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What (who) is VAXen - definition

COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE, AND A RANGE OF COMPUTERS

VAXen; Vax; Vaxen; DEC VAX; VAX Security Kernel

VAXen

/vak'sn/ (From "oxen", perhaps influenced by "vixen") The plural canonically used among hackers for the DEC VAX computers. "Our installation has four PDP-10s and twenty vaxen." See boxen. [Jargon File] (1995-02-20)

VAX

Virtual Address eXtension (Reference: DEC, VAX)

VAX

<computer> /vaks/ (Virtual Address eXtension) The most successful minicomputer design in industry history, possibly excepting its immediate ancestor, the PDP-11. Between its release in 1978 and its eclipse by killer micros after about 1986, the VAX was probably the hacker's favourite machine, especially after the 1982 release of 4.2BSD Unix. Especially noted for its large, {assembly code}-programmer-friendly instruction set - an asset that became a liability after the RISC revolution. VAX is also a British brand of {carpet cleaner (http://vax.co.uk/)} whose advertising slogan, "Nothing sucks like a VAX!" became a battle-cry of RISC partisans. It is even sometimes claimed that DEC actually entered a licencing deal that allowed them to market VAX computers in the UK in return for not challenging the carpet cleaner trademark in the US. The slogan originated in the late 1960s as "Nothing sucks like Electrolux", Electrolux AB being a rival Swedish company. It became a classic textbook example of the perils of not knowing the local idiom, which is ironic because, according to the Electrolux press manager in 1996, the double entendre was intentional. VAX copied the slogan in their promotions in 1986-1987, and it surfaced in New Zealand TV ads as recently as 1992! [Jargon File] (2000-09-28)

Wikipedia

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 VAX-11/780, introduced October 25, 1977, was the first of a range of popular and influential computers implementing the VAX ISA. The VAX family was a huge success for DEC – over 100 models were introduced over the lifetime of the design, with the last members arriving in the early 1990s. The VAX was succeeded by the DEC Alpha, which included several features from VAX machines to make porting from the VAX easier.

VAX was designed as a successor to the 16-bit PDP-11, one of the most successful minicomputers in history with approximately 600,000 examples sold. The system was designed to offer backward compatibility with the PDP-11 while extending the memory to a full 32-bit implementation and adding demand paged virtual memory. The name VAX refers to its Virtual Address eXtension concept that allowed programs to make use of this newly available memory while still being compatible with unmodified user mode PDP-11 code. The name "VAX-11", used on early models, was chosen to highlight this capability. The VAX ISA is considered a complex instruction set computer (CISC) design.

Later models in the series dropped the −11 branding as PDP-11 compatibility was no longer a major concern. The line expanded to both high-end machines like the VAX 9000 as well as to the workstation-scale systems like the VAXstation series. The VAX family ultimately contained ten distinct designs and over 100 individual models in total. All of these were compatible with each other and normally ran the VAX/VMS operating system.

VAX has been perceived as the quintessential CISC ISA, with its very large number of assembly language programmer-friendly addressing modes and machine instructions, highly orthogonal instruction set architecture, and instructions for complex operations such as queue insertion or deletion, number formatting, and polynomial evaluation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX