Richard "Dick" Irvin Hustvedt (February 18, 1946 – April 15, 2008) was a renowned software engineer., designer and developer of several operating systems including

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

RSX-11 RSX-11 is a discontinued family of multi-user real-time operating systems for PDP-11 computers created by Digital Equipment Corporation. In widespread use through the late 1970s and early 1980s, RSX-11 was influential in the development of later ...

, and VMS.

Personal history

Hustvedt was born in

Aberdeen, South Dakota Aberdeen (Lakota language, Lakota: ''Ablíla'') is a city in and the county seat of Brown County, South Dakota, Brown County, South Dakota, United States, located approximately northeast of Pierre, South Dakota, Pierre. The city population was 2 ...

and grew up in

Radcliff, Kentucky Radcliff is a home rule-class city in Hardin County, Kentucky, in the United States. The population was 21,692 at the 2010 census, and in 2019 the estimated population was 22,914. It is included in the Elizabethtown–Fort Knox Metropolitan Are ...

, home of

Fort Knox Fort Knox is a United States Army installation in Kentucky, south of Louisville and north of Elizabethtown. It is adjacent to the United States Bullion Depository, which is used to house a large portion of the United States' official gold res ...

. He attended the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

studying

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

and was later employed by the

Army Security Agency The United States Army Security Agency (ASA) was the United States Army's signals intelligence branch from 1945 to 1976. The Latin motto of the Army Security Agency was ''Semper Vigiles'' (Vigilant Always), which echoes the declaration, often ...

. Following the ASA, Dick worked for the

Xerox Corporation Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Stam ...

on the development of operating systems for their Data Systems division (Xerox DSD Development Programming in

El Segundo, California El Segundo ( , ; ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Located on Santa Monica Bay, it was incorporated on January 18, 1917, and is part of the South Bay Cities Council of Governments. The population was 16,731 as of th ...

), and was a principal kernel developer of the

Xerox Data Systems Scientific Data Systems (SDS), was an American computer company founded in September 1961 by Max Palevsky and Robert Beck, veterans of Packard Bell Corporation and Bendix, along with eleven other computer scientists. SDS was an early adopter of ...

(XDS) RAD-75, RBM-1 and

CP-V The Universal Time-Sharing System (UTS) is a discontinued operating system for the XDS Sigma series of computers, succeeding Batch Processing Monitor (BPM)/Batch Time-Sharing Monitor (BTM). UTS was announced in 1966, but because of delays did no ...

operating systems. He was recruited by

Ken Olsen Kenneth Harry "Ken" Olsen (February 20, 1926 – February 6, 2011) was an American engineer who co-founded Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson and his brother Stan Olsen. Background Kenneth Harry Olsen w ...

to join

(DEC) in 1974. He moved from

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

Concord, Massachusetts Concord () is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, in the United States. At the 2020 census, the town population was 18,491. The United States Census Bureau considers Concord part of Greater Boston. The town center is near where the conflu ...

where he worked at the company headquarters at "The Mill" in

Maynard, Massachusetts Maynard is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The town is located 22 miles west of Boston, in the MetroWest and Greater Boston region of Massachusetts and borders Acton, Concord, Stow and Sudbury. The town's population w ...

. Married to Audrey R. Reith in 1976. Father of sons Eric Hustvedt (1978) and Marc Hustvedt (1979). On January 13, 1984, he suffered a severe head injury in an automobile accident in

Acton, Massachusetts Acton is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, approximately west-northwest of Boston along Massachusetts Route 2 west of Concord and about southwest of Lowell. The population was 24,021 in April 2020, according to the Unite ...

. He resided in

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...

at the time of his death on April 15, 2008. The

VAX/VMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

development team, now

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Ope ...

and part of

Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...

, named a conference room in his honor in

Nashua, New Hampshire Nashua is a city in southern New Hampshire, United States. At the 2020 United States census, 2020 census, it had a population of 91,322, the second-largest in northern New England after nearby Manchester, New Hampshire, Manchester. Along with Manc ...

facility.

DEC

Dick Hustvedt was one of the three principal designers of VMS, along with

Dave Cutler David Neil Cutler Sr. (born March 13, 1942) is an American software engineer. He developed several computer operating systems, namely Microsoft's Windows NT, and Digital Equipment Corporation's RSX-11M, VAXELN, and VMS. Personal history Cutl ...

and Peter Lipman. VMS was first conceived in 1976 as the operating system for the

32-bit In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32-bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculation ...

virtual memory In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very l ...

line of computers eventually named

VAX VAX (an acronym for Virtual Address eXtension) is a series of computers featuring a 32-bit instruction set architecture (ISA) and virtual memory that was developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 20th century. The V ...

. Version V1.0 shipped in 1978 and the VAX and VMS became flagship products for DEC. Hustvedt was also the driving force behind the development of DEC's

VAXcluster A VMScluster, originally known as a VAXcluster, is a computer cluster involving a group of computers running the OpenVMS operating system. Whereas tightly coupled multiprocessor systems run a single copy of the operating system, a VMScluster is l ...

, which was the first clustering system to achieve commercial success, and was a major selling point for VAX systems. His sense of humor is behind the fact that the TIMEPROMPTWAIT variable in VMS is famously defined in "microfortnights".

References

"Nothing Stops It: VAX OpenVMS at 20"
* "DEC used by Digital itself:" ''PDP11 Processor Handbook'' (1973): page 8, "DEC, PDP, UNIBUS are registered trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation;" page 1-4, "Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) designs and manufacturers many of the peripheral devices offered with PDP-11's. As a designer and manufacturer of peripherals, DEC can offer extremely reliable equipment... The LA30 DECwriter, a totally DEC-designed and built teleprinter, can serve as an alternative to the Teletype." * Edgar H. Schein, Peter S. DeLisi, Paul J. Kampas, and Michael M. Sonduck, ''DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation'' (San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler, 2003), . * "VAX-11" 1st Edition - Dick Hustvedt, 1975 19- Stanford

External links

Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story

Nothing Stops It: VAX OpenVMS at 20

Dick Hustvedt, the consummate software engineer
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hustvedt, Dick 1946 births 2008 deaths People from Aberdeen, South Dakota People from Radcliff, Kentucky American computer scientists