Talk:TOPS-20

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[edit] Tenex/ARPANet

I removed the following from the article:

By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX.

This is not my memory, and it is not what is shown by the logical maps of the Arpanet from the early 1970s. True, the PDP-10 was a popular system on the Arpanet -- at its peak, it probably represented half the machines. And Tenex was probably the majority OS on those systems—though MIT ran ITS (3 machines) and Harvard ran TOPS-10 (1 machine). But that is far from "almost all". As for the late 1970's, RFC 752 has a census of Arpanet hosts in 1979, with information on OS's. About 30% are PDP-10s. True, 81% of those ran Tenex, but that's only 25% of the total. --Macrakis 22:45, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Maybe put it back in as:
By the early 1970s, almost all of the PDP-10 systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX.
which is (as you point out above) perfectly true! Noel (talk) 14:39, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Tenex/TOPS-20

I think TENEX and TOPS-20 deserve separate articles, rather than one giant article which covers them both. The development environment, goals, etc of the two were sufficiently different that there's really not that much overlap between the two, and the TOPS-20 article can simply refer back to the TENEX article. Noel (talk) 14:43, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] TOPS-10 / TOPS-20

Re "was preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10", my recollection was that there was a lively, ongoing dialog. I am not sure that the situation was as settled as this indicates (at least by the time that the Jupiter project was canceled). I personally found TOPS-20 more elegant, but for several practical reasons we stayed with TOPS-10 for our principal environment. It is possible that a warmer glow of nostalgia has settled over TOPS-20. I would rather read "was preferred by many PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10...". Jim 17:58, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Features

There ought to be some discription of features provided by TOPS-20, most notably command line completion, which was a pretty advanced thing for command interpreters (shells) back then. — Loadmaster 16:02, 6 July 2007 (UTC)