from Hacker News

Dave Cutler on Windows [video]

by hexmiles on 10/21/23, 9:01 PM with 213 comments

  • by mrweasel on 10/22/23, 3:12 PM

    The interviewer, Dave Plummer, is also is also an amazingly interesting person in his own right. I particularly enjoyed his retro-coding videos, such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlZe2JwrJqM and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zxIfJJLAY

    The videos are really interesting and his background muzak and RGB lighting puts me in a Christmas mood. He generally put Microsoft in a completely different light than I'm used to, he speaks warmly about his job, co-workers and Microsoft, while acknowledging much of the weirdness going on in Redmond.

    Only problem is that watching is channel will trigger something in the YouTube algorithm and flood your feed with videos on ADHD. Presumably it has to do with his videos on autism and ADHD, but I feel like YouTube should be smart enough to notice that I didn't watch to videos, only those on coding and Microsoft history.

  • by spondyl on 10/22/23, 9:44 PM

    I haven't watched this video yet but I'm looking forward to it, having read Showstopper[1] quite a few years back.

    One thing that stuck out to me when I was still in my early 20s thinking I needed to work all the time was the mention that Dave would always take holidays on time, every time without any debate.

    While I may not love Microsoft, it was probably my first real exposure of a highly competent and qualified person who wasn't grinding 24/7.

    It still feels nuts to write it but it's a holdover from rural (and retail) life where the mindset is basically "The more you suffer, the more virtuous you are".

    As much as I still struggle to properly take time off (that is, it's easy to postpone because of X or Y being more important), thinking about Dave's view is always a good reminder that it's not a choice between taking a break and being good at X.

    [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...

  • by canucker2016 on 10/22/23, 9:19 PM

    Near the tail end of WinNT 3.1 development, I read an article (possibly from Usenet) about someone creating a screensaver that showed a bluescreen.

    I had never created a screensaver before.

    I could reliably cause my WinNT dev box to bluescreen due to a bug in an internal Microsoft network driver.

    So I read the docs for writing a Windows screensaver. After writing down the values shown for my bluescreen, I cobbled together my first and only Windows screensaver.

    I sent an email to the Windows NT group announcing my creation for laughs and giggles.

    A few weeks later, the NT build group decided to play a prank on Dave Cutler.

    They installed my bluescreen screensaver on one of their build servers.

    They also unplugged the mouse and keyboard from the build server.

    Then they waited...

    Dave Cutler comes in to check on the status of the latest NT build.

    He turns on the monitor and sees a bluescreen.

    He tries moving the mouse.

    Nothing.

    He tries typing on the keyboard.

    Nothing.

    Then the unanticipated happens.

    He reaches over and pushes the power button on the build server to reboot the build server.

    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

    I never heard about the aftermath/any fallout from their prank.

    With great power comes great responsibility.

  • by jmmv on 10/22/23, 5:03 PM

    I’ll recommend here the book “Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft”, which someone else recommended a few weeks ago. Link:

    I’m still reading it, but it’s really enjoyable. And it makes me wish I had been part of that history. Particularly the whole thing about dogfooding a brand new OS. But it caught me a few years too early.

  • by petercooper on 10/22/23, 5:57 PM

    The bit I found interesting was how Xbox's hypervisor is based on that of Azure, rather than anything they did on the desktop, and that Xbox games are/were packaged up with an OS rather than relying on a single OS on the device, so a bit more like containers. Dave also said he's working on making ML workloads run on idle Xbox Cloud Gaming devices. Any architectural tie between Azure and Xbox had never occurred to me before.

  • by eismcc on 10/22/23, 7:19 PM

    I worked in the windows kernel team and my favorite story about DC is when he basically made x64 happen because he hated Itanium architecture so much. He worked with AMD and basically made it happen while cranking in his corner office.

  • by trentnelson on 10/22/23, 11:10 PM

    One of the most pivotal moments in my software engineering career came from reading the leaked NT source code (6-7 years ago) in conjunction with reading the Showstopper[1] book. The NT leak is particularly fascinating because it included all of the author history, so you can see exactly what files Dave Cutler worked on. The book goes into detail about how we ended up with things like kernel modules having pageable sections -- which is fascinating in its own right.

    The book describes Cutler coming in and revamping certain assembly routines and you can see exactly what routines are being talked about in the actual source code.

    Cutler's code was (and I'm sure still is) absolutely beautiful C code. It really impacted the way I write NT-style C code.

    [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...

  • by randomifcpfan on 10/22/23, 3:55 PM

    The Computer History Museum oral history interview with David Cutler is also very good:

    Part 1: https://youtu.be/29RkHH-psrY

    Part 2: https://youtu.be/SVgSLud50ss

  • by mikewarot on 10/22/23, 4:43 PM

    Looking back on all both Daves said, there is an extraordinary amount of attention paid to getting things done and out the door, and almost no mention of planning ahead, and actual security strategy. Its all commercial pressure to get the sausage out of the meat grinder, and keep the failures down to an acceptable level.

    No wonder things never get better, and never take a turn in the right direction, industry wide. I used to think we'd eventually get to capability based security, but now I see we'll always be stuck with application permission flags, the almost worthless bastard cousin, instead.

    I weep for the future.

  • by sneed_chucker on 10/21/23, 10:05 PM

    Looking forward to listening to all of this.

