[Info-vax] History of VMS and related operating systems

thomasrdiaz at gmail.com thomasrdiaz at gmail.com
Sat Jan 31 12:34:37 EST 2015


Some years have gone by, but if anyone is still interested in this topic I would be glad to help with some history.  I was the technical writer in Cutler's DECwest team and so the author of the various original Elan books.  (The product was named Elan by the team and changed by the marketing folks to VAXELN, out of trademark fear.)

Dave went on to Microsoft and is still there, as far as I know.  So, I believe is Darryl Havens, who wrote the Files-11 compatible file system and the System Builder utility.  Roger Heinen, the project leader, went on to a number of executive positions, including at Apple and Microsoft, and is now a successful venture capitalist.  The Elan Pascal compiler was developed by Don McLaren and Jay Palmer.  I am not sure where Jay went.  Don worked at Microsoft for many years.  Reid Brown was the product manager. The networking system was developed by Len Kawell, who is still an entrepreneur in the Seattle area.  Len and I and Mary Ellen Heinen founded one of the first successful ebook companies, called Glassbook, in 1998-2000.  I currently reside in a semi-retired state in Lexington, Massachusetts. 

Elan Pascal, and most other parts of the product, were a team design effort by the small group.  

The product debuted at DECUS in Las Vegas in (if I remember correctly) 1982.    Len Kawell wrote a great demo app that featured a toy robot solving the Towers of Hanoi puzzle.  I wrote one, using data I obtained from a PDP-11 developer, Ralph Cherubini, which played minuets on a small music synthesizer.  I needed to keep the volume down, because the minuets started to get on everyone's nerve around the DECUS booth.  Dave didn't want to go to DECUS (he tended to avoid public appearances, so fairly few people had met him personally).  I went with Dave's hotel reservation, and people standing nearby were wowed and amazed to hear who was checking in.  So, I let an opportunity slip through my fingers to impersonate him.  I could not have kept it up for more than a few seconds anyway.

Tom Diaz
Lexington, Massachusetts

On Thursday, March 1, 2007 at 7:33:18 AM UTC-5, John Wallace wrote:
> "John Reagan" <john.reagan at hp.com> wrote in message
> news:z0oFh.600$%k6.481 at news.cpqcorp.net...
> <snip>
> > Seems to be that MicroVMS was more of a packaging concept.
> <snip>
> 
> Indeed.
> 
> From my end-user point of view, one of the nicest things about MicroVMS was
> the radically different documentation. VMS's traditional documentation was
> guaranteed to cover anything you were ever likely to know, and a shelf-full
> of stuff you probably wouldn't ever need, but to achieve anything useful
> you'd often need a desktop's worth of full size manuals. MicroVMS
> documentation had a different approach, one which I liked; as I recall, all
> the commonly used stuff was covered in a couple of relatively small manuals,
> which were often task-oriented rather than the reference-oriented style of
> most of the VMS docs.
> 
> Wrt VAXELN: If there are specific VAXELN questions to be answered, I may
> have a go, but my VAXELN experience started around V4 so I'm not in a good
> position to say much about history, other than the usual widely known
> stuff - VAXELN was a host/target toolset for relatively lightweight but
> potentially sophisticated VAX-based real-time applications. It intentionally
> does not attempt to provide VMS-like design concepts (eg VAXELN doesn't have
> ASTs). Unusually for the time, VAXELN had transparent networking built in
> for inter-process communication, and it also had a concept equivalent to
> what became known as "threads". Many popular VAXes and devices were
> supported on the target system.
> 
> Initially only Pascal was supported (initially not VAX Pascal but an
> ELN-specific version). Additional languages were added over time, and in
> particular comprehensive Ada support was available (working with the same
> fine VMS debugger that VMS folks were used to, rather than the previous
> VAXELN-specific debugger). C and Fortran were probably supported too (you
> could certainly make them work). Some of the language-specific stuff would
> have been done by people who may still read this newsgroup.
> 
> Later versions of VAXELN had decent X-windows support (client, server, or
> both), a capability which was used in some of DEC's VAX-based Xwindows
> terminals and in the ELN Window System.
> 
> An optional add-on to VAXELN was a relational database API, Rdb/ELN, which
> was basically (as the name implies) RdB for VAXELN.
> 
> Another optional add-on to VAXELN was a source distribution of the VAXELN
> runtime, which would reveal lots of details of how the stuff worked. The
> VAXELN source kit wasn't on the Condist CDs and as far as I know not many
> people had one.
> 
> Basic VAXELN documentation included a "VAXELN Technical Summary" and
> "Introduction To VAXELN" which might be helpful here, depending on what the
> "history" exercise hopes to achieve. The "Introduction" was part of the
> online docs and so should be on a VAX Consolidated Documentation CD from the
> relevant era, not sure about the "Technical Summary". Google finds an
> "Introduction" at
> http://www.sysworks.com.au/disk$cddoc04jan11/decw$book/aa%2djl11d%2d01%5f%5f
> a01%5fb2.p5.decw$book#1
> 
> Another relevant piece of documentation might be the excellent VAX Realtime
> User's Guide, EK-VAXRT-UG001 (1986!) which covers using VAX for realtime
> applications on both VMS and VAXELN, in some considerable depth. Not
> immediately locatable online.
> 
> VAXELN is the kind of thing that ought to have had a Digital Technical
> Journal article (or several) written about it but I don't recall any; anyone
> got a comprehensive DTJ index e.g. was there an index on the DTJ CD from the
> VMS boot camp, does it include any VAXELN articles?
> 
> VAXELN was never ported to Alpha. For Alpha, DEC chose to "partner" with
> Wind River Systems to have WRS's VxWorks ported to Alpha, with support for a
> small number of OEM-specific board-level Alpha products and a tiny subset of
> WRS's mainstream VxWorks supported boards. A documented and supported
> "VAXELN API layer for VxWorks" was offered to (allegedly) simplify migration
> of applications (so long as they were written in C). But with VxWorks hosted
> on Unix vs VAXELN hosted on VMS, and with almost no commonality between the
> two products' architectures except claimed support for a variety of Posix
> APIs , anything non-trivial simply wasn't sensibly portable between the two
> environments, and a re-design would almost certainly be a more sensible
> option. Some customers needing the power of Alpha in the context of
> real-time systems chose to use DEC OSF/1 (or Tru64 or whatever it was called
> at the time its respectable RT stuff came out) instead of VxWorks, subject
> to practicality constraints (like having a disk available).
> 
> It's no secret where one of the original VAXELN architects ended up, right -
> taking some VAXELN concepts, putting some PC-friendly stuff around them, and
> labelling the result Windows NT ? I don't know where the remaining VAXELN
> team ended up - they were sold off from Compaq when Digital's OEM+Realtime
> group were sold to SMART Modular Technology and I lost track of them after
> that (I believe that at one point some of the OEM+RT group ended up being
> owned by Motorola...). Some folks are still using VAXELN but they tend to be
> a bit "niche", and you won't often read about it. It's often the kind of
> stuff that goes in and then "just works" for years.
> 
> Hth
> John




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