The Event Driven Executive (EDX) is a computer operating system originally developed by IBM for the control of research laboratory devices and experiments. It included an application programming language known as EDL and HCF, a Host Communication Facility.
Background
IBM's Research Division opened the San Jose Research Laboratory (SJRL) in 1956, in building 025 on the IBM plant site in San Jose, California. Dr. Henry M. Gladney established the first laboratory automation project in 1968, with an IBM 1800 computer. Various instruments in chemistry and physics laboratories throughout the SJRL were linked to the 1800 for control, data acquisition and processing. (Note that this was a long time before instrumentation came with embedded chips and microprocessors and the output from a sophisticated research instrument was likely to be a strip of chart paper with squiggly marks on it or perhaps punched paper tape.)
Dr. Gladney became the manager of the Research Computing Facility (RCF) and, when Research moved to Building 028 in 1970, he established a new department in the RCF, the Laboratory Automation Group, which was tasked to transition to a new sensor-based computer, the IBM System/7 produced in Boca Raton, Florida. Robert W. Martin was appointed as first line manager of the group with a staff consisting of Ray Aylsworth, Donald L. Raimondi, and Gerd Hochweller, a post-doctoral fellow on assignment from Germany.
LABS/7 – the precursor to EDX
The System/7 was a much smaller machine than the 1800 and was intended to be co-located in individual research labs along with the instruments it would service. Multiple System/7s were to be hosted, large scale computing purposes, by the IBM System/360 “mainframe” which served the SJRL as a whole.
The System/7 was somewhat unusual, especially, from a programmer's perspective, in its lack of supporting software. Its basic human input/output interface was a teletype keyboard and printer along with a paper tape reader punch. It had a hard disc drive for data storage along with digital and analog input/output and process interrupt all of which could be used for lab instrument interface, data acquisition and instrument control. What it did not have was any sort of operating system or high level programming facility, only a basic assembler language program. Another way of putting it would be to say that, as delivered, it was not very user friendly, if the users were to be research scientists and engineers, i.e. non-programming professionals.
It was clear from the start that, in order to provide a successful System/7 based environment for laboratory automation in the SJRL, it would be necessary to develop a real-time, sensor-based, multitasking and multiprogramming operating system, an associated application development facility which provided not only an appropriate high level application programming language with requisite special features, e.g. sensor I/O, but also a communication interface to the large scale host computer for program development, bidirectional data transfer and data analysis.
The result was the development of an operating system known as the Laboratory Automation Basic Supervisor for the System/7 (LABS/7) and an application development language. LABS/7 was a real-time multitasking, multiprogramming operating system.
