Armando Stettner

Armando P. Stettner is a computer engineer and architect who is most widely known for Unix development and for spearheading the native VAX version of UNIX, Ultrix, during his tenure at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Stettner started working with UNIX while at Bell Labs Murray Hill and later moved to DEC where he worked for Bill Munson and with Fred Canter and Jerry Brenner to start DEC's UNIX Engineering Group. While his focus was kernel development, he also designed and produced the original UNIX "Live Free or Die" license plate and the original Ultrix poster based on Phil Foglio's UNIX T-shirt as designed by Mike O'Brien. Originally a marketing promotion, Stettner obtained the actual vanity plate from the state of New Hampshire in 1982 after Bill Shannon left to join Sun Microsystems.

With Bill Shannon, Stettner was responsible for establishing near-realtime UUCP-based connections between University of California, Berkeley and Duke University through their system known as decvax. Stettner later established near-realtime netnews and email feeds news feeds to Europe, Japan and Australia. At a conference, he relayed the conversation during a budget review with financial department staff of the nearly $250,000 in phone bills attributed to his department's timesharing computer (known as decvax) explaining that these were computers talking. That seemed to satisfy the finance people.

Stettner ported UNIX to DEC's symmetric multiprocessing VAX-11/782 hardware system, though based upon Purdue University's asymmetric kernel. The kernel supported symmetric multiprocessing while not being fully multithreaded and based upon pre-Ultrix work by Stettner and earlier work by George H. Goble at Purdue University. There was liberal use of locking and some tasks could only be done by a particular CPUs (e.g. the processing of interrupts). This was not uncommon in other SMP implementations of that time (e.g. SunOS).

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