Breaking The Nerd Internet: Three Overlapping Generations Of Tech History – Inone Selfie
Sysinternals founder Mark Russinovich’s after-dinner photo just flipped the nerd world into Kardashian-like levels of internet meltdown.
Russinovich posted a selfie on his Linkedin page that shows two brilliant OS programmers whose work has shaped the modern world of computing… oh, and next to them, Bill Gates.
The star OS developers in question are a slightly sheepish-looking Linus Torvalds and Dave Cutler. Next to Torvalds is Bill Gates, whose company paid for much of Cutler’s late-period work and also created the market for commodity x86 hardware on which Torvalds’ most famous work runs. Contrary to widely held belief, Gates never wrote an OS in his life; his programming kudos lie in the co-creation of the BASIC interpreter that was used in the MITS Altair and many other late-1970s and early-1980s micros.
We are sure that Linus Torvalds needs no introduction to readers of The Register. At 55, the youngest in the picture, his OS is everywhere and is still gaining ground. These days, Dr Russinovich (58) is one of the head honchos of Microsoft’s Azure division, but back in the 20th century he started an email newsletter called Sysinternals and developed a suite of tools that let admins peer deep into the guts of Windows NT. The first reference we can find on The Register, from back in the year 2000, also mentions one of the four chaps in the photo, Dave Cutler. In the photo, Cutler, who is now 83, is on the right of Linus Torvalds. Microsoft acquired Sysinternals in 2006 and Russinovich is still there.
Also in 2000, Dave Cutler won a Microsoft gong, when The Reg described him as the “ex-DECcie responsible for the design of Windows NT.” He designed and implemented several of DEC’s many OSes, including RSX-11 and VAX/VMS. The latter is still around — contrary to our much earlier story on its cancellation, which also mentioned a pair of projects Cutler proposed to DEC management: PRISM, which would have been DEC’s first RISC processor, and MICA, a multi-personality OS to run on it.
DEC didn’t go ahead with either project, to Cutler’s dissatisfaction. That laid the groundwork for Microsoft to headhunt Cutler and his core team, where they were given the job of completing the CPU-independent OS/2 version 3, which Microsoft was left with after its divorce from IBM. Incorporating more of the design principles of the cancelled MICA than OS/2 code, under Cutler, OS/2 3 became OS/2 NT became Windows NT and the rest is history.
Cutler has won many other awards in his time, and not entirely incidentally, he also developed the Azure hypervisor.
Two programmers whose work has touched the lives of almost every living human: Linus Torvalds, who finally made the dream of Unix as the world’s default OS by delivering an all-FOSS version… And Dave Cutler – whose OSes have resisted the rise of Unix more effectively than any others. G Pascal Zachary’s book Showstopper described Cutler’s position on Unix:
“Unix is like Cutler’s lifelong foe,” said one team member who’d worked with Cutler for nearly two decades. “It’s like his Moriarty. He thinks Unix is a junk operating system designed by a committee of PhDs. There’s never been one mind behind the whole thing, and it shows, so he’s always been out to get Unix.”
The Reg FOSS desk really wishes he could have been a fly on the wall to Cutler meeting Torvalds – who since 1991 has arguably been that one mind.
Oh, and Bill Gates (69)? He built the BASIC he wrote with the late Paul Allen into an empire that paid for Windows NT, and Windows 95 before it – which between them, drove the x86-32 platform to vast international success, enabling Linux to reach its current pre-eminent position. Directly or indirectly, he paid for the dinner. Well, he and Paul Allen. And Tim Paterson, who wrote DOS. And Gary Kildall, who designed it. ®
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