Len Kawell

Last updated

Len Kawell is an engineer and entrepreneur who once worked at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he was one of the designers of the VAX/VMS operating system. He also played a key role in the development of the MicroVAX computer, VAX Notes, and VMC Mail. Like DEC co-founders Harlan Anderson and Ken Olsen, Kawell graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in computer science.

Kawell was co-founder and president of Glassbook, Inc., that was eventually acquired by Adobe. The company developed PDF-based e-book reading software. He was also one of the co-founders of Iris Associates, where he co-designed Lotus Notes, the first commercial groupware product. He would later go on to become the founder of Pepper Computer, where he served as chief executive officer. The company was based in Lexington, Massachusetts, and was the developer of the Pepper Pad internet appliance/game console.



Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital Equipment Corporation</span> U.S. computer manufacturer (1957–1998)

Digital Equipment Corporation, using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until he was forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan Bricklin</span> VisiCalc inventor

Daniel Singer Bricklin is an American businessman and engineer who is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, and Trellix, which he left in 2004. He currently serves as the chief technology officer of Alpha Software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DEC Alpha</span> 64-bit RISC instruction set architecture

Alpha is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computers (CISC) and to be a highly competitive RISC processor for Unix workstations and similar markets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VAX</span> Line of computers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation

VAX 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, 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">OpenVMS</span> Computer operating system

OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using OpenVMS include banks and financial services, hospitals and healthcare, telecommunications operators, network information services, and industrial manufacturers. During the 1990s and 2000s, there were approximately half a million VMS systems in operation worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data General</span> Minicomputer manufacturer, 1968–1999

Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sibelius (scorewriter)</span> Scorewriter program

Sibelius is a scorewriter program developed and released by Sibelius Software Limited. Beyond creating, editing and printing music scores, it can also play the music back using sampled or synthesised sounds. It produces printed scores, and can also publish them via the Internet for others to access. Less advanced versions of Sibelius at lower prices have been released, as have various add-ons for the software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ultrix</span> Series of discontinued Unix operating systems by DEC

Ultrix is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems for the PDP-11, VAX, MicroVAX and DECstations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gordon Bell</span> American computer engineer (1934–2024)

Chester Gordon Bell was an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), from 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later served as the company's Vice President of Engineering from 1972–1983, overseeing development of the VAX computer systems. Bell's later career included roles as an entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate from 1986–1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research from 1995–2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">DEC PRISM</span> RISC instruction set architecture

PRISM was a 32-bit RISC instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the outcome of a number of DEC research projects from the 1982–1985 time-frame, and the project was subject to continually changing requirements and planned uses that delayed its introduction. This process eventually decided to use the design for a new line of Unix workstations. The arithmetic logic unit (ALU) of the microPrism version had completed design in April 1988 and samples were fabricated, but the design of other components like the floating point unit (FPU) and memory management unit (MMU) were still not complete in the summer when DEC management decided to cancel the project in favor of MIPS-based systems. An operating system codenamed MICA was developed for the PRISM architecture, which would have served as a replacement for both VAX/VMS and ULTRIX on PRISM.

RADIX 50 or RAD50, is an uppercase-only character encoding created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use on their DECsystem, PDP, and VAX computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franz Lisp</span> Lisp programming language system

In computer programming, Franz Lisp is a discontinued Lisp programming language system written at the University of California, Berkeley by Professor Richard Fateman and several students, based largely on Maclisp and distributed with the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX minicomputer. Piggybacking on the popularity of the BSD package, Franz Lisp was probably the most widely distributed and used Lisp system of the 1970s and 1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emulex</span> Computer peripherals manufacturer

Emulex Corporation was an American computer hardware company active from 1978 to 2015. The company was a provider of computer network connectivity, monitoring and management hardware and software. The company's I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, are or were used in server and storage products from OEMs, including Cisco, Dell, EMC Corporation, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp, and Oracle Corporation. In 2015, the company was acquried by Avago Technologies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VAX-11</span> Family of superminicomputers by Digital

The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of 32-bit superminicomputers, running the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Development began in 1976. In addition to being powerful machines in their own right, they also offer the additional ability to run user mode PDP-11 code, offering an upward compatible path for existing customers.

Jim Starkey is a database architect responsible for developing InterBase, the first relational database to support multi-versioning, the blob column type, type event alerts, arrays and triggers. Starkey is the founder of several companies, including the web application development and database tool company Netfrastructure and NuoDB.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gold key (DEC)</span> Computer keyboard key

The Gold key is a computer keyboard key used as a prefix to invoke a variety of single-key editing and formatting functions. Usually located in the top-left position of the numeric keypad on platforms such as the VT100, it is the signature element of a consistent user interface implemented by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) across multiple product lines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pepper Pad</span> Linux-based mobile computer

The Pepper Pad was a family of Linux-based mobile computers with Internet capability and which doubled as a handheld game console. They also served as a portable multimedia device. The devices used Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies for Internet connection. Pepper Pads are now obsolete, unsupported and the parent company has ceased operations.

The VAX 9000 is a discontinued family of mainframes developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using custom ECL-based processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA). Equipped with optional vector processors, they were marketed into the supercomputer space as well. As with other VAX systems, they were sold with either the VMS or Ultrix operating systems.

The Digital Storage Systems Interconnect (DSSI) is a computer bus developed by Digital Equipment Corporation for connecting storage devices and clustering VAX systems. It was designed as a smaller and lower-cost replacement for the earlier DEC Computer Interconnect that would be more suitable for use in office environments. DSSI was superseded by Parallel SCSI.

Systime Computers Ltd was a British computer manufacturer and systems integrator of the 1970s and 1980s. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Systime became the second-largest British manufacturer of computers, specializing in the minicomputer market.