TWENEX
TWENEX
(operating system)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.