What is "vaxeln"

VAXELN is a real-time operating system for the VAX family of computers produced by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts.

As with RSX-11 and VMS, Dave Cutler was the principal force behind the development of this operating system. Cutler's team developed the product after moving to the Seattle, Washington area to form the DECwest Engineering Group, DEC's first engineering group outside New England. Initial target platforms for VAXELN were the "backplane interconnect" computers such as the model code-named Scorpio. At the time there were no VAX microcomputers. When VAXELN was well under way, Cutler spearheaded the next project, the MicroVAX I--the first VAX microcomputer. Although it was a low-volume product compared with the New England-developed MicroVAX II, the MicroVAX I demonstrated the set of architectural decisions needed to support a single-board implementation of the VAX computer family, and it also provided a platform for embedded applications written in VAXELN.

The VAXELN team made the decision, for the first release, to use the Pascal language as its system programming language. Other languages, including C, were supported in later releases of the system. The small and very focused development team built the first product in approximately 18 months.

VAXELN allowed a developer to write a self-contained embedded system application that would run on VAX (and later MicroVAX) hardware with no other operating system present. The system was debuted in Las Vegas in the early 1980s, with a variety of amusing applications written by the development team, ranging from a system that composed and played minuets to a robotic system that played and solved the Towers of Hanoi puzzle.