30 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
30 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
TWENEX
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/tweneks/ , n. The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC the second proprietary OS
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for the PDP-10 preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by
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those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt,
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Beranek Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By
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the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC
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purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own.
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The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual
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memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name
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was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project
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called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly
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reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected
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that krans meant funeral wreath in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers
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have since said it means simply wreath ; this part of the story may be
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apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating
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system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community,
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mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of twenty
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TENEX ), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code
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remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and BSD). DEC
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people cringed when they heard TWENEX , but the term caught on nevertheless
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(the written abbreviation 20x was also used). TWENEX was successful and very
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popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as
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fervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS but DEC's decision to scrap
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all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy
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VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun.
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DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert to VMS , but instead, by
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the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix. There is a
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TOPS-20 home page.
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