TWENEX

TWENEX

(operating system)/twe'neks/ The TOPS-20 operating systemby DEC - the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 -preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, bythose who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 beganin 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating systemusing special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost allof the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased therights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own.The first in-house code name for the operating system wasVIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customersstarted asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DECcould truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS.When the name SNARK became known, the name was brieflyreversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned whensomeone objected that "krans" meant "funeral wreath" inSwedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it meanssimply "wreath"; this part of the story may be apocryphal).

Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operatingsystem, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. Thehacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed itTWENEX (a contraction of "twenty TENEX"), even though by thispoint very little of the original TENEX code remained(analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and BSD).DEC people cringed when they heard "TWENEX", but the termcaught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation "20x" wasalso used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact,there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded asfervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS - but DEC'sdecision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAXarchitecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed theDEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun.DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert to VMS,but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackershad migrated to Unix.