25 gateway to that thing called the Internet...it was just the best 10 years I ever spent.

Did you catch the part where they sent him off to IBM to learn GPSS III? There were no formal degrees in this stuff back then. I suspect he got sent because no one else wanted to go or be stuck with dealing with that end of the computing business. I assume that DaveC was noticed as a go-getter and was picked for that reason.

But your point that HR would filter him out has some merit. When I left MSFT, the bar was basicly a masters degree in CS which I think most of the people who worked on NT 3.1 wouldn't have met.

This is typically the advantage when things are brand new and essentially no one knows anything about them. There were plenty of jobs when he started that rejected people with no relevant experience. One of the problems faced today is everyone is familiar with software and all software is just software. To many there is no different between an iOS app and developing a new LLM.

While I agree with what you’re saying in regards to what would happen today, in fact back then he did have the requisite skill set. Math and physics were his minors or at least study subjects for him, I forget if he said he degreed in them or not. So he had what would have been the appropriate skill set back then. I doubt there were any computer science degrees being offered at the time.

Was he involved in XBox? The story I heard as that they 'took the Windows 2000 source code and hacked it' to make the original XBox OS. It sounds like the sort of thing Cutler would be very dismissive of.

Rumor has it that he was brought in, or maybe volunteered, to step into the Xbox project a while back to help save the Xbox One virtualization layer for Xbox and Xbox 360 backward compatibility. I’m not sure if he was heavily involved before that, but I believe he’s been working on Xbox stuff for a while now…but I could be totally off base.

He talks a bit about Xbox at around 2:00:00 in the video. Didn't know that all games are an actual VMs complete with its own OS. Thinking of that, if that's the architecture, it wouldn't be hard to run Xbox games on PCs. 🤔

@@rgl168it’s not quite it’s own full OS for each game, but the game application itself runs in a sandboxed virtualized environment, so it can only write to its own dedicated save slots and it’s memory space is isolated from the OS. It’s based on Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology.

Now that would be an awesome episode!

+1 for this. Azure is my favorite Public Cloud platform and I would love to see the CTO of it sharing his old days.

+1 for Mark interview. Though I think Mark's work is not as close to Dave's interests.

Add plus one for russnovich interview.

Thank you for noticing! I was wondering if anyone would be able to spot the idle pattern from RSX11m, and I think you're the first to do so, or at least say so :-)

@@DavesGarage Dave, I also noticed the PiDP-11 running RSX-11M+ in the background behind Dave. It is likely running the RSX disk image that I provided to Oscar for the PiDP-11. There is an improved RSX disk image available from Johnny Billquist who created the TCP/IP stack and utilities for M+ in the past few years. I was wondering if Dave Cutler was aware of the renewed interested in RSX11M+ that's happening because of the more than 4,500 PiDP-11/70's that have been sold?

Glad you enjoyed it!

@@DavesGarage This was simply phenomenal.

That was a great book.

Excellent Book. It's where I first read about Dave Cutler in the 2000s.

I got the impression that Dave Cutller was a kind of a scary character from that book but he seems so approachable and a fun guy in this interview.

@@StuartWoodwardJP - I agree the book did certainly give the impression he was scary. I am sure he was when deadlines were looming!

I was blessed in that I came in at a time and place where I was surrounded by people like him. The learning curve was steep!

@@DavesGarage I have dramatically changed my opinion of Microsoft and its management for the better from the two Daves.

@@robsyoutube Cutler had a reputation for a nasty temper and punching holes in drywall at DECwest.

@@robsyoutube honestly don't judge a book by its cover.

@@MultiPetercool As long as they value honesty, and can admit faults when presented with the evidence, those are the best people to work with. For the simple reason that you know there is nothing stuffed under the carpet. If you don't get away with it, others don't get away with it. It keeps politicians and lazy people away. It can be tough sometimes, but it's worth it. The same with Steve Jobs, he was not always right, but the people who complain about him were mostly wrong.

like what

@@shallex5744 Listen to the video

@@shallex5744operating systems, hardware, interfaces…what else you want?

@@shallex5744 the guys at Stanford basically built this modern era computing infrastructure but there's always a moron , I bet you're a zealot of sorts.. tsc, tsc, monolith operating systems... Tanenbaum was right

Thanks! I'm a good listener, and he was interesting, so it was a good mix :-)

Enjoy!

On punch cards likely too!

Nope. 5-track paper tape. The machine was a Ferranti Sirius. Our college had 4 of them at one time, from a production run of 20. A store room also held a ZEBRA, with magnetic drum as main store.@@DavesGarage

Glad you enjoyed it!

DaveC’s thoughts about AI and ML would make a fantastic follow up to this interview, if he’s been keeping up! (Not easy for anyone to do given the constant development in the space)

That is odd. The PDP-8 had 12-bit words and they used three of them for all floating-point numbers. Well, eventually, 48 bits for FORTRAN 4. 8 bits of precision does sound awfully meager.

Analogues were 16 bits in total, 8 bit mantissa, 4 bit exponent and 4 status bits. 4 status bits was extremely generous but when talking about real plant signals were critical.

Some people lose a bit of memory and mental sharpness through their late 60s and 70s, but quite a lot remain 100% sharp. I believe there's research showing that staying engaged with challenging projects bends the odds in your favor.