Dick Hustvedt - Quotes

Quotes

“In the early 1980s, we were designing computers so complex, our engineering processes couldn’t keep up with them. We discovered we had to use the latest VAX to simulate the new one we were building. Building VAXes on VAXes—our first computers became tools for building the next generation of VAXes.” —Bill Strecker Chief Technical Officer, VP, CST

“Roger Gourd passed around the book The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks and almost all the team members read it. Most of us already had one operating system under our belt, so Brooks’ discussion of the ‘second system effect’ struck home. The ‘second system effect’ results from each engineer wanting to fix all the mistakes and shortcomings of their first system. Left unchecked, the second system effect can cause runaway complexity that can be disastrous for software quality and schedule. A new term entered the programmers’ lexicon—‘Creeping elegance’ — a process in which a design is successively refined to be increasingly complete, eventually yielding a result that collapses because of its size and complexity. The entire software team was very conscious of maintaining the balance between producing a functional, high quality product and staying on schedule.” —Andy Goldstein VMS Engineer on original development team

“People worked a lot of overtime during the creation of VMS. At one point, we hired an engineer from California, Ralph Weber. For the first week he had a rental car and was living in a hotel. He got there so early that he parked in exactly the same spot every morning, and he stayed late. After a week, a security guard thought the car had been abandoned and called the car rental place to come and collect it. That night Ralph went to leave, and his car was gone. So he ran into the security room shouting, ‘My rental car’s been stolen!’ They started to call the police and then, luckily, another security guard came in and said, ‘No, no, we had that one towed today because it’s been there a week and we thought it had been abandoned.’” —Kathy Morse, VMS Engineer

“Today, OpenVMS is the most flexible and adaptable operating system on the planet. What started out as the concept of ‘Starlet’ in 1975 is moving into Galaxy for the 21st century. And like the universe, there is no end in sight.” —Jesse Lipcon, Senior VP, UNIX and OpenVMS Systems Business Unit

“(Open)VMS remains King of the Clusters. DIGITAL’s technology is still the high bar against which other clustering schemes are measured.” —Datamation, August 15, 1995