Dave Cutler

Dave Cutler
Cutler at work on Microsoft Azure
Born	(1942-03-13) March 13, 1942 (age 74) Lansing, Michigan, USA
Occupation	Senior Technical Fellow at Microsoft

David Neil "Dave" Cutler, Sr. (born March 13, 1942) is an American software engineer, designer and developer of several operating systems including Windows NT at Microsoft and RSX-11M, VMS and VAXELN at Digital Equipment Corporation.

David Cutler was born in Lansing, Michigan and grew up in DeWitt, Michigan. After graduating from Olivet College in 1965, Cutler went to work for DuPont. Cutler's first exposure to computers came when he was tasked to perform a computer simulations model for one of DuPont's customers using IBM's GPSS-3 language on an IBM model 7044. This work led to an interest in how computers worked and their operating systems. Cutler left DuPont to pursue that interest beginning with Digital Equipment Corporation.

Cutler holds over 20 patents and is an affiliate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington.

Cutler is also an avid auto racing driver. He has previously competed in the Atlantic Championship from 1996 to 2002, scoring a career best of 8th on the Milwaukee Mile in 2000.

Cutler is a member of Adelphic Alpha Pi fraternity at Olivet College.

In April 1975, Digital began a hardware project, code-named Star, to design a 32-bit virtual address extension to its PDP-11. In June 1975, Cutler, together with Dick Hustvedt and Peter Lipman, were appointed the technical project leaders for the software project, code-named Starlet, to develop a totally new operating system for the Star family of processors. These two projects were tightly integrated from the beginning. The three technical leaders of the Starlet project together with three technical leaders of the Star project formed the "Blue Ribbon Committee" at Digital who produced the fifth design evolution for the programs. The design featured simplifications to the memory management and process scheduling schemes of the earlier proposals and the architecture was accepted. The Star and Starlet projects culminated in the development of the VAX-11/780 superminicomputer and the VAX/VMS operating system, respectively.