    Regardless of you feelings towards him or the company he works for, Cutler has been a very influential software engineer through his work on OpenVMS and Windows NT, and I don't think he's talked about as much as the Bell Labs gang, Stallman, Linus, Stroustrup, and so on.

  • by HL33tibCe7 on 10/22/23, 5:15 PM

    Hard to believe this guy is 81. He looks and sounds like he's in his late 60s.

  • by cfn on 10/22/23, 9:09 PM

    Cutler: ...Microsoft had DOS which was pathetic... Dave: .. I wrote some of that!

    That was hilarious. I still remember how good NT even though it struggled in my 486 with 4Mb of RAM, Dave Cutler is a legend.

  • by HankB99 on 10/23/23, 12:04 AM

    I was hoping to get some insight into the roots of NT. At the time my understanding was that it resulted from the split between IBM and MSFT and that MSFT was already developing NT based on their derivative of OS/2. That was IIRC before Dave Cutler went to MSFT.

    Later on that (OS/2 -> NT) seems to have been scrubbed from history and NT is now derived from VMS. I'm curious where the truth lies.

    It was well documented at the time that early NT error messages occasionally identified themselves as OS/2.

    I'm over an hour in and not sure how close I'm getting to that. At about 1:09:00 Cutler states that they "developed NT on OS/2" but I think he meant their toolchain was hosted on OS/2 (and they couldn't wait to get off of it.)

  • by CurtHagenlocher on 10/22/23, 5:12 PM

    I knew someone who worked on the Windows kernel in the "aughts". Apparently, Dave Cutler was still looking at kernel code reviews back then, and could be quite unsparing in his feedback.

  • by indigodaddy on 10/22/23, 6:07 PM

    Is it not unbelievably rare to get an interview with Dave Cutler or even to get him to speak on camera at all?

  • by simplyinfinity on 10/22/23, 10:04 PM

    Interesting tidbit.. DC mentions he's using 96 core Thread Ripper.. which got announced 1 day before the release of the video.

  • by xyst on 10/22/23, 6:07 PM

    Not a fan of MS as a business.

    But the tech that built the business is fascinating. Surprised to see an 81 y/o still working. Dude looks good.

    Haven’t fully watched the episode (3hrs long!). But it’s queued.

  • by trentnelson on 10/22/23, 11:25 PM

    I keep meaning to try ask Bill Gates this question whenever he does one of his Reddit AMAs:

    Bill, what are you most proud of out of the following two:

    1. Getting Cutler to come over from DEC and spearhead NT.

    2. Committing to backwards compatibility early on, that ensured old apps Just Worked on new versions of Windows.

    I don’t think Microsoft would look like it currently does without either of those two historical paths taken.

  • by tbalci on 10/22/23, 6:26 PM

    Dave Plummer is making an amazing job in his channel with the things about Microsoft. This interview with Dave Cutler cannot be missed.

  • by bullen on 10/24/23, 3:01 PM

    I finally plowed through the computer parts of this interview.

    This tells you so much about how Microsoft works they probably will want it removed from the internet. Not directly but implicitly between the lines.

    My conclusion is that what built our winners today is just infinite amounts of energy and random selection until something stuck to the wall.

    Complete bat shit ranges of bit sizes and competing infrastructure (you cannot compete with infrastructure because uniformity is the main driver)!!!

    This is not a technique we will have the luxury of using from now on.

  • by rifkiamil on 10/23/23, 5:20 PM

    Was the origin of 'NT' in 'Windows NT' really New Technology? Some suggest that the name might have originated from the Intel i860 CPU. Originally, NT was targeted at the Intel i860 CPU, codenamed N10 (or "N-Ten"). Dave Cutler's put to rest that it was 'New Technology' https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=2ZCM44xPTR831MeR&t=4233&v=x...

  • by rvba on 10/22/23, 6:53 PM

    Dave somehow looks like he aged 5-10 years when compared to his first videos

  • by iancmceachern on 10/22/23, 5:30 PM

    I've been watching Dave's garage for a while now and really love it. The combination of new projects and "war stories" as well as his personality ticks all the boxes for me.

  • by twoodfin on 10/23/23, 1:47 AM

    The Smithsonian has a copy of the “NT OS/2 Design Workbook” by Cutler and others on the team. I don’t think there’s a piece of technical writing I’d more like to read.

    https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma...

  • by mepian on 10/21/23, 9:57 PM

    The link seems to point to "No Dignity Speedrun Any%" instead of anything related to Dave Cutler?..

    EDIT: The link is correct now.

  • by fidotron on 10/22/23, 5:51 PM

    This is fascinating in so many respects. One is it is almost like his whole career developed through a series of events attempting to escape the usual bureaucracy of successful companies.

  • by dilyevsky on 10/22/23, 11:05 PM

    > Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do

    Love it

  • by dboreham on 10/22/23, 4:14 PM

    Nice to see the full 3h version posted here.

  • by alexjplant on 10/21/23, 10:01 PM

  • by huseyinkeles on 10/21/23, 9:58 PM

    Irrelevant link. People just upvoted this to the homepage without checking the video?

  • by jmbwell on 10/22/23, 4:47 PM

    For those who misread the title as I did, this is not Dave Coulier. Moreover, it is not Dave Coulier wearing stonewashed jeans and a mullet, making Full House era jokes, in a forgotten Microsoft promotional video about Windows 95.