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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="no"?>
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>TWENEX</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../T.html" title="T"/><link rel="previous" href="tweak.html" title="tweak"/><link rel="next" href="twiddle.html" title="twiddle"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">TWENEX</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="tweak.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">T</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="twiddle.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="TWENEX"/><dt xmlns="" id="TWENEX"><b>TWENEX</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/twe´neks/</span>, <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="grammar">n.</span></dt></dt><dd><p> The TOPS-20 operating system by <a href="../D/DEC.html"><i class="glossterm">DEC</i></a> —
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the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 — preferred by most PDP-10
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hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not
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<a href="../I/ITS.html"><i class="glossterm">ITS</i></a> or <a href="../W/WAITS.html"><i class="glossterm">WAITS</i></a> partisans).
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TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating
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system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of
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the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX
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from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name
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for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when
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customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC
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could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the
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name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS;
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this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that <span class="firstterm">krans</span> meant ‘funeral wreath’ in
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Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply
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‘wreath’; this part of the story may be apocryphal).
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Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it
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was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its
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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
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code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and
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BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard “<span class="quote">TWENEX</span>”, but the
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term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation ‘20x’ was
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also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a
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period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of
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partisans as Unix or ITS — but DEC's decision to scrap all the
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internal rivals to the <a href="../V/VAX.html"><i class="glossterm">VAX</i></a> architecture and its
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relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's
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brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert
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to <a href="../V/VMS.html"><i class="glossterm">VMS</i></a>, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the
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TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix. There is a <a href="http://panda.com/tops-20/" target="_top">TOPS-20 home page</a>.</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="tweak.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../T.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="twiddle.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">tweak </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> twiddle</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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