<
operating system> /twe' neks/ The T
opS-20
operating system by
DEC - the second pr
oprietary OS for the
PDP-10 - preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over T
opS-10 (that is, by those who were not
ITS or
WAITS partisans). T
opS-20 began in 1969 as
Bolt, Beranek & Newman' s
TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the
ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the
operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory
operating System) when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that "krans" meant "funeral wreath" in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply "wreath" this part of the story may be apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked T
opS-20 as the name of the
operating system, and it was as T
opS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of "twenty TENEX"), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and BSD). DEC pe
ople cringed when they heard "TWENEX", but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation "20x" was also used). TWENEX was successful and very p
opular in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS - but DEC' s decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX' s brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince T
opS-20 users to convert to
VMS, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the T
opS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix. [
Jargon File] (1995-04-01)
In addition suitable contents:
[ 2 ] [ = ] [ abbrev ] [ ad ] [ ag ] [ AI ] [ ai ] [ AIT ] [ al ] [ am ] [ an ] [ analog ] [ ANS ] [ ar ] [ arc ] [ architecture ] [ arg ] [ ARP ] [ ARPA ] [ ARPANET ] [ as ] [ AT ] [ at ] [ AT&T ] [ au ] [ av ] [ B ] [ b ] [ ba ] [ bb ] [ be ] [ bj ] [ br ] [ BS ] [ BSD ] [ by ] [ C ] [ ca ] [ cc ] [ ch ] [ ci ] [ ck ] [ co ] [ code ] [ com ] [ comma ] [ command ] [ con ] [ contraction ] [ cr ] [ cu ] [ D ] [ de ] [ DEC ] [ dec ] [ diff ] [ do ] [ DP ] [ du ] [ E ] [ ec ] [ ed ] [ ee ] [ eg ] [ er ] [ era ] [ es ] [ ET ] [ et ] [ fact ] [ fi ] [ file ] [ fo ] [ for ] [ fr ] [ ga ] [ ge ] [ gh ] [ gi ] [ gr ] [ gy ] [ h ] [ hack ] [ hacker ] [ hang ] [ hardware ] [ hat ] [ hit ] [ hose ] [ hr ] [ ht ] [ id ] [ ie ] [ iff ] [ il ] [ in ] [ inc ] [ int ] [ io ] [ IR ] [ ir ] [ is ] [ IT ] [ it ] [ ITS ] [ J ] [ Jargon File ] [ K ] [ ke ] [ ki ] [ kn ] [ KR ] [ kr ] [ la ] [ ld ] [ Lex ] [ li ] [ ls ] [ lt ] [ ly ] [ M ] [ ma ] [ man ] [ memory ] [ mm ] [ mo ] [ mod ] [ module ] [ mp ] [ ms ] [ mu ] [ N ] [ na ] [ nc ] [ ne ] [ ng ] [ ni ] [ no ] [ ns ] [ O ] [ object ] [ om ] [ op ] [ operating system ] [ opS ] [ OS ] [ pa ] [ paging ] [ PD ] [ PDP ] [ PDP-10 ] [ pe ] [ ph ] [ pl ] [ ply ] [ point ] [ pop ] [ pr ] [ proprietary ] [ PS ] [ pt ] [ query ] [ ques ] [ rc ] [ re ] [ rl ] [ ro ] [ ru ] [ S ] [ sa ] [ sc ] [ SD ] [ se ] [ sh ] [ si ] [ sk ] [ sl ] [ SNA ] [ so ] [ speaker ] [ spec ] [ st ] [ su ] [ sy ] [ system ] [ T ] [ tar ] [ th ] [ to ] [ Top ] [ TopS-10 ] [ TopS-20 ] [ tr ] [ TS ] [ tt ] [ tw ] [ ua ] [ ug ] [ us ] [ user ] [ V ] [ va ] [ VAX ] [ ve ] [ vi ] [ VM ] [ VMS ] [ WAITS ] [ WE ] [ X ]