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Comment by winestock | Hacker News Reader

Towards the bottom of the page, there are two pictures of the mainframe that they used. The desktop computers in the other pictures were probably just terminals that were connected to it. It was a DECSYSTEM 2020. It ran the TOPS-20 operating system.

The text of the link calls it a minicomputer, but the links that I found called it a mainframe.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/digital/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECSYSTEM-20

The fans of TOPS-20 were nearly as anti-Unix as the ITS partisans. This may help explain why Microsoft has not been so fond of Unix and the Unix way of doing things. At least in its early days.

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TOPS-20 on a DEC-2060 was an amazing adventure. These were the origin days of the ARPANET and machines had hostnames like SUMEX, SCORE, MITXX, STORK, LOTS-A, LOTS-B, and SANDIA. I'll let you guess where that last hostname was located.

Many many hours were spent in Margaret Jacks Hall and CERAS at Stanford writing code and playing with the "net." Perhaps one of the best articles of the time was in Rolling Stone Magazine, February 1982 entitled "Hackers in Paradise"

http://www.designersnotebook.com/Scrapbook/Hackers_in_Paradi...

It was indeed a rich and yeasty environment in which I learned many things about computers, programming, networks, and friendship. Alas, VMS ruled the roost at DEC and I never really enjoyed that OS, switching to Unix in the mid-1980's and never looking back. That Unix adopted the COMND JSYS style of command completion made one feel right at home.

Oh, and if you have a mind to, you can fire up an emulator with code from http://klh10.trailing-edge.com/

Remember, FisK.

I would give quite a bit to own a DECSystem 2020. You couldn't really run a KL-10 in your garage but man you could run one of those. These days simh can run all your old TENEX, TOPS-10, and TOPS-20 code but nothing quite like the real iron. The last working one I knew of was running in Mark Crispin's garage.

Microsoft developed a popular Unix (xenix), sounds like there was some fondness.

If I'm not mistaken to create NT Microsoft hired a bunch of DEC people and put Dave Cutler at the helm. Like you say, none of those people were particularly fond of Unix.

NT was the weird mutant love child of VMS and Windows.

There was a lot to like about VMS, including early sharding, solid security, and an impressive file system.

NT managed to lose most of it, IMO.

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