It certainly seems like he was there from the beginning (and it was built to be compatible with RSX-11M which he was the lead for): "In April 1975, Digital Equ

It certainly seems like he was there from the beginning (and it was built to be compatible with RSX-11M which he was the lead for): "In April 1975, Digital Equipment Corporation embarked on a project to design a 32-bit extension to its PDP-11 computer line. The hardware component was code named Star; the operating system was code named Starlet. Roger Gourd was the project lead for VMS. Software engineers Dave Cutler, Dick Hustvedt, and Peter Lipman acted as technical project leaders.[29] The Star and Starlet projects culminated in the VAX-11/780 computer and the VAX/VMS operating system. The Starlet project's code name survives in VMS in the name of several of the system libraries, including STARLET.OLB and STARLET.MLB.[30] VMS was mostly written in VAX MACRO with some components written in BLISS.[10]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenVMS