David N. Cutler is one of the most influential operating-system engineers of the late twentieth century. The Computer History Museum’s profile of Cutler records that he joined Digital Equipment Corporation in 1971 and, as part of a small VAX architecture team, “led the development and implementation of the VMS operating system.” VMS became the standard operating system for DEC’s VAX minicomputers, the machines on which much of early Unix work was also done.
According to Microsoft’s own feature on Cutler, Gordon Bell of DEC selected him to lead VMS because, in Bell’s words, “Dave is the ultimate competitor. He really wants to win.” Bell later described Cutler as “the best writer of operating systems in the world.” The VMS project launched in April 1975 with Cutler as a senior programmer on the effort.
After DEC cancelled his next project, Cutler joined Microsoft on October 31, 1988, bringing a group of former DEC engineers with him. Microsoft tasked the team with building a new, portable, 32-bit operating system that could run on many different processor architectures. The Computer History Museum profile describes the result, Windows NT, as “the basis for all major Windows-based operating systems since 1993.”
The respect for Cutler within the industry is captured in Microsoft’s feature: Steve Ballmer is quoted saying “There wouldn’t be a Microsoft today without Dave,” and Nathan Myhrvold called him “one of the greatest systems programmers of all time.” Cutler received the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2007.