[HN Gopher] Tenex, a Paged Time Sharing System for the PDP-10
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Tenex, a Paged Time Sharing System for the PDP-10
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 21 points
Date : 2021-10-08 20:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (opost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (opost.com)
| pramodbiligiri wrote:
| Don't miss the nice retrospective about Tenex by Dan Murphy on
| the same website domain - https://opost.com/tenex/hbook.html
| mtraven wrote:
| I may be the only one here old enough to have worked on Tenex...
| around 1978 or so, I dropped out of MIT and went to work at BBN
| and did some extensions to Tenex / TOPS-20, including as I
| remember some device drivers for the IBM-style tape drives that
| were still in use.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Do you regret dropping on out of MIT all these years later?
| (Honest question, not trolling)
| mtraven wrote:
| Not really, I was more interested in hacking than coursework,
| so that's what I did. But I dropped back in some years later
| when the Media Lab started up, finished up my BS and got a
| couple of grad degrees.
| drfuchs wrote:
| The shell was superior to any *nix shell, because the interface
| with programs was sane. Rather than the shell expanding *.foo
| into a zillion individual strings, the shell and the program
| agree that there's a file(s) parameter, and the program
| dynamically asks for the first, then next, then next, etc.
| matching file. So, you don't need to recompile your kernel every
| year or two to increase the maximum command line length.
|
| And that was just the beginning of it. Programs could tell the
| shell what all their options were, so _while_ you were typing a
| command, you could hit "?" and get something like a brief "man"
| page of options available at that point. Plus command completion
| worked all along the way, so not only would file names be
| completed when you hit <esc>, but also flags and parameters and
| such.
|
| Given how baked-in the argc/argv interface is in *nix, there's no
| hope we'll ever be able to experience this again. How wonderful
| it was to be able to say the equivalent of "cp *.c (TO) *.old"
| and have it do what you obviously want. (The "(TO)" was a "noise-
| word" automatically inserted by the shell as part of the copy
| command's auto-completion.)
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| That's hilarious. I came up with something similar while
| brainstorming. Nothing new under the sun indeed.
| loph wrote:
| TOPS-20, we hardly knew ye.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| This was before TOPS-20 and DEC borrowed a lot of ideas from
| TENEX into TOPS-20 while maintaining backwards compatibility
| with TOPS-10.
|
| I had arrived at USC just after they had converted USC-ECLC to
| TENEX and connected it via the LA IMP to USC-ISI. I think it
| was host #32 on the ARPANET but I don't trust my memory well
| enough to swear to it :-).
|
| Such a fun architecture the DEC-10, I'm glad you can run both
| TOPS and TENEX on simh, there are still good things to be
| learned there.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| Oscar Vermeulen (who created the PiDP-8 and PiDP-11 kits) is,
| or at least was, creating a PiDP-10 prototype last year. I
| think he posts in HN on occasion.
|
| https://obsolescenceguaranteed.blogspot.com/2020/02/inevitab.
| ..
| mtraven wrote:
| Don't think that's quite right, TOPS-20 was actually a fork
| of the Tenex code and so was pretty similar. Not sure what
| the relationship with TOPS-10 was.
| codesnik wrote:
| if I'm not confusing it with some other OS, I think there was an
| emulated TOPS system online not so long ago
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(page generated 2021-10-09 23:01 UTC)