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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

Back in the 80s I moved from Queen Elizabeth College (part of University of London) which had just bought a couple of VAXen, which i thought were very smart, to Middlesex Polytechnic in north London who had a DecSystem10 running TOPS-10. It was horrible.We never ran ITS, maybe we should have.

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And yet TOPS-10 was fairly advanced back in the sixties.

It is the common root of RT11, CP/M and PC-DOS / MS-DOS, but also one of the only system that allows to run batch and time sharing tasks at the same time. IBM couldn't do that, if you needed time sharing, you had the 360/67 but then you couldn't run batches.

Fun fact, Microsoft originally used a KA-10 running TOPS-10 and cross assemblers for software development. The PDP-10 was also a cornerstone of developing NCP/IP, TCP/IP, and early AI.

It's fairly hard nowadays to find 36 bits machines still running, as the 8 bits byte has taken over the world. I think XKL uses an FPGA-based PDP-10 running TOPS-20 on its TOAD2 router, but that's about all I'm aware of.

> I think XKL uses an FPGA-based PDP-10 running TOPS-20 on its TOAD2 router, but that's about all I'm aware of.

I’m pretty sure the TOAD2 is a discontinued product. I believe their current routers run a BSD variant

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30520851

There has always been more than a passing resemblance to TOPS-20 and Cisco iOS CLI - while they might run a BSD variant, the feel is the same (so are some of the commands, like systat).

It is very common for embedded vendors, when changing the underlying OS, to try to keep the UI unchanged. Once upon a time, every IBM mainframe contained a PC running OS/2, which was used to perform system maintenance functions such as startup and shutdown, hardware configuration changes, OS installation, etc. At some point, IBM decided to get rid of OS/2 and replace it with a HTTP server running on x86 Linux – but they had the webapp emulate the OS/2 UI look, so it still looked like OS/2 even though it was now a webapp. (I believe more recently they've refreshed the UI so it doesn't look like OS/2 any more.) So it wouldn't surprise me if, when XKL migrated from TOPS-20 (or possibly it was their own custom PDP-10 OS) to BSD, they kept the CLI as unchanged as possible.

It also wouldn't be the first time a Unix application has used a TOPS-20 inspired interface. The most famous example of that is Kermit. Columbia MM is another.

Lynx doesn't look very Unixy too.

Its amusing, early XKL documentation called it "router style user interface" so while it might have been PDP-10 under the surface, it looked like a Cisco Router from the get go, which makes sense considering the market intended for.

This has more to do with Cisco's IOS command line being a direct clone of the TOPS-20 "Exec" than XKL attempting to clone Cisco's interface.

The first time I sat down at a TOPS-20 box, I could see the genetic similarity.

Also, I was not presuming XKL cloned Cisco - considering the shared provenance of it all.

> And yet TOPS-10 was fairly advanced back in the sixties.

first release 1970, according to wikipedia.

> It's fairly hard nowadays to find 36 bits machines still running,

true. one of our system programmers looked at buying our Dec10 but power supply and cooling problems defeated him - it was eventually sold for scrap.

It would take unusual dedication, plenty of space, and a huge budget for electricity and air con to run a KL10 at home.

I understand the attraction, because they were very popular with users - partly because TOPS-10 was relatively intuitive and could be learned by almost anyone, and timesharing was very much an experience of personal computing.

That was a huge deal when most computing still had to go through operators and other expert intermediaries.

TOPS-20 was more refined and tried to be even friendlier, with nice features like command completion.

Neither was at all UNIXy - a good thing IMO.

he was prepared to sacrifice his 2-car garage, but i think the three-phase and other electrics defeated him. of couurse, it wouldn't have been switched on anywhere near all the time. and his girlfriend wasn't keen. perhaps a bit too big for a hobby project?

If I remember correctly the DEC supplied power supplies were hugely inefficient, and CompuServe redesigned the power supplies since they were using so many of these systems.

> first release 1970, according to wikipedia.

Under that name. It goes back to the PDP-6 monitor, 1964.

I have good memories of playing Star Trek all night on a DECwriter connected to a -10.

i have good memories of playing empire :-)

Such a shame. Did he try to contact a local museum maybe? I'm looking forward to have PiDP10 but seeing a real one, especially a KA-10, would be a bit of a dream.

>Microsoft originally used a KA-10 running TOPS-10 and cross assemblers for software development - This was before they had Unix ported to their PDPs (Xenix)- and then Vaxes? Ms Piggy? Oh do tell! A lot happened between 1979, and 1984, when Xenix was released...

And a lot more so, after they decided they didn't want that UNIX business after all.

Do you mean how Microsoft "borrowed" time on PDP-10 computers that were not theirs? I believe they got a DEC-2020 (KS10) later. Ms Piggy was a PDP-11, right?

That's right, there even used to be a picture of Bill Gates and Paul Allen using the DEC-2020 at the LCM in Seattle.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/63/DECSYSTE...

Sorry to be pedantic here, but that LCM computer is not a DEC-2020, and by looks of it, not the one in the photo either. The 2020 is a small machine with the KS10 processor. The ones in the photos look like some larger KL10 based DEC-20 models: 2040, 2050, 2060, or 2065.

You're absolutely right, thank you for pointing this out to me. I indeed meant a KL-10 based DEC-20, not a KS-10 2020.

I was at Middlesex Poly in the late 80s / early 90s doing an AI degree. I'm pretty sure one of the things we used was the EXSYS expert system shell running on VAX/VMS (because that's where I first came across the name). We didn't use it much though because the AI group had a bunch of early Macs that everyone preferred.

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