RSX-11
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| Developer | Digital Equipment Corporation |
|---|---|
| Written in | MACRO-11 |
| OS family | DEC OS family |
| Working state | Discontinued |
| Source model | operating system source included; filesystem and utilities closed source |
| Initial release | 1972 |
| Platforms | PDP-11 |
| Default user interface | Command line interface |
| License | Proprietary |
RSX-11 is a discontinued family of real-time operating systems mainly for PDP-11 computers created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), common in the late 1970s and early 1980s. RSX-11D first appeared on the PDP-11/40 in 1972. It was designed for and much used in process control, but was also popular for program development.
Henry Krejci was the project leader for RSX-11D up to version 4. Dr Garth Wolfendale from the UK took over RSX11D development in 1972 to 1976 in Maynard, US. Before moving to US he led a team to prototype an interactive layer, IAS based on the RSX11D OS. When he moved to US to take over RSX11D development, Andy Wilson became the project leader in the UK.
Ron McLean was the project leader for RSX-20F/RSX10F a version of RSX11-D not RSX11-M as many suspected. This was a PDP10 front end.
Garth Wolfendale was the project leader for RSX-11D from 1972–1976 and led the redesign and commercial release of the operating system as well as adding support for the 22-bit PDP-11/70 system. Dr. Wolfendale, originally from the UK, set up the team that designed and prototyped IAS in the UK, providing time-shared user access to operating system resources. Andy Wilson then led the full development and release of the IAS system, based in Digital's UK development facility.
Dave Cutler was the project leader for RSX-11M, which was an adaptation of the earlier RSX-11D for a smaller memory footprint. Principles first tried in RSX-11M later appeared in DEC's VMS. Microsoft's Windows NT system is in some areas a conceptual descendant of RSX-11M and VMS but is more directly descended from an object based operating system Cutler developed for a RISC processor (PRISM) which was never released. This lineage is made clear in Cutler's foreword to "Inside Windows NT" by Helen Custer.
RSX-11 existed in many versions:
RSX-11 was often used for general-purpose timeshare computing, even though this was the target use for the RSTS/E operating system. RSX-11 provided features to ensure less than a maximum necessary response time to peripheral device input (i.e. real-time processing), its intended use. These included the ability to lock a process (called a task under RSX) into memory as part of system boot up and to assign a process a higher priority so that it would execute before any processes with a lower priority.
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